RICO So it begins.
“The class-action suit accuses the Church of violating the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was originally devised to target organized crime syndicates. It seeks to triple financial damages for “unlawful and intentional schemes, actions, inaction, omissions, cover-up, deception, and concealment, obstructive behavior regarding investigations, and conspiracy of silence,” which “constitute assault, breach of fiduciary duty, negligence/gross negligence, negligence per se, intentional infliction of emotional distress, wrongful death, public nuisance, conspiracy, and aiding and abetting.”
The class-action suit is historic, in that it attempts to hold the Vatican liable in the United States for the actions of its clergy — a first. Up to now, the Vatican has avoided liability by claiming it has no direct authority over clergy.
But this assertion was shattered on Monday when the Holy See blocked the USCCB vote in Baltimore.
“If that’s not command responsibility, I don’t know what is,” said attorney Mitchell A. Toups, who is helping lead the class-action suit. “
“I think this is a more well-reasoned approach to the problems in the Church. Too many former Catholics tell me they’ve lost faith entirely, and they often cite the leadership of the Church as their reason why. Their complaints are legitimate, but their solution is absurd. If you’re one of those people reading this right now, this is for you…
Don’t leave Christ because of Judas. Don’t let bad priests and bishops chase you away from your baptismal birthright. Why would you give these evil men the satisfaction of driving you away from your home!
You are Catholic. You deserve better than the leadership we have, we all do, but this is (unfortunately) what we’ve been scourged with for now. So I would like to propose a challenge to you. Rather than walk away from Christ, and the Church he founded, do as I am doing instead. Become a good Catholic in spite of these Judases. For they say the greatest revenge is living well. Become Catholic again, but do it in a way that counters bad priests and bishops, and deprives them of their ability to control, manipulate and abuse.
Pick up an old Baltimore Catechism (yes, it’s still legitimate) and read it. Read the Bible too. Start with the Gospels. Start praying again, the way you remember, and maybe say a rosary or two. Then, before you return to mass, try to find a good one, where the Judases in the Church have had little influence. “
…
“We must accept that no reform will come from inside the Church. It’s not going to happen, so we must get that out of our heads now! It’s time to stop asking the bishops conferences for change. It’s time to stop asking the Vatican for change. It’s time to put away all those tears and demonstrations for Pope Francis, and the bishops, because they are simply not going to change. If you’re an abuse victim, it’s time to go straight to the governmental authorities. Don’t bother with the bishops anymore. They can learn about your abuse claims from the district attorney. News flash for everyone: there is already a hotline to report clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It’s called 9-1-1.”
“Get on your favorite social media platform and speak out about how our bishops (and pope) have failed us. Speak up about the doctrine that is undermined in favor of the anti-doctrine this papacy is pushing on us, even when the secular world will hate us for it. …”
“While the USCCB may get significant taxpayer dollars from the American people each year (as much as 33% of their annual budget, according to their own reports), we will not give them a penny more. This support in the form of bishops’ annual appeals, or collections for shady ministries such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (which openly supports abortion, contraception, and LGBT issues, to name a few) will collect dust, the money will dry up, and they will realize that the laity’s is the hand that feeds them.”
https://onepeterfive.com/black-friday-bishops/
“The sense of the now almost unanimous non-traditionalist constituency opposing the madness of this Pope is ably summed up by Dr. Douglas Farrow, a theology professor at McGill University, writing for Catholic World Reportconcerning what he calls “the troubling Bergoglio pontificate”:
The critics are right that the revolution is wrong. This is not reform; it is not even conversion. It is conquest. If it is not stopped, the gates of Hades will prevail against the Church, which will die out everywhere just as it is dying out in the lands of the revolutionaries themselves. We must appeal to Heaven to stop it and be prepared to help stop it, confident in our Lord’s promise that those gates shall not prevail and that his Church will not fail.”
“The crisis we are living is the consequence of not heeding the command of Christ who gave us this great commission. We must return to Him as disciples, and also become teachers to the world, evangelizers both by word and good example. That is not the obligation of only bishops and priests: that is the duty of the whole Church militant, especially in this time when so many bishops and priests seem to have lost their way. Therefore, it is urgent that we hold the plow and get to work. As they say in Virginia: “we are in the short rows now” there is not much time left.” http://www.lepantoinstitute.org/time-to-learn-time-to-teach/
“I recognize that not all of you were complicit in this, but right now (from the perspective of the laity) it’s pretty hard to tell who is complicit and who isn’t. This is why so many of us have blamed all of you collectively, and will continue to do so, until this matter is truly addressed in a meaningful way. I’m not talking about clutching your pectoral crosses and telling us how you didn’t know, and how sorry you are. We’re tired of that! We’ll have none of it! We want actions not words, and nothing but actions will suffice now.
Because you have failed us, so badly for so long, many within the laity have now turned to the government for help, and we will continue to do so. Many of us are eager to see criminal justice be done in this matter, and many of us are looking to the federal government as well as the states for help. We want our Church to be clean again, and if that means going to Caesar to mop it up, then so be it.”
https://completechristianity.blog/2018/11/08/an-open-letter-to-the-us-catholic-bishops/
“I have been away from practicing my faith for a half century. But in the past three years, I have spent a good deal of time following Church Militant, LifeSiteNews and other faithful Catholic websites. In spite of the appalling treachery and duplicity of the hierarchy and the mistreatment of faithful clergy and laity, I have the growing conviction I will again be in communion with the authentic Catholic faith which has remained dormant within me for so long.” https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/catholicmetoo-a-survivor-tells-his-story
“This can play out a thousand million different ways because each person is different and in different circumstances from everyone else.
Maybe you join the parish council. Maybe you begin a Catholic Bible study. Perhaps you go teach young children the Faith at the parish. Maybe you have it out with the unfaithful priest in your parish who is perverting doctrine. Perhaps you start your own prayer group in your house. Perhaps you adopt a seminarian and help keep him in check spiritually.
Just some random suggestions. The idea is there isn’t one solitary Catholic who can’t do something in the natural order. Maybe you print up little flyers about some nugget of Catholicism and put them on windshields. Or, having realized the disaster, the calamity that has befallen the Church, you start an internet site and consecrate it to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, under the protection of St. Michael, and offer it to Heaven for the entire purpose of being used to save souls.
https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-stay-stand-and-fight
Time to start asking this question: What kind of Pope will be chosen by the Cardinals elevated by Francis and this current crop of prelates?
“Today’s bishops are not responsible for the beginnings of this problem: they are responsible for allowing it to continue, and to strike deeper and deeper roots into the Church. They have known since they were bishops, from the files and from the victims, what they probably knew from hearsay before, that many dioceses are powder-kegs of wrongdoing. They don’t want anyone to light a match.
They are in a situation in which things are so bad that they cannot do anything to make things better. That, at least, is how things may seem to them. In reality, as secular prosecutors are beginning to point out to them, they had various moral and legal duties, to protect children, to report crimes, and to administer property belonging to the Church for proper charitable purposes, which they repeatedly failed to fulfil. Their fear of the bad consequences of doing the right thing is no justification or defense either legally or morally.
And now that light is creeping into this abyss of evil, as was bound to happen eventually, all the bad consequences they hoped avoid will now happen anyway, all the worse for the delay, and the continuing reluctance of bishops to do the right thing. “
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/why-catholic-bishops-are-terrified-of-investigations
LR
- Light
- No $$
- Pray & fast
“Catholic charitable organizations fear that the Church’s sexual abuse scandal is driving Catholics in the pews to close their wallets and forego support for their agencies.”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/catholic-charities-usa-loses-significant-donors-in-wake-of-sex-abuse-crisis
“laity have a remarkable amount of power, and we should exercise it to the fullest.” https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/five-ways-catholic-laity-can-powerfully-influence-church-for-good-from-with
Msgr Pope, I give you the same advice I give the venerable Cdl Zen, Quit looking to Pope Francis to change or give any type of meaningful help. We are not children to him, and he does not act as a father. Chaos, fear, power is what matters. Anyone getting in the way, will be silenced and forced out, one way or the other.
“Pope explained that Francis has actually been vocal about the issues in insulting those who request accountability, stressing the awkwardness of having to state such things about a pope.
“He really hasn’t been silent, that’s the problem,” Monsignor said. “He refers to people who disagree and want investigations as monsters, accusers, a pack of wild dogs.”
“I mean, these are things he said,” he added of the pontiff. “And there’s what I would call weaponized ambiguity. He uses very ambiguous terms about things, and he leaves the faithful guessing.”
“At some point we have to say, Holy Father, we’re your children,” said Pope. “Take spiritual care, respect us, love us, listen to us.”
Keyes is always worth listening to.
“Keyes reflected that faithful Catholics are suffering great sorrow because of their corrupted leadership and warned that Church leaders now reflect the godless values that have overrun the whole of American society.
He said he once had “good faith” that “at the end of the day, guided by the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church would be blessed by God with leadership that would never let go of His hand, never betray His truth, never confuse His law.”
“But that faith is sure to be a distant memory,” he lamented, adding:
And I cannot say that without sorrow. I cannot say it without a broken heart. I cannot say that without fear for the future of our country, of our world. For if the Catholic Church no longer plays its role; if the Catholic leadership no longer provides that foundation on which we can rely; if except they would … embrace the very sins we are seeing destroy the world, then we must be tempted to believe there is no hope — that God’s wrath is already upon us.
Keyes indicted the hierarchy for their “response to the broken hearts of the laity” which, he said, “tells me that they are more interested in crushing our position than lifting up the position of God.”
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/alan-keyes-6
“He recommended looking at both seminaries and houses of religious formation in a “thorough way” lest the same problem of homosexual activity reoccurs. Bishop Daly then spoke on the behalf “good faith-filled families,” who want to promote vocations within their family but are concerned that bishops will do nothing to clean up the homosexual activity within the Church.
“They do have a concern,” warned Daly, “about what is happening here this week and concern that we as the body of bishops leading as their shepherds take very seriously these issues.”
[They’re running out of patience.Tweet]
They want to continue encouraging vocations and to trust their shepherds, he said, but are running out of patience.
“These are faith-filled parents,” he emphasized, “that are committed to the Church, that are very understanding and patient; but my feeling is, judging from their conversations, they’re running out of patience.”
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/bishop-daly-do-bishops-have-catholic-morals
“The affidavit says Homeland Security Investigations have developed probable cause to believe the Rev. Lenin Vargas-Gutierrez, pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Starkville, knowingly devised schemes of obtaining money by means of false and fraudulent pretense, through the use of wire communications.”
“If this account proves true, then the Diocese of Jackson not only let this creep con parishioners with his fake cancer story, they also let an HIV-positive, sex-addicted priest minister to people. Some spiritual father he is!
This is why many Catholics don’t trust bishops. Can you blame them?”
“Now clergy sex abuse victims throughout California are calling on the state’s attorney general to investigate clergy abuse and force church officials to release more information about their role covering it up. The goal is to discover how wide-spread the practice of hiding abusers in immigrant communities really was.”
Aside from tax dollars, hiding corrupt priests is a motive for the alien invasion by the bishop conference. “Now clergy sex abuse victims throughout California are calling on the state’s attorney general to investigate clergy abuse and force church officials to release more information about their role covering it up. The goal is to discover how wide-spread the practice of hiding abusers in immigrant communities really was.” https://www.npr.org/2018/11/08/665251345/immigrant-communities-were-the-geographic-solution-to-predator-priests
Beaumont knows class action lawsuits. Think Big Tobacco.
“Coffman, one of two attorneys on the case from Beaumont, Texas, told the Beaumont Enterprise that he has been watching the unfolding of the recent sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and felt the “time was right” to file this lawsuit.
“(S)omething needs to be done about this problem,” he told the Enterprise.
“There’s just a louder and louder outcry going on across the United States for the Catholic church to do something about this situation,” Coffman added.”