Women priests and sex abuse not equal crimes: Vatican

[AngryOldDem]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100716/wl_nm/us_pope_abuse


<<<VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican on Friday denied accusations that it viewed the ordination of women as priests and the sexual abuse of minors by clerics as equally criminal.

On Thursday, the Vatican issued a document making sweeping revisions to its laws on sexual abuse, extending the period in which charges can be filed against priests in church courts and broadening the use of fast-track procedures to defrock them. But Monsignor Charles Scicluna, an official in the Vatican's doctrinal department, said there was no attempt to make women's ordination and pedophilia comparable crimes under canon (Church) law.

"This is not putting everything into one basket," Scicluna, the Vatican's internal prosecutor for handling sexual abuse cases, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"They are in the same document but this does not put them on the same level or assign them the same gravity," said Scicluna, who helped formulate the revisions.
The document was an attempt to update norms concerning "three sets of canonical crimes that are distinct," and whose jurisdiction is reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal department, he said.<<<

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And they go on to spin, spin, spin...read on only if you can tolerate massive dizziness.

If they did not want to give the impression that the two were equal, then they should not have included women's ordination in the same document that addressed clerical sex abuse. Period, end of sentence.

The world is calling them on their bullshit and they just don't know how to handle it. It would be funny if there weren't so many victims on both sides here -- whenever I see this crap from Rome I'm reminded of the old Mad magazine feature: "What They SAID, What They MEANT..." Because, according to them, they never really MEAN what they SAY. They are slowly backing themselves into a corner. Good.

No PR agency in the world, and no amount of pious wiggle words, can walk back what the Vatican has **unequivocally** said this week: Sex-abusing priests and women priests are of the same criminal nature. Rome has finally put in writing how it views women, as if there were any question about that in the first place.

[Salviati]

1. It sounds like a joke but it's true: The first thing that crossed my mind when I heard this,

That the Vatican was going to treat the ordination of women as comperable to sex abuse:

"Huh, I thought the Vatican was against the ordination of women..."