Originally Posted by Beachlover
Interesting progression: http://www.news.com.au/world/richard-da ... 5852464459
Richard Dawkins promises to arrest Pope Benedict XVI
ATHEIST campaigner Richard Dawkins has vowed to arrest the Pope for crimes against humanity.
Professor Dawkins has hired a team of lawyers to see if Pope Benedict XVI can be charged over his handling of the sexual abuse scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church, according to The Sunday Times.
Professor Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion, claims that the Pope has shielded paedophile priests from the authorities.
However, he and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens believe they can make a case for arresting the Pope during the Pope's planned visit to Britain in September.
Among the human rights lawyers they have hired is Australian-born barrister Geoffrey Robertson.
They do not believe the Pope will be able to claim diplomatic immunity because he is not recognised as a head of state by the United Nations.
"This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence," Professor Dawkins said.
Last year Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni was forced to cancel a planned trip to Britain after a British judge was persuaded by Palestinian activists to issue a warrant for her arrest over her role Israel's invasion of Gaza in 2008.
The warrant was later withdrawn.
Where do you find all the time for volunteering and spending plenty of time with your mates posting all this useless crap here?
You talk about money as the be all, end all purpose to life....but I can tell you Beachlover, money is the one thing you won't be bringing with you after you're gone. I'm a firm believer that we are judged in the end with how positive an impact we make in life to the planet and to humanity. Religions have evolved in different civilizations around the planet wihout any interactions from other civilaizations. They've had a purpose, they still have purposes and they will continue to do so after you and the rest of us are long gone.
The next time you are out hiking, look around at everything you see and understand that it all has purpose. There's a relationship between every living thing and like it or not......that includes you. Time is our most precious resource, not materialism.....nor is seeing our name so often on SGT.
Oh nice...
http://www.smh.com.au/world/child-abuse ... -se4y.html
Child abuse is a gay problem, says Vatican
PAOLA TOTARO HERALD CORRESPONDENT
April 15, 2010
LONDON: The Vatican's Secretary of State - No. 2 to the Pope himself - has suggested the paedophilia crisis engulfing the Catholic Church is linked to homosexuality, not priests' celibacy.
During a press conference in Chile, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone also insisted that the church has never stymied investigation of priests accused of paedophilia.
''Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and paedophilia,'' the cardinal 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.''
The cardinal's remarks have sparked a storm of controversy in Italy as well as Chile, where they were strongly criticised by politicians and medical experts, who accused the Secretary of State of ''vast generalisations''.
Senator Juan Antonio Coloma, president of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union, told the Chilean newspaper La Nacion that while he understood the claims were made in good faith, they were generalisations that could not be sustained.
Senator Patricio Walker of the Christian Democrats categorically disagreed with the comments. ''Paedophilia is a mental and sexual abnormality that affects both heterosexuals and homosexuals,'' he said.
''I would like to see what studies he is talking about because I would find it fairly surprising to see evidence for these claims.''
Cardinal Bertone's comments follow a series of claims from senior Vatican and Catholic officials over the past few weeks that the charges of clerical abuse and their cover-up by the church that have emerged in Europe, the US, Ireland and Australia are a product of media gossip and exaggeration.
Rolando Jimenez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation in Chile, said no reputable study exists to support Monsignor Bertone's comments.
In Italy, Aurelio Mancuso, former president of the gay rights association, Arcigay, said: ''The truth is that Bertone is clumsily trying to shift attention to homosexuality and away from the focus on new crimes against children that emerge every day.''
The Pope's press secretary, Federico Lombardi, said the pontiff might consider a private meeting with victims of clerical sexual abuse in Malta during a visit there next weekend. But he said the Pope should not be pressured by the media and should be given the space to listen to and communicate with the victims.
Newspapers in Chile reported that the most prominent paedophiles uncovered in the Chilean church attacked young girls and made a teenager pregnant.
The archbishop of Santiago at the time was shown to have received multiple complaints about Father Jose Andres Aguirre from the families of the young girls. But the priest was allowed to continue serving at several Catholic girls' schools. The church later moved Aguirre out of Chile twice and he was finally sentenced to 12 years in prison for abusing 10 teenage girls.
In La Nacion, one of the young women, identified only as Paula, said she had been abused between the ages of 16 and 20. She said when she told other priests at confession, they simply told her to pray but ''everyone looked the other way. No one corrected or helped me''.
The Associated Press reported that she said one of the priests she confessed to about her sex with Aguirre was Francisco Jose Cox, who had been bishop in La Serena, in northern Chile, for several years but was removed in 1997 amid rumours he was a paedophile and transferred to Santiago, then Rome, then Colombia and finally Germany.
The Schoenstatt movement, a worldwide lay community within the Catholic Church, is reported to have paid for his transfers as well as ''treatment''. He was finally removed for ''inappropriate conduct'' in 2002.
The Cardinal seems to have hit a raw nerve. Hmmm...
It's like watching a car accident...
I don't think there's a large enough stadium in Malta.
Oh, wait... he probably only meant residents of Malta. Then there might be.
"Gay problem"... What a crock of sh*t. How sad for the innocent and truly faithful Catholics in this world.
Symphorophilia is the word for a sexual interest in car crashes. Is that what you are Beachlover? A "sympho"? J. G. Ballard wrote a book based on this specific sexual interest.
Ballard also had this to say about us which may be what the Cardinal was considering in his explanation:
"Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all."
Gaudeamus igitur.
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