What must it feel like to have lost 50 years of your life? For that is what 61-year old Arthur Budzinski has endured.

Five long decades of personal pain.

And he has to rely on others to speak of his anguish.

It is made worse by the fact that no-one has been held to account for the sexual abuse he allegedly suffered as a child while at the Roman Catholic St John's School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin.

That is despite the fact that as a youngster he told adults around him what was happening. Despite the fact that later - as an adult himself - he has continued to fight for justice. All to no avail.

Arthur, along with around 200 other boys, was allegedly sexually abused at the school by Father Lawrence Murphy, a Catholic priest.

He says he and others told members of the clergy back then that they were being watched, touched and exploited by Fr Murphy.

No-one listened.

'Ignoble attacks'

Even when - decades later - the archbishop here did send a letter to the Vatican informing senior clergy about Fr Murphy, nothing was done.

The Vatican department tasked with looking into such abuses was headed by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - now, Pope Benedict XVI.

The Vatican insists there was no cover-up. It has accused the media and others of an "ignoble attack" on the Pope.

Yet what of the "ignoble attack" on Arthur Budzinski?

His daughter Gigi sits by his side as he goes through the black and white photos of his days back at St John's. She translates Arthur's sign language.

"It goes all the way up to him," she says. "The Pope knew for many, many years. He knew."

It is an allegation the Vatican firmly denies. It is, however, an allegation that is becoming harder to ignore.

'Reeking of hypocrisy'

A few miles away, Professor Daniel Maguire is wrapped up against the unseasonably cold wind chill. A dark blue woollen hat, green mittens, a smart beige three quarter-length overcoat.

A former priest, the professor lectures in moral theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

The latest allegations, centred around the events at St John's, are "the clearest example yet of the cover-up of crimes by Church authorities and colluding local law enforcement officers", he says.

The picture he paints is of an old boys' network, closing in to protect the group and its members.

For that is what the victims of paedophilia in the Catholic Church have been up against. A powerful group, desperate to protect its own interests at whatever cost to the victims.

The Vatican says things have changed - the Pope has pledged a policy of zero tolerance of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

That is welcome, of course, but it is hardly justice for men like Arthur Budzinsky.

And for critics like Professor Maguire, the whole sordid affair reeks of hypocrisy: "The Pope is accepting some resignations from some bishops who did what he did, ie allowing the transfer of sexual predators to other venues, failing to report crimes to the appropriate authority, seeing the crimes as public relations embarrassments, to the neglect of both law and the victims."

The Roman Catholic Church’s account of Pope Benedict XVI’s handing of a serial paedophile was called into question today when new documents emerged suggesting that his office was kept informed of the offender’s rapid return to working with children.

Contrary to statements released by the Church in Germany, a memorandum uncovered by The New York Times suggests that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was told that a priest had gone back to pastoral duties in Munich a few days after he started psychiatric treatment. The priest went on to commit further offences.

The latest child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church involves a German priest, Father Peter Hullermann, who was convicted of molesting boys in 1986. Victims have complained that repeated warnings were ignored by the Church over decades of abuse.
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But the memo, the existence of which was confirmed to The New York Times by two church officials, shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on January 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest to his district, but that he was also kept informed about the priest’s subsequent reassignment.

It remains unclear whether he played any part in the decision-making process or whether he had personally read the memo addressed to him.

Over the following years, church officials repeatedly transferred Father Hullermann to new parishes and allowed him to work with children, even after the 1986 conviction for sexually abusing boys.

He was suspended only this month as the sex abuse scandals came to light in the Pope's native Germany.

The initial statement by the Munich Archdiocese claimed that Father Hullermann had been allowed to return to work because of the “the statements of the treating psychologist”.

That was flatly contradicted by the psychiatrist in question. Dr Werner Huth, who treated him from 1980 to 1992, said he had warned church officials not to allow him to work with children from the very outset.

This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter of delinquency here and there. The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.

This hasn't been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on. This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of "repentance," or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It's enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.

Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus.

Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.

The reports, some of which are recent and some of which have been in circulation for at least seven years, said that such priests had demanded sex in exchange for favours, such as certification to work in a given diocese.

In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions.

The US article was based on five documents, which senior women from religious orders and priests have presented to the Vatican over the past decade. They describe a particularly bad situation in Africa. In a continent devastated by Aids, nuns, along with early adolescent girls, are perceived by some as safe sexual targets. The reports said that the church authorities had done little to tackle the problem.

The Vatican reports cited countless cases of nuns forced to have sex with priests. Some were obliged to take the pill, others became pregnant and were encouraged to have abortions. In one case in which an African sister was forced to have an abortion, she died during the operation and her aggressor led the funeral mass. Another case involved 29 sisters from the same congregation who all became pregnant to priests in the diocese.

One of the most comprehensive documents was compiled by Sister Maura O'Donohue, an Aids co-ordinator for Cafod, the London-based Catholic Fund for Overseas Development.

She noted that religious sisters had been identified as "safe" targets for sexual activity. She quotes a case in 1991 of a community superior being approached by priests requesting that the nuns be made available to them for sexual favours.

"When the superior refused the priests explained they would otherwise be obliged to go to the village to find women and might thus get Aids."
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While most of the abuse happened in African countries, Sister O'Donohue reported incidents in 23 countries including India, Ireland, Italy, the Philippines and the United States.

She heard cases of priests encouraging the nuns to take the pill telling them it would prevent HIV. Others "actually encouraged abortion for the sisters" and Catholic hospitals and medical staff reported pressure from priests to carry out terminations for nuns and other young women.

The head of the Vatican congregation for Religious Life, Cardinal Martinez Somalo, has set up a committee to look into the problem. But it seems to have done little beyond "awareness raising" among bishops.

More recently, in 1998, Sister Marie McDonald, mother superior of the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa, put together a paper entitled The Problem of the Sexual Abuse of African Religious in Africa and Rome.

She tabled the document to the Council of 16, made up of delegates of the international association of women's and men's religious communities and the Vatican office responsible for religious life. She noted that a contributing cause was the "conspiracy of silence".

When she addressed bishops on the problem, many of them felt it was disloyal of the sisters to send reports.

"However, the sisters claim they have done so time and time again. Sometimes they were not well received. In some instances they are blamed for what happened. Even when they are listened to sympathetically nothing much seems to be done" One of the most tragic elements that emerges is the fate of the victims. While the offending priests are usually moved or sent away for studies, the women are normally chased out of their religious orders, they are then either to scared to return to their families or are rejected by them. they often finished up as outcasts, or, in a cruel twist of irony, as prostitutes, making a meagre living from an act they had vowed never to do.

You all need religion
sinners

no u

I have it my friend