The Vatican’s Gay Priests

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. But a recent exposé is rocking the Catholic Church.

In the basement dining room of Le Mani In Pasta, a trattoria in central Rome, a young, glossy-eyed couple stare at each other across a table for two. They smile and blush over a private joke. There is no handholding or kissing, but they are clearly more than friends, even though they are both wearing dark shirts and the telltale white clerical collar.

For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. The phenomenon is a well-known secret here, and one that was largely ignored until last weekend, when the Italian weekly magazine Panorama published a shocking exposé called “Le Notti Brave Dei Preti Gay,” or “Good Nights Out for Gay Priests.” Investigative journalist Carmelo Abbate spent 20 days undercover posing as the boyfriend of a man who ran in gay clerical circles, secretly videotaping the sexual escapades of three Rome-based priests. Abbate caught the priests on hidden camera dirty dancing at private parties and engaging in sex acts with male escorts on church property. He also caught them emerging from dark bedrooms in time to celebrate mass. In one postcoital scene, “Father Carlo” parades around seminaked, wearing only his clerical vestments. Abbate’s “date” even had sex with one of the priests to corroborate the story. “This is not about homosexuality,” Abbate, who is not gay, told NEWSWEEK. “This is about private vices and public virtues. This is about serious hypocrisy in the Catholic Church.”

The exposé has touched a nerve within the Catholic community in Rome, but Abbate doesn’t believe that it will have any effect, especially given the Vatican’s other sex scandal. Yet unlike the pedophile-priest crisis, which has so far reached scores of dioceses in the United States and Europe, the gay-priest problem is—so far—an issue just for the Rome diocese on the Vatican’s home turf. Most priests in Rome have some affiliation with the Vatican, and Abbate says one of the priests caught on tape also gave mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. The Vatican says that the offending priests from Abbate’s story will be sought out and stripped of their collars. Cardinal Agostino Vallini, head of the Rome diocese, is in charge of purging the offending clerics, and he has called on all gay priests who cannot respect the basic tenet of celibacy to get out of the priesthood. “Priests who are living a double life have not understood what the Catholic priesthood is and should not have become priests,” he said in a statement responding to the Panorama expose. “Consistency demands that they be discovered. We do not wish them ill, but we cannot accept that because of their behavior the honor of all the other priests is dragged through the mud.”

Vallini may have the right idea when it comes to punishing those who break priestly laws, but the church as a whole seems to find it difficult to differentiate its sex scandals—and to determine what role celibacy plays in either situation. In April, Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone famously blamed gay priests for the pedophilia problem during a press conference in Santiago, Chile. “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia,” he said. “But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true. That is the problem.”

Laundering Scandal Rocks Vatican Bank

by Victor L. Simpson and Nicole Winfield

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall.

     Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it is under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize Euro 23 Million in Vatican assets in September. Critics say case shows that the "Vatican Bank" hase never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.

     The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a "misunderstanding" and express optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws "wth the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital." The documents also reveal investigators' suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.

     The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew Euro 650,000.00 from an Italian Bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed.

     The new allegations of financial impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered pedophile priests. the corruption probe has given new hope to Holocausts survivors who tried unsuccessfullt to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Bank.

     Yet the scandal is hardly the first for the centuries-old bank.

     In 1986, a Vatican financial adviser dies after drinking cyanide-laced coffee in prison. Another was found dangling from a rope under London's Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, his pockets stuffed with money and stones. The incidents blackened the bank's reputation, raised suspicions of ties with the Mafia, and cost the Vatican hundreds of millions of dollars in legal clashes with Italian authorities. 

     On Sept. 21, financial police seized assets from a Vatican Bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano SpA. Investigators said the vatican had failed to furnish information on the origin or destination of the funds required by Italian law.

     The bulk of the money, Euro 20 Million, was destined for the American JP Morgan Bank branch in Frankfurt, Germany, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino, an Italian Bank.

     Prosecutors alleged the Vatican ignored regulations that foreign banks must communicate to Italian financial authorities where their money has come from. All banks have declined to comment.

     In another case, finaincial police in Sicily said late October that they had uncovered money laundering involving the use of a Vatican Bank account by a priest in Rome whose uncle was convicted of Mafia association.

     Authorities say some Euro 250,000.00, illegally obtained from the regional government of Sicily for a fish breeding company, was sent to the priest by his father as a "charitable donation," then sent back to Sicily from a Vatican Bank account using a series of home banking operations to make it difficult to trace.

     The prosecutors' office stated in court papers last month that while the bank has expressed a "generic and stated will" to conform to international standards, "there is no sign that the institutions of the Catholic Church are moving in that direction." it said its investigation had found "exactly the opposite."

     Legal waters are murky because of the Vatican's special status as an independent state within Italy. This time, Italian investigators were able to move againsts the Vatican Bank because the Bank of Italy classifies it as a foreign financial institution operating in Italy.

     However, in one of the 1980s scandals, prosecutors could not arrest then-bank head Paul Marcinkus, an American archbishop, because Italy's highest court ruled he had immunity.

 (Published on Manila Bulletin, December 13, 2010) 

21 Priests Suspended

NEW YORK -- Twenty-one Roman Catholic priests in Philadelphia have been suspended after being linked to an investigation into widespread child molestation, church authorities said on Tuesday. The suspensions followed a Grand Jury report that identified 37 current or former priests. "I wish to express again my sorrow for the sexual abuse of minors committed by ant members of the Church, espcially clergy," Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia, said in a statement. "I am trully sorry for the harm done to the victims of sexual abuse, as well as to the members of our community who suffer as a result of this great evil and crime." - AFP (as published in Philippine Daily Inquirer, p. A24, March 01, 2011)

The Inhuman Inquisition

SO OPENLY CORRUPT did the fallen church become in the Middle Ages, we can readily understand why in many places men rose up in protest. Many were those noble souls who rejected the false claims of the pope, looking instead to the Lord Jesus for salvation and truth. These were called "heretics" and were bitterly persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church.

One of the documents that ordered such persecutions was the inhuman "Ad Exstirpanda" issued by Pope Innocent IV in 1252. This document stated that heretics were to be "crushed like venomous snakes." It formally approved the use of torture. Civil authorities were ordered to burn heretics. "The aforesaid bull 'Ad Exstirpanda' remained thenceforth a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-92), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were joined by the popes, under pain of excommunication, to execute the legal sentences that condemned the impenitent heretics to the stake. It is to be noted that excommunication itself was no trifle, for, if the person excommuinicated did not free himself from the excommunication within a year, he was held by the legislation of that period to be a heretic, and incurred all the penalties that affected heresy." (The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8, p. 34).

Men pondered long in those days on how they could devise methods that would produce the most torture and pain. One of the most popular methods was the use of the rack, a long table on which the accused was tied by the hands and feet, back down, and stretched by the rope and windlass. This process dislocated joints and caused great pain.

Heavy pincers were used to tear out fingernails or were applied red-hot to sensitive parts of the body. Rollers with sharp knife blades and spikes were used, over which the heretics were rolled back and forth. there was the thumbscrew, an instrument made for disarticulating fingers and "Spanish boots" which were used to crush the legs and feet. The "iron virgin" was a hollow insturment the size and figure of a woman. Knives were arranged in such a way and under such pressure that the accused were lacerated in its deadly embrace. This torture device was sprayed with "holy water" and inscribed with the Latin words meaning, "Glory be only to God." (Smith, Man and His Gods, p. 286).

Victims after being stripped of their clothing had their arms tied behind their backs with a hard cord. Weights were attached to their feet. The action of a pulley suspended them in mid-air or dropped and raised them with a jerk, dislocating joints of the body. While such torture was being employed, priests holding up crosses would attempt to get the heretics to recant.

Ridpath's History of the World includes an illustration of the work of the Inquisition in the netherlands. Twenty-one Protestants are hanging from the tree. A man on a ladder is about to be hanged, below him is a priest holding a cross. (Ridpath's History of the World, vol. 5, p. 304).

"In the year 1554 Francis Gamba, a Lombard, of the Protestant persecution, was apprehended and condemned to death by sentence of Milan. At the place of execution, a monk presented a cross to him, to whom Gamba said, 'My mind is so full of the real merits and goodness of Christ that I want not a piece of sensless stick to put me in mind of HIm." For this expression his tongue was bored through and he was afterwards burned." (Fox's Book of Martyrs, p. 103.).

Some who rejected the teachings of the Roman church had molten lead poured inmto their ears and mouths. Eyes were gouged out and others were cruelly beaten with whiups. Some were forced to jump from cliffs, onto long spikes fixed below, where, quivering from pain, they slowlt died. Others were choked to death with mangled pieces of their own bodies, woth urine, or ecrement. At night, the victims of the Inquisition were chained closely to the floor or wall where they were a helpless prey to the rats and vermin that populated those bloody torture chambers.

The religious intolerance that prompted the Inquisition caused wars which involved entire cities. In 1209 the City of Beziers was taken by men who have been promised by the pope that by engaging in the crusade against heretics they would at deathbyp[ass purgatory and immediately enter heaven. Sixty thousand, it is reported, in this city perished by the sword while blood flowed in the streets. At lavaur in 1211 the governor was hanged on a gibbet and his wife thrown into a well and crushed with stones. Four hundred people in this town were burned alive. The crusaders attended high mass in the morning, then proceeded to take other towns of the area. In this siege, it is estimated that 100,000 Albigneses (Protestants) fell in one day. Their bodies were heaped together and burned.

At teh massacre of Merindol, five hundred women were locked in a barn which was set on fire. If any leaped from windows, they were received on the opoints of spears. Women were openly and pitifully violated. Children were murdered before their parents who were powerless to protect them. Some people were hurled from cliffs or stripped of clothing and dragged throgh the streets. Similar methods were used in the massacre of Orange in 1562. The Italian army was sent by Pope Pius IV and commanded to slay men, women, and children. The command was carried out with terrible curelty, the people being exposed to shame and torture of every description.

Ten thousand Huguenots (Protestants) were killed in the bloody massacre in Paris on "St. Batholomew's Day", 1572. The French king went to mass to return solemn thanks that so many heretics were slain. The papal court received the news with freat rejoicing and Pope Gregory XIII, in grand procession, went to the Church of St. Louis to give thanks! He ordered the papal mint to make coins commemorating this event. The coins showed an angel with sword in one hand and a cross in the other, before whom a band of Huguenots, with horror on their faces, were fleeing. The words Ugonotorum Stanges 1572 which signify "The slaughter of the Huguenots, 1572", appeared on the coins.

An illustration from Ridpath's History of the World, shows the work of the Inquisition in Holland. A Protestant man is hanging by his feet in stocks. The fire is heating a poker to brand him and blind his eyes. (Ridpath's History of the World, vol. 5, p. 297).

Some of the popes that today are acclaimed as "great" by the Romish church lived and thrived during those days. Why didn't they open the dungeon doors and quench the murderous fires that blackened the skies of Europe for centuries? If the selling of indulgences, or people worshipping statues as idols, or popes living in immorality can be explained as "abuses" or excused because these things were done contrary to the official laws of the church, what can be said about the Inquisition? It cannot be explained away as easily, for though sometimes torture was carried out beyond what was actually prescribed, the fact remains that the Inquisition was ordered by papal decree and confirmed by pope after pope! Can any believe that such actions were representative of Him who said to turn the cheek, to forgive our enemies, and to do good to them that despitefully use us?
- Babylon Msytery Religion (Ancient and Modern).

A Roman Miracle

A pretty maid, a Protestant, was to a Catholic wed;
To love all Bible truths and tales, quite early she'd been bred.
It sorely grieved her husband's heart that she would not comply,
And join the Mother Church of Rome and heretics deny.

So day by day he flasttered her, but still she saw no good
Would ever come from bowing down to idols made of wood.
the Mass, the host, the miracles, were made but to deceive;
And transubstantiation, too, she'd never dare believe.

He went to see his clergyman and told him his sad tale.
"My wife is an unbeliever, sir; you can perhaps prevail;
For all your Romish miracles my wife has strong aversion,
To really work a miracle may lead to her conversion."

The priest went with the gentleman -- he thought to gain a prize.
He said, "I will convert her, sir, and open both her eyes."
So when they came into the house, the husband loudly cried,
"The priest has come to dine with us!" He's welcome," she replied.

And when, at last, the meal was o'er, the priest at once began,
To teach his hostess all about the sinful state of man;
The greatness of our Savior's love, which Christians can't deny,
To give Himself a secrifice and for our sins to die.

"I will return tomorrow, lass, prepare some bread and wine;
The sacramental miracle will stop your soul's decline."
"I'll bake the bread," the lady said. "You may," he did reply,
"And when you've seen this miracle, convinced you'll be, say I."

The priest did come accordingly, the bread and wine did bless.
The lady asked, "Sir, is it changed?" The priest answered , "Yes,
It's changed from common bread and wine to truly flesh and blood;
Begorra, lass, this power of mine has changed it into God!"

So having blessed the bread and wine, to eat they did prepare.
The lady said unto the priest, "I warn you to take care,
For half an ounce of arsenic was mixed right in the batter,
But since you have its nature changed, it cannot really matter."

The priest was truck real dumb -- he looked as pale as death.
The bread and wine fell from his hands ands he did gasp for breath.
"Bring me my horse!" the priest cried, "This is a cursed home!"
The lady replied, "Begone; 'tis you who shares the curse of Rome."

The husband, too, he sat surprised, and not a word did say.
At length he spoke, "My dear," said he, "the priest has run away;
To gulp such mockery and tripe, I'm not for sure quite able;
I'll go with you and we'll renounce this Roman catholic fable."

-Author Unknown