From 2001 Forward Every Single Priest Sex Abuse Case Went To Ratzinger

The Vatican is finally holding one of its own accountable, but not a member of the pedophile ring that has completely taken over the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy or of the financial swindlers who run the Vatican. Instead, they're punishing a whistleblower, the fascist Pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison "for leaking confidential documents to the media."

Mr. Gabriele, 46, remained impassive as the chief judge, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, pronounced the sentence “in the name of His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, gloriously reigning,” in a wood-paneled room in the Vatican City tribunal, in a nondescript palazzo near to the apse of St. Peter’s Square.

The verdict capped one of the most embarrassing episodes in recent Vatican history after a tell-all book based on dozens of the documents leaked by Mr. Gabriele revealed accusations of financial misdeeds, infighting and widespread tensions within the Vatican.

The court formally sentenced Mr. Gabriele to three years in prison and required him to pay court costs. But the sentence was reduced to 18 months after the court acknowledged several extenuating circumstances, including the butler’s public recognition that he had betrayed the pope’s trust. The court also took into account Mr. Gabriele’s belief, “albeit erroneously” that his motivations for leaking the documents had been pure.

Before the verdict, Mr. Gabriele addressed the court and told the three judges: “I am not a thief.”

Speaking with little emotion in his voice, Mr. Gabriele said that “he felt the strong conviction deep inside to have acted exclusively for love, a visceral love, for the church” and the pope.

For several months, beginning in November, the butler gave a number of documents to a journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who published many of them in the book “His Holiness: the Secret Papers of Pope Benedict XVI.” The most embarrassing revelations pointed to alleged misdeeds within the Vatican’s administration and its chief financial institution.

Two weeks after the book was published in May, Mr. Gabriele was arrested when hundreds of photocopied documents were found in his apartment inside Vatican City, where he lived with his wife and their three children. Mr. Gabriele spent nearly two months in a holding cell at the Vatican before being released to house arrest.

The Pope is said to be considering pardoning his former butler. Normally Vatican criminals don't get convicted of anything or even face trial. The real Vatican crimes get covered up-- and very, very systematically. In Chris Hayes' book about the crisis of authority, Twilight Of The Elites, he gets into the notorious case of Jesuit child rapist John Leary, then president of Gonzaga University in Spokane. Hayes' point was not about the rapes, per se, but about the cover-up, which went beyond the Church right into the police department. Instead of arresting Leary, the police just told him to get out of town within 24 hours. That kind of thing happens all the time when elites are caught in criminal acts. It's rare, for example, that a congressman is arrested and tried for his crimes. They're just told to resign and disappear. Mark Foley may be the most recently notorious of that lot but even more recently Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) was caught in serial electoral fraud and was let off the hook by the Michigan Attorney General (a "law and order" Republican) in return for a resignation. No arrest, no trial, no accountability. McCotter will be back on top of the world in no time. Foley, by the way, was a guest on Bill Maher's show Friday night.

Because Leary was a brilliant and charming university president, his case hasn't ever been treated for what it was, a serials of grubby criminal attacks on young boys.

[I]n 1965, Leary spotted a young adolescent boy of around 12, who lived in the neighborhood near Gonzaga University, riding his bicycle by the school. Leary lured the boy into his office and molested him. University officials found out about it somehow and called a meeting with the boy. They asked if Leary had done anything inappropriate. He explained what happened, said attorney Michael Pfau, who is representing the alleged victim in the planned lawsuit.

According to Pfau, the officials said, "Don't tell your parents; we'll take care of it."

And take care of it they apparently did, orchestrating a stunning cover-up that allowed Leary to expand his pedagogical legend despite allegations that he'd abused several boys. He left Spokane, and Gonzaga in 1969 at the private insistence of the Spokane police. The university said he left for "health reasons."

...In 1965, an 18-year-old freshman at the Jesuit Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., learned he'd landed a plum assignment.

The boy was from a Washington family of committed Catholics. He was considering a vocation in the priesthood... The idea was that the Gonzaga student would drive Rev. Leary to a town across the state where the university president was speaking. They'd rent separate hotel rooms, spend the night, and drive back to the university. According to the boy's now late-middle-aged recollections, he fell asleep in his own bed. Leary stripped naked, got on top of the sleeping boy, and tried to penetrate him. Leary wasn't extremely violent, but he was forceful, persistent, and the boy had to fight Leary off. Eventually, Leary relented and made up an excuse for his behavior.

The next day Leary persisted, this time talking about sexual matters, embarrassing the young man. The few hours' drive home was excruciating, he recalls, according to Doug Spruance, a Washington state attorney representing the former student in possible litigation over the alleged attack. Because of the nature of the case, Spruance did not name his client, nor make him available to interview.

The young man became depressed. His grades plummeted. He dropped out, and remained bitter during the next 40 years that he'd been unable to complete his college education.

Soon after there was an agreement between the Jesuits and the Spokane police "under which Leary wouldn't face charges of molesting victims if he left town within 24 hours." He went on molesting boys in similar situations for years to come. As the biggest newspaper in eastern Washington state wrote, "the Spokane Police Department and Jesuit hierarchy orchestrated a stunning cover-up that preserved the reputation of the institution and a man revered as a leader in Spokane," which has a long and very sordid history of tolerating child rape among it's elites. "Jesuit leaders created an 'artificial scenario' in which they stated Leary had resigned for health reasons during a trip to the East Coast. Gonzaga officials perpetuated the story of Leary's 'illness,' even as the priest moved from one Western university to another in the years that followed. Leary died in 1993."

Rev. John D. Whitney, the Jesuits' current provincial superior, issued a statement calling the reports "deeply distressing," though he admitted rumors of Leary's predatory activities had churned in university and Catholic circles for four decades. Gonzaga President Robert Spitzer refused to comment but sent out a boiler plate Catholic statement claiming the university regretted its actions and sought to assure the community that it has made changes to the way it reports and investigates inappropriate sexual behavior. "We're not like this anymore," said Whitney. But they are-- right up onto St. Peter's throne. And everyone conspires to make believe the Church is something other than a pedophile criminal operation. That's why Hayes included them in a book about the breakdown of Authority in society. The Pope himself, after all, forced the Irish Church to back off from plans to start turning priest rapists over to the police. Hayes:

The broad outlines of the scandal are familiar. For decades priests sexually molested children, using their clerical status as protection. When church authorities were alerted, they simply moved the predators to new parishes, where the abuse would continue. This didn't just happen a few times: it was, it appears, a policy. In 2007, when the Irish Church dealt with its own burgeoning crisis by crafting a policy that would require bishops to report suspected abusers to civil authorities the Vatican sent a letter expressing its reservations about "mandatory reporting" and instructing the bishops that the Code of Canon Law (as opposed to secular law) "must be meticulously followed." The command, in other words, was for bishops to shield their wayward priests from prosecution, to administer whatever justice would be administered in secret, within the fold of the church.