Click here to read: “Cardinal Bevilacqua, retired Philadelphia Archbishop, Dies at age 88,” by Catholic News Service, Feb. 1, 2012
Click here to read: “Cardinal Bevilacqua, retired Philadelphia Archbishop, Dies at age 88,” by Catholic News Service, Feb. 1, 2012
The pope gives Bevilacqua fairly faint praise. Of course, Rigali has surely told the pope the real truth, so we we can understand the pope’s reticence. Moreover, the pope has never explained his own role in protecting a Munich pedophile priest who continued to abuse children long after the pope, as then archbishop of Munich, knew of the pedophile’s immoral record. The criminal conspiracy among the hierarchy is pervasive.
The Popes own brother, a priest,(Msg) who headed up a school for the deaf and handicapped in Germany WAS ACCUSED OF allowing these precious people to be treated with the utmost “disrespect” when it was found out that they had been sexually abused by their care givers… Of course it was hushed up as fast as Bevalaqua will be buried.
I believe that the Pope knows everything that is going on in the RCC. I believe that is why and how they all get their jobs–knowing where the bodies are buried. I believe that the vast majority of the heirarchy in the RCC are NOT good men and their intentions are NOT good. I do not believe their goals are to enhance the spritual development of the members of the RCC.
I would love an investigation of Bevilaqua’s death, but have no hope that will happen.
When are we going to catch wise as members of the RCC and stop the worship of the gown wearing men who run our spiritual organization? Frankly, I will sign off now because I may say what I really think about them and their practices.
An autopsy would clearly define his cause of death and eliminate speculation. Would the Diocese agree??
In Chaput’s public statement acknowledging the death of Bevilaqua, he refers to him as “a servant of the Lord who loved Jesus Christ and his people.” Considering what two Grand Jury Reports reveal about Bevilaqua and some of his people (namely sexually abused children), it would seem he neither loved Jesus Christ, nor his people, nor was he an adequate servant to the Lord.
Bevilaqua loved and was a servant to the clerical culture. Indeed his advancement up the hierarchical ladder best illustrates the degree to which he immersed himself in it, obeying, living and functioning according to its parameters and expectations. When pedophile priests threatened the reputation of the Church, he responded according to his culture’s “best practices”– hush hush, private, secret, covert, undercover, underhanded, underground, under wraps. Protecting the myth that Mother Church was holy was more important than protecting children. God only knows where Bevilaqua’s “servant to the Lord” and lover of Christ conscience was. In a cultural paralysis…
Clerics live and die. We seem to have entered into a period in the history of the Church where we will be burying clerics who have missed the mark in terms of having earned heroic or saintly legacies. John Paul II and Bevilaqua have left legacies that are complex, twisted and contorted. Krol, Rigali, Chaput, Benedict… the world is filled with clerics who, through their actions or inactions, have created misproportioned legacies. For generations to come, the convoluted truths of them will stare an informed and information-laden laity squarely in the face.
If the powers are in you Bevilaqua, inspire your brothers to reform the priesthood.
Mark 4:9 Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55ondhraw7c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doBpMp6IRyc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrUtIh17o0Y&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2_jeA8uQw8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ed9OgLJJ-c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuspIETZp6E&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2orht60ghbo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcJbNd1cSQA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABd_K7i5V8
Mark the video of the priests faces was eery. I knew 6 of these priests 5 I saw on a regular basis for many years at my parish, High school and even aunts nursing home.When I watched the video I thought to myself when is it going to end the video and the abuses…………
Mark, Carmelo Abbatte an investgative journalist spent months undercover documenting a hidden world in which hetrosexual priests have children with women who can never be their wives and gay preist’s of many different nationalities visit night clubs in Rome and pay for services rendered.
It was too shocking to be true until I contacted him to confirm it.
His book: Sex and the Vatican, printed only in French and Italian at this time. His contact details:
carmelo.abbatte@mondadori.it
“Sic transit gloria mundi” and the favored translation of the original latin is “So passes the glory of the world.”
We are so happy to live in a “civilized” period of history. Pope Formosus III (891-896) died after a difficult pontificate. His successor was so angered with him for various acts of malfeasance, including perjury, that he had the body exhumed, dressed in papal finery and placed him on a chair in the church of St. John Lateran (the Pope’s own Church at the time) to await trial. Formosus was found guilty of all charges and was disgraced by stripping him of his paraphenalia, chopping off the fingers with which he consecrated the eucharistic bread, and then buried in a common grave. Later he was exhumed again and his body thrown into the Tiber river.
We are so lucky that this type of reprecussion does not occur in our time of history.
(See Wikapedia or any history of the Popes).
yes i heard that story before.
I can totally relate to this articles simple message.http://www.philly.com/philly/news/138530164.html?cmpid=15585797
Beth, that was a terribly compelling link. Thank you.
Beth, In the link, that picture reminds me of the mini-series, The Thorn Birds.
Has anyone seen it? 1983 was the year it was made. Didn’t know then how it was more like a documentary than an actual mini-series.
A friend of mine had a copy of it and lent it to me. While down with the flu a while back, I watched it. Completely different understanding of that mini-series now!
Makes me wonder who wrote the book and what that author’s experiences in the church must have been. Whoever it was clearly understood grooming, clericalism, etc.
Colleen McCullough wrote the book, it’s pretty close to the bone.
These day’s who needs a television mini-series, with the real thing in real life worlwide.
Mark Cleary the singing priest and Bishop Eamon Casey, both Irishmen and on public record as a start, both with legacies.
SW points out that “whoever it was clearly understood grooming, clericalism, etc.”
“An ex-Jesuit priest, Terrance A. Sweeney, was ordained to the priesthood on June 15, 1973 in Los Angeles. He was the technical adviser on the mini-series, “The Thorn Birds.”
Terrance A. Sweeney is a five-time Emmy Award winning producer. He “formally taught at Loyola Marymount University in California. Holds Ph.D in theology from Graduate Theological Union in Berkley, California, and an M.A. in communications from Loyola Marymount University. He and his wife reside in Sherman Oaks, California.” http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0842111/bio
Mark, thank you for taking the time to post the YOU TUBE video exerpts above … very informative and compelling.
I’m not surprised it was an ex-priest, and a Jesuit to boot.
They have brilliant minds.
It seems every other Order apart from the Franciscans who seem to be able to exit, even when they have a child and expressed their wishes to do so through the valid process according to Canon Law.
They probably make an offer too good to be true and if too good to be true it no doubt is.