Priest says he was pressurised into taking blame for pope

[brooklynite]

Source: Irish Times

A FORMER vicar-general in the archdiocese of Munich has claimed that he was pressurised last month into taking the blame for a mistake made 30 years ago by the then Archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), concerning the case of a paedophile priest.

Fr Gerhard Gruber has now said he did so only after coming under huge pressure from unnamed Catholic Church sources to take responsibility, so as to “take the pope out of the firing line”.

In a letter to a friend, seen by German weekly magazine Der Spiegel , Fr Gruber wrote that he was “begged” in numerous phone calls and after receiving a prepared statement by fax for him to sign. The magazine said Fr Gruber expresses unhappiness in the letter at being given the sole blame in public.

A spokesman for Munich archdiocese has dismissed the report as “completely made up”, saying Fr Gruber was at no point forced to sign anything but that he merely assisted in formulating the statement.

Read more: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/0419/1224268630491.html

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Guessing he won't be getting a Christmas Card from Vatican...

(pressurised?)

[ananda]

1. pressurised is British spelling

nt

[aquart]

2. British word. We say "pressured."

[paulsby]

7. i was going to make an animal house reference

"tires are pressurized, PEOPLE are pressured"

[CoffeeCat]

33. vegetables are pressurized...

...people are pressured.

;)

[tavalon]

8. Isn't it kind of embarassing that we are so provincial that we don't know alternate spellings

[happygoluckytoyou]

17. IN A RELATED STORY pope offers sale of choir boys robes.... half off ! !

[kurtzapril4]

25. No, it isn't.

Pressured and pressurised mean two different things entirely. I'm sure they mean two entirely different things in England, too.

[Hissyspit]

35. British say Pressurised. It is an acceptable alternate. It is not incorrect.

Dictionary.com:

pressure v. to force (someone) toward a particular end; influence

pressurize v. to apply pressure

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

31. Ummm....That's not an alternate spelling

These are two different words.

Kind of embarrassing...

[No Elephants]

39. It IS an alternate spelling of "pressurize." Alternatively, you could say that "pressurize" is an

alternate spelling of pressurise, since the Brit version preceded the American.

[No Elephants]

38. We?

[Zambero]

18. So is this being a "Scapepope"?

As far as the selection process for pope goes -- I sense that the Church would need to look very long and hard to find a senior archbishop who didn't at some point participate in the sanctioned policy of "rehabilitation and relocation" for the pedophile priests within their archdiocese. I don't know whether a large scale "Mea Culpa & move on" will cut it", but pressuring a fall guy into taking the blame for crimes of omission committed by a higer up CERTAINLY doesn't cut it.

[izquierdista]

3. He must have felt like an aeroplane then

[Ikonoklast]

15. What colour?

Or was it just unpainted aluminium?

[TrollBuster9090]

16. Did they put him in a Crock Pot?

(The Crock Pot would be sort of a modern day version of those classic old SPANISH INQUISITION tools.) Or maybe one of those pressure chambers, like when you come up from a deep sea diving expidition and need to worry about "the bends." No pun intended.

[No Elephants]

36. Self delete.

[Ozymanithrax]

4. pressurised? What did they fill him full of to preasurize him? n/t

[KansDem]

5. Yeah, you know...

pressurised...

[jberryhill]

6. Duh... its Pastorized

They are all pastorized when they are ordained.

[h9socialist]

9. Heavens to John Mitchell!!!!!!!!!

This scandal can now be called "Vaticangate."

"People need to know, is their Pontiff a crook? Well, I am not a crook!"

"Let's pray together Henry!"

[Stuart G]

23. Richard Nixon would be proud....It seems that a John Dean has arrived.

[FreedomRain]

10. I wonder if he's afraid of some sort of charges being brought

Wouldn't that be something?

[DeSwiss]

11. K&R

- Forced to bear false witness, eh?

“Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed” ~ Steven Wright

[ZombieHorde]

20. Exactly, but the sheep won't care. nt

[DeSwiss]

21. True.

- But I suppose if they did care, they wouldn't call them sheep.

[yellowcanine]

12. Sounds like the word that fits is "sanitized" or "whitewashed"

Seriously, this is serious shit. The "spokesman" can yelp all he wants about this being "completely made up" but that just makes it sound worse - now he is basically calling the priest a liar. And if the priest was "assisted in formulating the statement" it would be inaccurate to say "completely made up". So just who is the liar?

[Soulis]

13. Just following orders

As always with the monsters!

[Doc Martin]

14. Authoritarian leadership cultivating compliance

That is the reform of the reform (Vatican II) in the RC Church since the John Paul II-Ratzinger papacy and now during the Ratzinger papacy.

[Angry Dragon]

19. After reading the Irish Times story

I have come to the conclusion that these men do not have god in their hearts or souls. They hide behind the word god spewing from their mouths but have no idea what a god is. Lets all use the god defense to get out of any crime we may commit. I was working for god so I can not be held accountable for my actions. If these men truly had god inside of themselves, truly believed and could think for themselves they would protect the people they claim they are trying to save. These men are the lowest of the low and pieces of garbage.

[pjt7]

22. Ratzinger needs to go

& be replaced with a great Pope.

[bkozumplik]

24. or be replaced with no pope

even better

[IndianaGreen]

26. This Pope discredited himself long before he rose to the Papacy

The Vatican needs to clean house, and it can't do it while Ratzo sits on Peter's chair.

[ooglymoogly]

28. in the footsteps of Jesus. nt

[brooklynite]

30. Ratzinger was picked by the current College of Cardinals...

Why would they do a better job next time?

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

32. You have to wonder what they were thinking....

Of all people to put in this position -- and you can't tell me that NOT ONE of them knew the whole story. It's really just a slap in the face of the victims.

Infallible, my ass....

[PATRICK]

37. Ratzinger

was a favorite doctrinal hitman of all the post-Vatican reactionary popes. As a disastrous close advisor of the last pope he helped pack the college of cardinals who voted him in. All very reminiscent of Dick Cheney. He did the cover up for predator pedophiles while grilling and threatening positive and saintly Church theologians. By all apparent signs he basically had himself chosen just in case the Holy Spirit was a little less thrilled. Now he reaps what all bad popes do, but like any of the current miserable crop of a%%holes seemingly in power everywhere, something a like a Black death of world leadership, there is no getting rid of them. Anti-popes have resigned and one irascible saint disgusted at the intractability of the inner circles. This one has never been much in tune with the Spirit of the Church, set himself up over God anyway and will not destroy the Church by giving up his collapsing self fantasies by simply stepping down.

Hans Kung was one repeatedly attacked for his central role in the positive reforms of Vatican II so he might be a bit biased in favor of the Spirit as opposed to the Curia but he should know the poeple he is appealing too have similarly been chosen over the decades to be safe yes-men(or much much worse) to the central power of the Retrenchment.

[CoffeeCat]

34. They are pure evil...

The Pope is supposed to be "infallible" and this is what we get.

If it wasn't for religion, I would probably believe in God.

[ooglymoogly]

27. Why is it that mean spirited hypocrites, like Ratz, always gravitate

toward the authoritarian Reich, um, right.

[bemildred]

29. Dang, you could knock me over with a feather.

The Catholic hierarchy has always been so honest in the past.

[No Elephants]

40. Um, say what?

"Fr Hullermann was allowed return to parish duties in Munich within weeks of arriving there. The priest reoffended and in June 1986 he was convicted of the sexual abuse of other minors and given an 18-month suspended sentence. When this emerged last month, Fr Gruber assumed total responsibility, thus seeming to absolve Pope Benedict.

Meanwhile, according to the Spanish daily La Verdad , Colombian cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos said at a weekend conference in Murcia that Pope John Paul approved the policy of not reporting to the police clerical sex abuse crimes.

In a September 2001 letter, recently published by the French Catholic publication Golias , Cardinal Hoyos wrote to French bishop Pierre Pican to congratulate him for not reporting an abuser priest. Earlier that year, Bishop Pican received a suspended three-month sentence for not reporting serial abuser Fr René Bissy,who was eventually given an 18-year prison sentence for child sex abuse crimes between 1989 and 1996.

It sounds as though Fr. Hullermann was reported to the authorities as a repeat offender and got--wait for it--all of 18 months--supspended. Failure to report, 3 months, also suspended.

Suspensions were bullshit in both instances, but a repeat abuser did not get sentence much worse than the guy who failed to report.

In sum, the secular authorities were not much better than that church authorities.

[Old Troop]

41. Doesn't "pressurised" mean inflated or filled with gas?