This 3 May 2020 video from the USA says about itself:
Sixth nun dies from coronavirus complications at Our Lady of the Angels convent
Sister Josephine Seier, 94, died Friday. According to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner, a post-mortem test revealed she tested positive for COVID-19.
Dutch daily Algemeen Dagbladreports today that COVID-19 is killing many people in monasteries.
In Bijdorp monastery in Voorschoten, four nuns and one friar have died this May.
In the Sisters of Charity nunnery in Tilburg, during two weeks in April, 13 out of 128 nuns died.
Also in Tilburg, four friars of the Brothers of Our Lady Mother of Mercy, including a former superior general, died.
In the Sisters of Charity nunnery in Schijndel, four nuns died.
In the monastery in Zenderen, COVID-19 killed two monks of the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, including the prior, and infected three more.
Some good coronavirus news: the anti-coronavirus measures not only mean less coronavirus deaths, but also less patients infected with other contagious diseases. Among Dutch children, norovirus infections have become 70-80% less since the partial lockdown.
John Paul II’s secretary of state Cardinal Angelo Sodano long blocked any investigation into the Legion.
Pope Francis accepted his resignation as dean of the College of Cardinals on Saturday.
FBI OPENS SWEEPING PROBE OF CLERGY SEX ABUSE IN NEW ORLEANS The FBI has reportedly opened a widening investigation into sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans going back decades, looking specifically at whether priests took children across state lines to molest them. The probe could deepen the legal peril for the Archdiocese of New Orleans as it reels from a bankruptcy brought on by a flood of sex abuse lawsuits. [AP]
The series of abuse scandals is now also affecting the Vatican. Donations are decreasing and, moreover, those decreasing amounts of money are poorly managed. That is what the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi says in a book published this week. News about financial mismanagement and money shortages seems to support his findings.
By Charlotte Klein
If the pontificate of Pope Francis fails, Nuzzi writes in his book Guidizio universale (“Last Judgment”), it will not be because of the attacks by conservative Catholics or the worldwide decline in the number of believers, but because of “the financial collapse that is getting closer’. The journalist bases that on three thousand pages of documents that he has collected since 2013. The fact that according to AP news agency the Vatican has not published a budget since 2015 is only fueling the rumors.
Financial mismanagement, a reduction in donations, money laundering and corruption is said to lead to this collapse. …
Discussion is possible about Nuzzi’s claim that the Vatican is heading for bankruptcy in 2023. But it is almost certain that the mini-state is struggling with financial deficits, partly due to the way the Vatican generates income. The state does not collect taxes but receives contributions from dioceses, income from popular museums, donations from believers and income from real estate.
The latter two now cause the biggest problems. Due to the sexual abuse scandals, worldwide donations have fallen dramatically, writes Nuzzi, especially from the United States. According to Nuzzi, the Peter’s Pence, the annual gift of millions of euros from Catholics to Vatican City, is on its way down.
The Financial Times also writes that around 150 million euros have been used in a Swiss bank account of the Vatican for the purchase of luxury apartments in London. This controversial purchase, which resulted in a huge profit for the original seller, was made under the direction of Cardinal Becciu. He is now under fire, also because of other substantial foreign investments.
The Vatican police therefore started an internal investigation at the beginning of October and invaded two important departments: the Financial Information Service (AIF) and the State Secretariat. Documents and computers were seized. The Vatican police suspect money laundering, fraud and corruption.
The five employees allegedly involved in these malpractices were suspended after the Italian magazine L’Espressohad published leaked documents about them. Domenico Giani, the Pope’s main bodyguard and head of the Vatican police, also offered his resignation. He was succeeded by Giuseppe Pignatone.
Steve Humphries’ Sex In a Cold Climate, a documentary denouncing the Magdalene Asylums, which were operated by Catholic nuns in Ireland for over 100 years.
The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, also known as Magdalene asylums, were institutions of confinement, usually run by Roman Catholic orders.
No congregation escaped Belgian sex abuse. “It’s the Church’s Dutroux”, referring to mid-1990s trauma in Belgium + arrest of serial rapist / child killer Marc Dutroux, serving life for six rapes and four murders.
Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Archbishop Emeritus of Mechelen-Brussels, died Thursday morning in Mechelen. Cardinal Jozef De Kesel reports this. Danneels was 85 years old. …
Rome – In a remarkable admission, German Cardinal Reinhard Marx said Saturday that documents that could have contained proof of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church were destroyed or never drawn up.
“Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed or not even created,” said Marx, the archbishop of Munich and president of the German Bishops’ Conference.
“The stipulated procedures and processes for the prosecution offenses were deliberately not complied with,” he added, “but instead canceled and overridden.
“Such standard practices will make it clear that it is not transparency which damages the church, but rather the acts of abuse committed, the lack of transparency, or the ensuing coverup.”
Marx’s stunning admission came on the third day of a historic Vatican summit focused on combating clergy sexual abuse. The day’s theme was transparency, which Marx said could help to tackle abuse of power.
A member of Pope Francis‘ inner circle of advisers, Marx is one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church.
The four-day summit of 190 Catholic leaders, including 114 bishops from around the world, will conclude Sunday with an address by Pope Francis. On Thursday, at the beginning of the unprecedented summit, Francis urged the bishops to take “concrete measures” to combat the clergy abuse scandal.
At a press conference later Saturday, Marx said that the information about destroying files came from a study commissioned by German bishops in 2014. The study was “scientific” and did not name the particular church leaders or dioceses in Germany that destroyed the files.
“The study indicates that some documents were manipulated or did not contain what they should have contained,” Marx said. “The fact in itself cannot be denied.”
Marx said he doubts the destruction of files related to clergy sexual abuse was limited to one diocese.
“I assume Germany is not an isolated case.”
The report commissioned by the German bishops also revealed that “at least” 3,677 cases of child sex abuse by German clergy occurred between 1946 and 2014.
CNN’s Lauren Said-Moorhouse and Livvy Doherty contributed to this report.
He pointed out that priests were suspended because of the abuse of nuns and that his predecessor Pope Benedict in 2005 disbanded a female monastic order because of sexual abuse and corruption. A spokesman for the Vatican told Reuters news agency that this was a French monastic order.
HuffPost reporters Jessica Blank and Carol Kuruvilla dove into abuse allegations of nuns and Catholic sisters. Although it’s rarer than abuse by priests or monks, one subject of their story, a nun named Trish Cahill, a survivor of nun abuse, believes it goes under reported. Gender stereotypes about female perpetrators of abuse make it much harder to see the broader picture: here.
“You do not know what happens to you.” The now 74-year-old Theo Bruyns was raped around the age of 12 in a seminary, an ecclesiastical school. He therefore filed a complaint against the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope last month.
The Good Shepherd Convent, Magdalen Asylum, Sunday’s Well, Cork opened on the 29th July 1872. It remained the site of orphanage, Magdalen laundry until the late 1970s.
The buildings have been derelict ever since a serious fire in 2003. The laundry was one of buildings that were destroyed. The existence of the Magdalen asylums was little thought of until, in 1993, when an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their convent to a real estate developer.
The shocking discovery of 155 inmates buried in unmarked graves was made, all were exhumed and with the exception of one body were cremated and re-interred in a communal grave. This triggered a public scandal and became local and national news in 1999.
Mary Norris, Josephine McCarthy and Mary-Jo McDonagh, all asylum inmates, gave accounts of their treatment. The 1998 Channel 4 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate interviewed former inmates of Magdalen Asylums who testified to continued sexual, psychological and physical abuse while being isolated from the outside world for an indefinite amount of time.
The conditions in the Good Shepherd Convent, Magdalen Laundry Asylum, and treatment of the inmates was dramatized in the acclaimed film The Magdalene Sisters (2002), written and directed by Peter Mullan.
The full name of this organisation is The Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, also known as the Magdalene Sisters.
‘Catholic congregation is liable for forced labor of girls’
Sisters of the Good Shepherd
Nuns violated European human rights treaty with forced labor of girls. If there is no settlement, then a lawsuit will follow.
By Joep Dohmen
January 18, 2019
Forty-four women who were forced to do forced labor in laundries and sewing workshops of the sisters of the Good Shepherd, held the Catholic congregation to account this week. They demand recognition of abuses, payment of wages and compensation for material and immaterial damage. In the statement of liability sent on Thursday, the sisters are accused of violating the European Convention on Human Rights by imprisoning the girls and forcing them into unpaid work. If there is no amicable settlement within six weeks, then a lawsuit will follow, says their lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld.
Reports about exploitation by the nuns previously became known in France, Australia, Canada, the US, Germany and Ireland. In Ireland, the government started independent research. The victims received compensation from the government. The nuns refused to pay.
In the Netherlands the congregation refused last year to also accommodate victims financially. According to the congregation, their claim “has been time-barred” for a long time. Zegveld: “The question is whether the congregation is protected by a time bar. After all, it was an international system of exploitation and abuse.”
…
The 44 women stayed from 1948 to the end of the nineteen seventies in one or more institutions of the sisters. They were between 10 and 21 years old at the time. Zegveld: “They had to work under threat of punishment and against their will. Six days a week, eight hours a day. ”
The girls worked in sewing workshops, laundries, ironing rooms, and did housework. The institutions were closed. Zegveld: “There was punishment for resistance to work, running away, resting or working slowly.” The sisters are also accused of sabotaging the girls’ education and submitting to “psychological abuse and neglect”.
Furthermore, there is the accusation of physical violence. Zegveld: “Some have been aborted forcibly with violence.
Abortion, according to official Roman Catholic doctrine, is a terrible crime. A Spanish archbishop believes that one is allowed to rape women who have had an abortion. Apparently, if abortion is done forcibly at the orders of a Catholic congregation, then it suddenly ceases to be a crime.
Others had to give up their children.” The group is supported by fellow survivors’ organization VPKK. It wants the government to conduct an independent investigation, just like in Ireland. Minister Dekker (Justice, VVD) refuses that. VPKK board member Annemie Knibbe: “He says it has been researched before, which is simply not true.”
To a large group of young people in Estonia, the Pope said that he knows that many young people feel that the church has nothing to offer them and does not understand their problems. “They are furious about the sexual and economic scandals without clear condemnation, and about the fact that we are not willing to really understand the lives and sensitivities of young people.”
“We ourselves must be converted”, said the Pope. “In order to be able to stand next to you, we have to realize that we have to change a lot.”
Today, a report was published at the German bishops’ conference showing that almost 3700 people in Germany were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. More than half were 13 or younger at the time, and nearly a third of them were altar boys.
Cardinal Marx, as the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, said at the presentation of the report that things are not finished right now, but are just beginning.
![Catholic nuns protest alleged rape by a bishop in the southern state of Kerala in India [File: AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/9/12/e7816a77dfb34d82b08989a55e3ffeee_18.jpg "Catholic nuns protest alleged rape by a bishop in the southern state of Kerala in India [File: AP]")
Dear Kitty. Some blog 