Tag Archives | Catholic Church

Real Life Exorcisms In The Berkshires

By on October 16, 2012 in News 56

Exorcisms in the Berkshire Mountains? Apparently so, per this report from Adam Poulisse for the Berkshire Eagle:

The word “exorcism” can cause a flurry of disturbing images: a young girl’s head spinning around; profanity too vulgar to be uttered by anyone, let alone a 12-year-old; two priests dying during the ritual.

But those iconic images surrounding a possessed girl named Regan (Linda Blair) and her eventual exorcism in the 1973 film “The Exorcist” are “highly inaccurate” compared to the real-life ritual of casting out demons or spirits, according to Glenn Shuck, an assistant professor of religion at Williams College.

“It’s not done so haphazardly,” he said. “Priests should focus on driving the demon out, not engaging in the sensational activities depicted in ‘The Exorcist.’ Sometimes the individual has to be restrained, preferably by a family member, but that’s very, very rare…

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Secret Papers, The Occult, Freemasonry In Pope’s Butler’s Trial

By on October 10, 2012 in News 16

Reuters has some tantalizing tidbits from the start of the criminal trial of the pope’s former butler. The whole affair, concerning the leaking of the pope’s secret papers revealing deep-seeded corruption at the Vatican Bank and other internal scandal, is confirming some of the conspiracy theories pertaining to the Catholic Church:

Pope Benedict’s former butler stole highly sensitive papers the pontiff had marked “to be destroyed” and compromised Vatican security through his actions, the Holy See’s police told his trial on Wednesday.

On the third day of Paolo Gabriele’s trial, testimony depicted a man fascinated by the occult, Masonic lodges, secret services and past Italian and Vatican scandals.

“You can understand our unease when we saw these documents. This was a total violation of the privacy of the papal family,” said police agent Stefano De Santis, one of the four agents who said they found the papers in Gabriele’s home, using a Vatican term for the pope’s closest aides.

… Read the rest

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TSA Hired Accused Child Molester Priest To Do Airport Pat Downs

By on October 2, 2012 in News 8

Presumably in his application cover letter, he explained how his skills from one job pertained to the other. Via Philly.com:

About four months after being defrocked by the Diocese of Camden in 2002, Thomas Harkins had a new job as a security officer, including patting down passengers, with the Transportation Security Administration at Philadelphia International Airport.

The TSA hired the former priest before completing a background check, the agency recently confirmed. According to a church document, the diocese revealed to the TSA in 2003 as part of the background check that Harkins had been removed from ministry because of allegations he had molested two grade-school girls. Harkins was never criminally prosecuted, but the diocese settled civil lawsuits for $195,000.

The TSA took no action as a result of the disclosure. “An allegation alone does not warrant dismissal or automatically disqualify applicants from employment with the TSA,” spokeswoman Ann Davis said.

… Read the rest

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Pope’s Butler Has Holy Spirit As His Defense In Vatileaks Trial

By on September 17, 2012 in News 5

You have to hand it to Roman Catholics, they are consistent in their dogma. In what looks on its face like a garden variety case of petty theft, the Pope’s butler claims he stole the Pope’s papers on behalf of the Holy Spirit, who wants to wipe out corruption. We’ll find out soon if it’s a successful defense strategy. Via AFP/Yahoo News:

Pope Benedict XVI’s former butler and a Vatican computer technician will go on trial starting September 29 on charges of leaking secret papers that revealed fraud and intrigue in the Holy See.

The butler, Paolo Gabriele, has told investigators he was acting as an agent for the Holy Spirit to rid the Catholic Church of “evil and corruption”.

Photo: MatthiasKabel (CC)

He is accused of aggravated theft, which carries a sentence of up to six years in prison, in a scandal dubbed “Vatileaks” by the Italian press.

Gabriele will stand trial together with Claudio Sciarpelletti, who according to court papers played a secondary messenger role in an unprecedented scandal that has threatened to expose major rifts at the heart of the Catholic Church.

… Read the rest

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Catholic Pedophilia Story Everybody is Going to Get Wrong

By on September 1, 2012 in News 13

Picture: NARA (PD)

From RawStory:

A Catholic newspaper has removed an interview from their website in which a priest said that pedophiles are seduced by children in “a lot of the cases” and the abusers should not go to jail.

During an interview with National Catholic Register, 78-year-old Father Benedict Groeschel was asked about his experience working with priests involved in abuse.

“People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case,” Groeschel explained. “Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.”

This is a big deal. Father Groeschel is a respected psychologist who has worked with pedophile priests within the Church. And the newspaper has apparently engaged in self-censorship in order to help polish the Vatican’s image on it’s disastrous handling of its priests accused of abusing children.… Read the rest

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Underwear-Clad Priest Caught Chasing Young Boy in Midnight Pursuit

By on August 31, 2012 in News 11

Via Oregon Live:

Woodburn, Oregon Catholic priest Angel Armando Perez was arrested following an August 12th midnight incident in which he was spotted in his underwear chasing a twelve year-old boy. Local residents interceded when the boy cried for help, claiming that the priest had sexually abused him.

The boy, who was sleeping over at Perez’s home, had fallen asleep on an air mattress after being given beer by Perez. He awoke in the night to discover the priest fondling his genitals and snapping photos of the act. The boy fled on foot and the pursuit began:

It was close to midnight Sunday when Woodburn resident James Curths saw the 12-year-old boy running down the street toward him. Curths said the child, panting and out of breath, begged for help, telling him a man was chasing him.

Moments later, a man rounded the corner wearing only underwear. He stood a short distance away, trying to wave the boy over as Curths and his sister-in-law prepared to drive the boy to relatives.

… Read the rest

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Catholic Church’s Anti-Glacier Prayers ‘Worked Too Well’

By on August 15, 2012 in News 5

Could this whole “global warming” thing which has wrought landscape change, weather disasters, and wildfires be the result of a 300-year-old prayer from the Vatican imploring God to melt the icy peaks? Via National Geographic:

About 50 people set out on foot from the Swiss village of Fiesch at dawn on July 31. “Glacier is ice, ice is water, water is life,” intoned priest Toni Wenger, before beseeching God to stop the glaciers high above them from melting.

By changing a few, crucial words in the liturgy, Father Wenger reversed a Catholic ritual that for 350 years had implored the heavens to push back the glaciers. The Vatican had approved the change as the effects of global warming became all too tangible in the Alps.

The people of devoutly Catholic Fiesch and Fieschertal have made the annual pilgrimage since 1674, when Europe was in the grip of the Little Ice Age.

… Read the rest

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Catholic School Girls Denied HPV Vaccine By Canadian Bishops

By on July 3, 2012 in News 9

A vaccine to help prevent cervical cancer could send the wrong message, Catholic leaders in Calgary decided. Via TIME Newsfeed:

The female students in Calgary’s Catholic school system will be receiving one less shot than their public school counterparts. In 2008, a group of bishops led by Bishop Frederick Henry deemed that providing the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination — which guards girls against the four strands of HPV most associated with cervical cancer — to fifth and ninth-grade girls could be viewed as a compromise of Catholic teaching, because HPV is a sexually transmitted virus.

Children in Calgary’s Catholic schools were sent home with… a letter… instruct[ing] parents that “Although school-based immunization delivery systems generally result in high numbers of students completing immunization, a school-based approach to vaccination sends a message that early sexual intercourse is allowed.”

HPV Calgary says that by banning the vaccine, the church is literally endangering the lives of thousands of girls.

… Read the rest

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The Myth About Marriage

By on May 11, 2012 in News 7

Wedding At CanaVery interesting perspective from Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books given the current media circus regarding President Obama’s personal support of same-sex marriage:

Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.

Some of my fellow Catholics even think that “true marriage” was instituted by Christ. It wasn’t. Marriage is prescribed in Eden by YHWH (Yahweh) at Genesis 2.24: man and wife shall “become one flesh.” When Jesus is asked about marriage, he simply quotes that passage from Genesis (Mark 10.8). He nowhere claims to be laying a new foundation for a “Christian marriage” to replace the Yahwist institution.

Some try to make the wedding at Cana (John 1.1–11) somehow sacramental because Jesus worked his first miracle there. But that was clearly a Jewish wedding, like any other Jesus might have attended, and the miracle, by its superabundance of wine, is meant to show the disciples that the Messianic time has come.

… Read the rest

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Pope or Hitler: Who Said This?

By on May 8, 2012 in News 79

Pope Or HitlerThanks to jasonpaulhayes for the comment. As Pope or Hitler explains:

This is a response to the Pope’s claim that the Nazi movement was atheist. When it was nothing of the sort.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”

Please share what you learned from Pope or Hitler… Read the rest

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