Will the World Wake Up to the Climate Change Threat?

Despite all kinds of scientific evidence that climate change is real, many Republicans and that party's toxic base of support continue to deny climate change is real and that the world is facing an existential threat. With Australia literally in flames, polar ice melting at a rapid rate and record temperatures hitting large parts of the world, the question is whether or not the world and nations like the United States will at last make needed policy changes to lessen the coming climate disaster. A piece in New Yorker looks at evidence that ought to convince anyone sentient that something must be done.  Here are article highlights:

In a Dantean sort of way, Australia’s holiday-season infernos provided a fitting close to 2019, which has been called “the year the world woke up to the climate crisis.” In India this past summer, a heat wave killed more than a hundred people in the northeastern state of Bihar, and in Japan a month later a heat wave sent an estimated eighteen thousand to the hospital. All-time temperature records were set in France, where a high of a hundred and eight degrees was reached in the town of Vérargues on June 28th, and in Germany, where the mercury in the town of Lingen hit a hundred and seven degrees on July 25th.

In Australia, records were broken only to be rebroken. On December 17th, maximum temperatures across the entire country, which is roughly the size of the continental United States, averaged 105.6 degrees. Then, on December 18th, they climbed to 107.4 degrees. The “feeling when you open the oven door” is how one Australian described the heat to the BBC. “It’s like that, but just the whole time.” Globally, it was the second- or third-warmest year since accurate measurements began.

What will the twenty-twenties bring? In geophysical terms, this question is almost too easy to answer. Temperatures will continue to rise. It’s virtually guaranteed that the coming decade will be warmer than the twenty-tens, which were warmer than the two-thousands, which were warmer than the nineteen-nineties, which—you guessed it—were warmer than the nineteen-eighties.

And with still higher temperatures will come still greater damage. Droughts will grow more punishing. (Australia’s horrific wildfires are, in large part, the result of what Australians are calling a “big dry,” which is now in its third year and has forced many towns to truck in water.) Warmer air holds more moisture, so the flip side of drought is deluge. (Last week, as Australia was roasting, flooding in Indonesia killed at least forty people.) Meanwhile, the planet’s ice sheets will continue to melt, leading to ever-higher sea levels, as will the Arctic ice cap. It’s possible that by 2030 the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free at the end of the summer.

Which brings us to the question of what it means to “wake up.” If in the past year (or the past decade) the world began to understand how dangerous climate change is, it certainly didn’t act like it. In the past ten years, more CO₂ was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of J.F.K.

The Trump Administration, which has filed to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, and the Morrison government, which wanted to use an accounting trick to fulfill its Paris commitments, were explicitly blamed for the stalemate. Many commentators noted the irony of the situation. A headline in the Guardian put it this way: “AUSTRALIA TOOK A MATCH TO UN CLIMATE TALKS WHILE BACK HOME THE COUNTRY BURNED.”

[T]he twenty-twenties will be consequential in a more or less permanent way. Global CO₂ emissions are now so high—in 2019, they hit a new record of forty-three billion metric tons—that ten more years of the same will be nothing short of cataclysmic. Unless emissions are reduced, and radically, a rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will be pretty much unavoidable by 2030. This will make the demise of the world’s coral reefs, the inundation of most low-lying island nations, incessant heat waves and fires and misery for millions—perhaps billions—of people equally unavoidable.

Really waking up, and not just dreaming to ourselves that things will be O.K., has become urgent—beyond urgent, in fact. To paraphrase Victoria’s fire authority: The world is in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive. 

The Climate Crisis: Yes, It’s Getting Worse

A photo from a reader in Australia taken from his front door.

The nightmare fires burning in Australia may finally be  forcing willfully ignorant, fact denying conservatives in that nation to accept the reality of climate change.  With luck, the current conservative prime minister will be voted out of office come the next election.  The question is, what will it take for "conservatives" in America to wake up and get their heads out of their ass.   What level of catastrophe will be required?  A repeat of 2019's floods in the Mid-West? A super hurricane that wipes out Houston or Miami? Fires that burn up huge parts of Wyoming or Montana? A sort piece in New York Magazine with dozens of copyrighted photos (which I cannot repost) from Australia is a must read - especially for soccer moms, and the church lady set that often to me seem utterly blind to more pressing issues in the world. Here are excerpts from the piece:

Tens of thousands of people are fleeing to safety in Australia after massive brushfires caused the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history. The fires have been burning since September, with emergency services struggling to contain apocalyptic blazes. Authorities will not force residents to leave, but are pleading for them to do so.

Many people have fled their homes, some of them running to beaches and huddling on boats when escape routes out of their rural seaside towns were engulfed in flames. Smoke has choked the air and light over cities including Sydney and even as far away as Melbourne. Over 11 million acres have burned, along with an estimated 480 million animals. Ten people have died since December 30, and 28 more remain unaccounted for.

Many Australians are furious with their government’s resistance to acknowledge the role of climate change in the brushfires, which experts say are now burning hotter, longer, and more ferociously due to rising global temperatures. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, elected on an anti-climate action platform, . . . said that he was committed to “sensible” climate policies, ones that “don’t move toward either extreme.” But the “extreme” is already here, as captured in photos taken in New South Wales and elsewhere over the last few days. Red skies and bright orange flames blur the features of humans and animals forced into survival mode, fighting for their lives in homes that, once idyllic, have been horrifically transformed. Their suffering is a portent of what’s to come for millions around the world, and what is already happening in the most vulnerable places. . . . Don’t start the new year by looking away.

Our politicians can pretend climate change isn't real and it is up to us to vote them out of office in every election at every level of government. 

Climate Apocalypse Becomes the New Normal

Living on the East Coast literally within about 30 feet of a tidal creek perhaps gives one a keener sense that climate change is real and the fear of higher storm surge and stronger hurricanes is very real.  But we are seeing other examples of climate change that ought to wake up sane and rational people: the Midwest flooding, warmer oceans, polar ice melting - the list goes on.  Yet America's federal government under the Trump/Pence regime is not only in denial, but is actively taking steps that will aggravate an already perilous situation. Equally frightening is the shrug of the shoulders reaction of many which indicates that, OK, climate change is real but it doesn't impact me.  But, of course, eventually it will impact all of us - despite Fox News' pretense to the contrary - and the indifference to the perils of others is most disturbing.  A column in the New York Times looks at the new normal that we are now living with which hopefully will awake more to reality.  Here are excerpts: 

Australia’s summer of fire is only the latest in a string of catastrophic weather events over the past year: unprecedented flooding in the Midwest, a heat wave in India that sent temperatures to 123 degrees, another heat wave that brought unheard-of temperatures to much of Europe.

And all of these catastrophes were related to climate change.

Notice that I said “related to” rather than “caused by” climate change. This is a distinction that has flummoxed many people over the years. Any individual weather event has multiple causes, which was one reason news reports used to avoid mentioning the possible role of climate change in natural disasters.

In recent years, however, climate scientists have tried to cut through this confusion by engaging in “extreme event attribution,” which focuses on probabilities: You can’t necessarily say that climate change caused a particular heat wave, but you can ask how much difference global warming made to the probability of that heat wave happening. And the answer, typically, is a lot: Climate change makes the kinds of extreme weather events we’ve been seeing much more likely.

On our current trajectory, Florida as a whole will eventually be swallowed by the sea, but long before that happens, rising sea levels will make catastrophic storm surges commonplace. Much of India will eventually become uninhabitable, but killing heat waves and droughts will take a deadly toll well before that point is reached.

Put it this way: While it will take generations for the full consequences of climate change to play out, there will be many localized, temporary disasters along the way. Apocalypse will become the new normal — and that’s happening right in front of our eyes.

The big question is whether the proliferation of climate-related disasters will finally be enough to break though the opposition to action.

The bad news is that growing climate awareness is mainly taking place among Democrats; the Republican base is largely unmoved.

And the anti-environmental extremism of conservative politicians has, if anything, become even more intense as their position has become intellectually untenable. The right used to pretend that there was a serious scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its sources. Now Republicans, and the Trump administration in particular, have simply become hostile to science in general. Hey, aren’t scientists effectively part of the deep state?

Furthermore, this isn’t just a U.S. problem. Even as Australia burns, its current government is reaffirming its commitment to coal and threatening to make boycotts of environmentally destructive businesses a crime.

The sick irony of the current situation is that anti-environmentalism is getting more extreme precisely at the moment when the prospects for decisive action should be better than ever.

On one side, the dangers of climate change are no longer predictions about the future: We can see the damage now, although it’s only a small taste of the horrors that lie ahead.

On the other side, drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions now look remarkably easy to achieve, at least from an economic point of view. In particular, there has been so much technological progress in alternative energy that the Trump administration is trying desperately to prop up coal against competition from solar and wind.

But the wave of climate-related catastrophes may be changing the political calculus. I’m not a campaign expert, but it seems to me that campaigns might get some traction with ads showing recent fires and floods and pointing out that Donald Trump and his friends are doing everything they can to create more such disasters.

For the truth is that Trump’s environmental policy is the worst thing he’s doing to America and the world. And voters should know that.

Global Apathy to Climate Change as Australia Burns

UPDATE:  Consider making a donation to help those impacted through the Australian Red Cross here.

In the realm of politics, I have often lamented the apathy and disinterest of so many when it comes to voting and making sure one is well informed.  A classic was the so-called soccer moms who obsessed over PTA gossip and children's sports while being totally oblivious to political issue that would impact their lives and the lives of their families far more.   Frighteningly, a similar phenomenon appears to be happening with the threat of global warming and climate change even as the East Coast of the USA faces dire sea level rise and large parts of Australia burns as that continent is experiencing record heat.  In Australia, huge areas have already burned, thousands of homes have been destroyed and perhaps a half billion animals have perished. The photos in this post are from a reader who took this photos from his home last month. He recounted that the experience was terrifying as the town's shopping district burned.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the frightening apathy of so many - including media outlets - to life threatening climate change.  Here are article highlights:

Right now, on the outskirts of a hyper modern first world megapolis, at the end of a year in which the public seemed finally to wake up to the dramatic threat from global warming, a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention.

The New South Wales fires have been burning since September, destroying fifteen million acres (or more than two thousand square miles) and remain almost entirely uncontrolled by the volunteer firefighting forces deployed to stop them; on November 12, greater Sydney declared an unprecedented “catastrophic” fire warning.

[T]he response to what’s transpired in Australia — again, over a period that has stretched into months — is unfamiliar, to me at least, and not in a good way. Those California fires transfixed the world’s attention, but while the ones still burning uncontrolled in Australia have gotten some media attention outside the country, in general they have been treated as a scary, but not apocalyptic, local news story.

What accounts for the difference? There are all the usual factors—the desire to look away, to avoid contemplating the scariest aspects of contemporary life or what they portend for our future, the shortsightedness of the media, reluctant to cover climate disasters, at least as climate disasters, and the forces of denial now seemingly embodied as much by Australian prime minister Scott Morrison (who was elected on a campaign pitched against climate action and who blithely took a long holiday in Hawaii while his country burned) as they are by Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro.

But two additional explanations suggest themselves to me, neither at all encouraging.

The first is that the duration of this climate horror has allowed us to normalize it even while it continues to unfold — continues to torture, and brutalize, and terrify. The Camp Fire in Paradise, California did almost all of its damage in just four hours, and the short duration may have been as important to our collective horror as the speed. Perhaps if it had lasted longer, even burning with equal ferocity, we would nevertheless simply have gotten used to it as the white noise of catastrophe all around us, as impossible as that may seem to imagine, given the scale of suffering involved.

This hypothesis is especially concerning, of course, given the way that climate change will inevitably extend these sorts of horrors in the decades ahead. Today, there are categories of natural disasters, like droughts, we understand can last for months, or even years, and though they should demand our attention, rarely do. . . . But regarding the fires themselves — which can travel 60 miles per hour or more, creating their own weather systems that project lightning strikes miles away from the blaze, causing more fire — not as a sudden catastrophe but a semi-permanent condition strikes me as another level of normalization entirely. And yet here we are.

The second explanation is perhaps even more distressing. If you had told me, even six months ago, that a climate disaster like this one would strike a place like Australia, I probably would not have expected global wall to wall media coverage — seeing these Sydney opera house against an eerie backdrop of orange smoke makes for spectacular footage, but it’s perhaps less ripe fodder for social media than watching the Kardashians evacuate the valley by Instagram story — but I would have expected a lot more than this.

That’s not because of high-minded faith in the media, or public interest in harrowing stories like these. It’s for a more sinister reason: for decades now, in the U.S. and Western Europe, we have paid much, much more attention to even small-scale suffering by the force of natural disaster when it strikes parts of the wealthy west than we ever muster for those suffering already so dramatically from climate change in Asia and especially in the global south.

That set of prejudices is a moral outrage, and an especially concerning feature of the global response to climate change, which is already punishing the developing world in ways almost no one in the wealthy west would consider conscionable — if they let themselves see it. But it has also proven maddeningly stubborn, and I would not have expected the same prejudices to blind the sympathy and empathy of millions across the U.S. and Europe to the plight of a mostly white, English-speaking “First World” former colony like Australia, however far away, in the face of disaster.

The global response to the bushfires has suggested, unfortunately, something more like the opposite: that no bind of tribal alliance or allegiance is strong enough that we won’t discard it, if discarding it allows us to see the suffering of those living elsewhere on the planet as insignificant to our own lives. These fires are just one disaster, of course, and the planet has many test cases like it ahead. But it would be among the most perverse grotesqueries of climate change if it brought about the end of these kinds of global prejudices — not to be replaced with a sense of common humanity but a system of disinterest defined instead by ever smaller circles of empathy.

Cardinal George Pell of Australia Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison

In other positive news, Cardinal George Pell of Australia has been sentenced to six years in prison for his sexual abuse of minors.  There are likely many more senior prelates who need to be jailed either for their own abuse of minors or their participation in the Catholic Church's worldwide conspiracy to protect predator priest and other clergy.  The New York Times looks at Pell's sentencing.  Note the judge's use of the word arrogance, which applies broadly across the ranks of the Catholic bishops and cardinals. They view themselves as princes while the rest of us are little better than serfs.  Here are article highlights:

MELBOURNE, Australia — George Pell, an Australian cardinal who was the Vatican’s chief financial officer and an adviser to Pope Francis, was sentenced to six years in prison on Wednesday, for molesting two boys after Sunday Mass in 1996.

The cardinal was convicted on five counts in December, making him the most senior Catholic official — and the first bishop — to be found guilty in a criminal court for sexually abusing minors, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.

Cardinal Pell, who stood stone-faced with lips pursed when his sentence was read aloud, will not be eligible for parole for three years and eight months.

“I would characterize these breaches and abuses as grave,” the chief judge in the case, Peter Kidd, said during the sentencing. Speaking directly to Cardinal Pell, he added: “Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance.”

The sentence, falling far short of the 50-year maximum, will be closely scrutinized around the world. The sentencing was broadcast live from the courtroom in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, where Cardinal Pell first rose to prominence as an archbishop.

It brings to a close two years of legal jockeying over evidence and accusations of sexual abuse, most of which were kept from public view by Australia’s legal system until recently. And for Catholics all over the world, it amounts to the toppling of a Vatican giant, a cleric of enormous power who will now reside behind bars.

“The importance of this case cannot be overstated,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org. “It will set a precedent.” . . . . Some called it a welcome if small dose of justice, while others said the sentence was far too lenient.

“Why should we take into account his age?” said Phil Nagle, an advocate for abuse victims from Ballarat, Cardinal Pell’s hometown. “He’s ruined lives.”

[H]e [Pell] is well known, in part, for protecting church finances from large payouts to abuse victims — and a culture warrior. He could frequently be found raising money for conservative causes in Australia, publicly condemning homosexuality and stepping into policy debates as well, opposing, for example, legislation to allow adoption by gay parents.

Note too Pell's breathtaking hypocrisy: sentenced for raping two 13 year old boys, yet railing against gays and gay parenting.   The Vatican is full of Cardinal Pell's.

Vatican Cardinal Guilty On Multiple Child Sex Charges

Pope Francis with Cardinal George Pell.

The already besieged Roman Catholic Church was just hit with a major earth tremor as Cardinal George Pell, formerly Australia's highest ranking cleric, and Vatican treasurer and adviser to the Pope, has been convicted on multiple charges of sexual abuse of minors.  The rot and cover ups truly go all the way up to the highest levels of the Vatican.  Pell like other sexual predators was elevated to the rank of cardinal by the far from saintly John Paul II, who the Vatican ridiculously fast tracked to sainthood under former Pope Benedict XVI who protected predators while launch a war against normal, well adjusted and non-predator gays and lesbians.  CNN looks at this damning conviction which hopefully will force Pope Francis to begin a long, long over due house cleaning of the ranks of the hierarchy.  If Francis fails to do this, it will be clear that his claims of ending the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy will mean nothing.  Here are article excerpts:

One of the most powerful men in the Roman Catholic Church was found guilty of multiple historical child sex offenses at a secret trial in Melbourne in December, the existence of which can only now be revealed.

Australian Cardinal George Pell, 77, is almost certain to face prison after a jury found him guilty of one charge of sexual penetration of a child and four charges of an indecent act with or in the presence of a child in the late 1990s.

The conviction of Pell, the Vatican treasurer and a close adviser to Pope Francis, will send shockwaves through the church, which is already reeling from accusations of sexual abuse committed by priests worldwide.

Pell is the most senior Catholic official to be found guilty of child sex offenses to date. His conviction brings the escalating international controversy around the abuse of children in Catholic institutions straight to the doors of the Holy See.

A court order banning media reporting of Pell's five-week long trial, which began in November 2018, was lifted by Chief Judge Peter Kidd on Tuesday.

The prosecution's case hinged on the testimony of one man, who said Pell sexually abused him and another boy in Melbourne's historic St. Patrick's Cathedral after mass one Sunday.

Pell has repeatedly maintained his innocence. His legal team confirmed on Tuesday they had filed an appeal against the guilty verdict.

The Vatican has yet to comment on the verdict. Pope Francis quietly removed Pell from his small council of advisors for "reasons of advancing age" in December, before the news of the cardinal's conviction became public.

Pell is due to be sentenced at a separate hearing in March.

Pell's conviction is a stunning fall of grace for a man who once ran the Catholic Church in Australia with an iron fist. . . . He was made Archbishop of Melbourne by Pope John Paul II in 1996. While in the post, Pell created a program to respond to the increasing tide of sexual abuse allegations against priests.

But Pell's "Melbourne Response" program was criticized for capping compensations to victims at just tens of thousands of Australian dollars. There were allegations people were advised not to go to the police.

In 2014, Pell moved to Rome after he was handpicked by Pope Francis to serve as treasurer of the Vatican and become one of nine advisers on the Council of Cardinals to the Pope. But Pell's fortunes began to sour after the Australian government announced a Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse in 2012.

The damning report by the commission in 2017 found 7% of Australian Catholic priests abused children over the past six decades.

Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Intensifies As Illinois AG Blast Church for Cover Ups

The 2018 has not been good for the Roman Catholic Church as a number of cardinals and bishops have been forced to resign over sexual abuse of children and minors or for covering up for predatory priests. This week, in the wake of the criminal conviction of the highest ranking prelate in Australia and the 3rd highest official at the Vatican and the launch of criminal investigations by federal and state prosecutors, a California bishop has been forced to resign due to credible accusations of sex abuse and the Illinois Attorney General blasted the Illinois diocese of failing to disclose close to 350 accused predator priests.  Despite voluminous quantities of crocodile tears, the Vatican has failed to take effective measures to clean house of bishops and cardinals implicated in cover-ups,  As a result, many are left with the impression that the Catholic clergy feel the equivalent of a droit du seigneur - historically, a supposed legal or customary right of a feudal lord to have sexual relations with a vassal's bride on her wedding night - when comes to sexually abusing children and youths.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the latest developments in Illinois.  Here are excerpts:

Illinois' attorney general’s office Wednesday accused the Catholic Church of dramatically lowballing the scope of allegations of clergy sex abuse, saying her investigators found at least 500 additional accusations against priests and clergy — compared with the 185 cases the church has found credible. 

[S]he alleged in a statement that a probe her office opened into the Church in August is finding that Catholic leaders are failing to dig deep into the guilt of their clerics. The probe “has revealed that allegations frequently have not been adequately investigated by the dioceses or not investigated at all,” the statement said. Madigan’s office is one of more than a dozen to open state investigations this year into Catholic handling of abuses cases. But Wednesday, some experts said, seemed to up the ante because it pushed on a controversial topic that has angered Catholics from left to right -- whether the Church, under fire since the early 2000s, is really coming clean with its lists. The problem: There is no standard within the Catholic Church for what constitutes “credible" accusations, and many Catholics and members of the public are skeptical that church leaders are coming forward to civil authorities and the public with everything they have. Madigan, said longtime survivor advocate Terry McKiernan, is trying to force the church to produce lists that are more transparent and meaningful. Even in recent weeks, McKiernan said Wednesday, some lists around the country are being shown to not have included names that they should have.

“There’s a big debate about what ‘credible’ means, but these lists are clearly incomplete in a number of ways. Or at least there is lag before names are added,” he said. “Let’s face it, an allegation is an allegation, and very few are unsubstantiated if the diocese does the work to look into it."

Dioceses are dragging their feet on substantiating allegations "because they don’t want to acknowledge the crisis they’re in, ”McKiernan said.

Earlier Wednesday, the Vatican announced that a Los Angeles bishop was being removed after a review of a child sex abuse charge from the 1990s.

Since Madigan’s probe began in August, her spokeswoman said, the six Illinois dioceses have had to add 45 new names to their various lists of credibly accused priests. This reflects a lack of candor, said the office’s communications director, Maura Possley, and it’s why Madigan publicized the number of accusations.

Cardinals, bishops and other top clergy say they want to make amends and help victims heal, but the church’s glacial pace of revealing allegations runs counter to that stated goal, said Towey, who was a lawyer and a Bush administration official before taking the helm at Ave Maria University, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative Catholic colleges.

"It won’t start until all the names are out there. The church has to clean up its act,” Towey said. “The fact is – this is a mess of the Church’s creation and all of us, laity and ordained, have to come together and fix it.”

With Christmas but days away, what should decent, moral Catholics sickened by the sex abuse scandal do?  Perhaps attend the midnight mass service at their local Episcopal church or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America parish rather than their home parish.  The service will be remarkably the same and they will not feel dirtied by supporting a morally bankrupt institution.

Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Charges of Sexually Abusing Choir Boys

How high up in the Vatican do charges of sexual abuse of minors go?  Very high it appears.  A jury in an Australian court unanimously convicted Cardinal George Pell - the No. 3 figure in the Vatican hierarchy and former Archbishop of Sydney and Melbourne - of sexual molesting two choir boys.  That's right it was a unanimous verdict. Details are scarce since the court had imposed a gag order in the case to prevent details from leaking out and potentially impacting the trial and jury.  Pell had been on a "leave of absence" from his Vatican posts and now, albeit belatedly, Pope Francis has dropped him like a hot potato and removed Pell from Francis' informal cabinet (a Chilean cardinal implicated in sex abuse cover ups has likewise been dropped).  As a former gay Catholic, I now wonder why I ever allowed myself to be filled with guilt and self-hate by the dictates of what is now so clearly a morally bankrupt and corrupt Church hierarchy.  The Daily Beast has details on the trial and jury verdict:

The Vatican’s third most powerful official has been convicted in Australia on all charges he sexually abused two choir boys there in the late '90s, according to two sources with knowledge of the case.

A unanimous jury returned its verdict for Cardinal George Pell on Tuesday (Australian time) after more than three days of deliberations, the sources said, in a trial conducted under a gag order by the judge that prevented any details of the trial being made public.

Pell, the Vatican’s finance chief and the highest Vatican official to ever go on trial for sex abuse, left Rome in June 2017 to stand trial in Melbourne.

As that trial was about to get underway in June, a judge placed a suppression order on all press coverage in Australia, according to the order reviewed by The Daily Beast. Prosecutors applied for the order and it was granted to “prevent a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice.” That order remains in place in Australia.

That trial, known as “the cathedral trial,” was declared a mistrial earlier this year after a hung jury, the sources say. A retrial began immediately and ended this week with the unanimous verdict.

Pell was accused by two former choir boys of sexual abuse while he was archbishop of Melbourne in the '90s. The boys sang in the choir at St. Patrick's cathedral and were allegedly abused by Pell in a room in the confines of the church. Pell’s office told The Guardian in 2017 he “repeats his vehement and consistent denials of any and all such accusations.”

A second trial known as “the swimmers trial” is due to get underway early next year, according to sources familiar with the case. That trial is expected to hear evidence that Pell “sexually offended” two men when they were boys playing games in a swimming pool in Ballarat, Victoria.

Sadly, Pell is likely to be far from a lone predator in light of the resignations of two former archbishops of Washington, D.C., one of whom was credibly accused of sexual abuse of seminarians and others, and the other of whom was implicated in cover ups of sexual abuse. The Sydney Morning Herald looks at Francis dropping Pell like a hot potato.  Here are excerpts:

Pope Francis has removed two cardinals from his informal cabinet amid the Catholic Church's sex abuse and cover-up scandal, shedding embarrassing advisers ahead of a high-stakes Vatican summit on abuse early next year.

The Vatican said on Wednesday that Francis in October had written to Cardinal George Pell and Chilean Cardinal Javier Errazuriz thanking them for their five years of service on the so-called Group of Nine, or C-9.

Their continued presence on the C-9 had been a source of scandal for Francis, given the explosion of the abuse and cover-up crisis this year. Francis himself was implicated in the scandal after he strongly defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering up for the country's most notorious predator priest - a position he took apparently on the advice of Errazuriz.

Though he has been away from Rome since announcing his leave of absence in June 2017, Pell technically remains prefect of the Vatican's economy secretariat.

No doubt right wing extreme Catholics will continue to scapegoat gays as the root cause of the sex abuse by Catholic clergy rather than admit that the real roots of the problem are : (i) the Roman rite priestly celibacy requirement , (ii) the Church's warped and ignorant 12th century dogma on sex and human sexuality, and (iii) the Church's unhealthy structure of seminary high schools and seminaries that have long guaranteed abnormal psycho-sexual development of candidates for the priesthood.

If one is a decent, moral Catholic, the only option is to leave the Catholic Church until such time as(A) a thorough house cleaning is done of all implicated bishops and cardinals, and (B) the Church discards its warped (and anti-woman) dogma on sex and sexuality.  The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America offer wonderful alternatives that have a Catholic like liturgy and are free from the corrupt, feudal  Catholic Church hierarchy.

The Vatican's Continued Refusal to Address Sex Abuse

I was beginning my "coming out" saga in 2002 when the Catholic Church sex abuse exploded in Boston.  The expose on the moral bankruptcy of the Church leadership - which traced all the way to the Vatican - made it much easier to (i) walk away from Catholicism, and (ii) rejecting all of the Church's anti-gay brainwashing that I had experienced growing up Catholic.  Sixteen years later, I have come to terms with my sexual orientation and now count as friends many members of the LGBT community who are more moral and decent than the bitter old men at the Vatican.  Meanwhile, the Catholic Church remains embroiled in one new sex abuse scandal after another.  More importantly, no thorough house cleaning of bishops and cardinals who aided, abetted, or participated in sexual abuse has occurred.  Worse yet, there are no signs that this will occur any time soon. Continued cover-ups and obfuscation remain the norm as entrenched Vatican bureaucracies resist any meaningful change and the Church clings to its 12th century dogma on human sexuality and priestly celibacy that, in my view, play a causative role in the rampant clerical sex abuse. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the Church's continued failure to :clean house" and end the cycle of abuse.  Here are highlights:

With revelation after revelation, a new wave of sexual abuse scandals is rocking the Roman Catholic Church and presenting Pope Francis with the greatest crisis of his papacy.

In Chile, prosecutors have raided church offices, seized documents and accused leaders of a coverup. In Australia, top church figures are facing detention and trials. And in the United States, after the resignation of a cardinal, questions are swirling about a hierarchy that looked the other way and protected him for years.

The church has had more than three decades — since notable abuse cases first became public — to safeguard victims, and itself, against such system failures. And, in the past five years, many Catholics have looked to Francis as a figure who could modernize the church and help it regain its credibility.

But Francis’s track record in handling abuse is mixed, . . . . Analysts who have studied the church’s response to sexual abuse, and several people who have advised the pope, say the Vatican has been unable to take the dramatic steps that can help an organization get out from under scandals — and avoid their repetition.

 

Francis is credited with some meaningful moves. Last month, he accepted the highest-level resignation to date when Theodore McCarrick stepped down from the College of Cardinals. . . . But the pope has also had notable missteps. During a January trip to South America, he drew widespread criticism by saying he was convinced of the innocence of Bishop Juan Barros , accused of covering up the acts of a notorious abuser.

 

Francis sought to recover from that episode by sending two investigators to Chile, apologizing for his “serious errors” in handling the crisis . . . . He also called Chile’s 34 bishops to Rome, where, according to a letter that was leaked to the Chilean media, he accused them of failing to investigate possible crimes and destroying evidence. The bishops offered to step down en masse. So far, Francis has accepted five of those resignations.

 

Yet the church has struggled with a more comprehensive effort to close the chapter on sexual abuse.  Whereas transparency is typically advised, the church remains quiet about its investigations and disciplinary procedures. It does not release any data on the inquiries it has carried out. A proposed tribunal for judging bishops accused of negligence or coverup was quashed by the Vatican department that was supposed to help implement it. And, rather than being fired and publicly admonished, offending church leaders are typically allowed to resign without explanation.

Even when the Vatican does take action, resolution comes “at a very glacial pace,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, who was among the Chilean abuse victims who met for several days with Francis this past spring.

Cruz said he tried to tell the pope bluntly that a deeper shake-up was still needed. He specifically mentioned Francisco Javier ­Errázuriz, a member of the pope’s powerful nine-member advisory Council of Cardinals, who victims have long said ignored their abuse accusations and tried to discredit them. Errázuriz has denied wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, in the wider world, the cultural ground is shifting, and other forces are taking the lead on accountability.

 

At the same time, law enforcement agencies have been pursuing abuse cases in countries that once treated the church with deference. In Australia, some state and territory governments are even going after one of the church’s most sacred tenets and are on the verge of enforcing new laws requiring priests to report child abuse that they learn of during confessions. In the United States, the Catholic Church is bracing for the release of a 900-page grand jury report into sex crimes across six dioceses in Pennsylvania.

 

“I think we have reached a point where bishops alone investigating bishops is not the answer,” said Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. “We bishops want to rise to this challenge, which may well be our last opportunity considering all that has happened.”

 

A similar conversation, about how to strengthen the response to abuse, has played out for several years in the Vatican — particularly within the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which Francis created a year after he became pope. But little has come of the commission’s ideas.

In 2015, Francis approved its proposal of a tribunal, placed within the Vatican’s powerful doctrine office, that would assess cases of bishops accused of concealing or neglecting abuse. The tribunal, though, was never created. Four former members of the commission, as well as outside analysts, say the idea was thwarted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. . . .  congregation members and others in the Vatican hierarchy were also concerned about opening a “Pandora’s box.”

 

“This would mean hundreds of cases that would then bounce back to Rome with a huge media impact,” said Politi, author “Pope Francis Among the Wolves,” a papal biography. “It would signify the beginning of hunting season on culprits.”

 

The stalled effort to launch the tribunal prompted the resignation from the commission of Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor. Current and former members of the commission said that they are not given data and information on abuse-related cases being handled by the Vatican. Krysten Winter-Green, a former commission member who was a longtime counselor for abuse victims, said they were up against a “domain of secrecy.”

“The crime in the Catholic Church remains causing scandal, not covering up,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the site BishopAccountability.org, which tracks sexual abuse cases. “Bishops all over the world are not being forthcoming.”

Sadly, a worldwide conspiracy continues aimed at covering up crimes and protecting those who aided and abetted the predators who raped children and youths. It's little wonder that Church membership is falling in educated areas of the world.

Catholic Cardinal in Australia to Stand Trial for Sex Abuse

Cardinal George Pell has been committed to stand trial on multiple
 charges related to historical sexual assault.
Photo: Jason South

While the Vatican dilly dallies, sheds crocodile tears, and fails to hold senior Catholic Church clerics responsible for the world wide sex abuse scandal wracking the Church - Australia, Guam, Pennsylvania and New York State are current centers of  the scandal - civil authorities are stepping in to fill the gap.  In Australia, civil authorities are being especially aggressive after a scathing report by a royal commission which, among other things, found the western rite requirement of priestly celibacy to be a significant factor in creating the priestly abuse phenomenon.  Now, Australian authorities are set to proceed with a criminal trial of Cardinal George Pell, the highest Catholic cleric in Australia and arguably the number two office holder after the Pope.  The Sydney Morning Herald looks at this one unheard of development.  Here are excerpts:

George Pell will be the most senior Catholic leader to face a jury after being committed to stand trial on multiple historic sexual assault charges.

In a decision that will ring loud through the Vatican and around the religious world, Australia's most senior Catholic and the man who a year ago oversaw management of the Vatican's finances was on Tuesday committed to stand trial on half the charges he faced, involving multiple accusers.

[M]agistrate Belinda Wallington . . . committed the 76-year-old on charges against multiple complainants, involving alleged sexual offending at a swimming pool in the 1970s in Ballarat, where the accused man was then working as a priest; and at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in 1990s, when he was the then Archbishop of Melbourne.

Asked to enter a plea, Cardinal Pell sat seated in a packed Melbourne Magistrates Court but said in a loud, clear voice: "Not guilty."

Magistrate Belinda Wallington said there was no evidence the two Ballarat accusers had colluded in their evidence.

Flanked by up to 40 police officers, Cardinal Pell arrived at the court in a white sedan just after 9am. He wore a dark coloured suit and white shirt.

The police separated the Cardinal’s path from the public as protesters arrived with laminated signs reading “every child deserves a safe and happy childhood”.

Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart released a statement saying he declined to make any comment about the decision to commit Cardinal Pell to face trial in the County Court.

 In addition, ABC News Australia has these highlights:

A number of onlookers applauded as the magistrate left the court room after delivering her 70-minute ruling.

Defence barrister Robert Richter QC said the most "vile" of the charges had been dismissed.

Cardinal Pell will face a directions hearing in the County Court tomorrow morning, when it's expected a date will be set for a trial before a jury. He is on bail and has already handed in his passport, the court heard. He is unable to leave Australia as a condition of his bail.

Today's ruling follows a month-long committal hearing in March.

Among the allegations, he is accused of sexual offending at Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral in the late 1990s when he was Archbishop of Melbourne.  Cardinal Pell is also accused of committing sexual offences at a Ballarat pool during the 1970s, when he was a priest in the area.

Ms Wallington told an earlier hearing she believed an accused person should be committed to stand trial unless there was a "fundamental defect" in the evidence.  "I think issues of credibility and reliability are matters for a jury, except where you get to a point where [a complainant's] credibility is effectively annihilated," she said.

As a child when I was indoctrinated by Catholic priests and nuns, I never imagined that a day would come when a "prince of the church" would be laid so low.  Sadly, given the Church hierarchy's arrogance and utter indifference to the lives of children and youths, not to mention the Vatican's refusal to punish the 1/3 or more of American bishops who protected predators, the Church's humiliation is deserved and long. long overdue.   

The Myth That More Guns Could Have Stopped the Parkland Massacre

NRA apologist Marco Rubio confronted by student survivor.

To listen to the NRA and its cheaply bought political whores in the Republican Party (one student survivor said AR-15 should be called Marco Rubio's since both could be cheaply bought) , more individuals armed with guns would have prevented the high school massacre in Florida.  It turns out that there were four (4) Broward County sheriff department deputies on the scene at the high school, none of whom entered the school as the shooter conducted his murderous rampage. One can ponder why trained deputies, one of who was highly decorated, refused to enter the school, but one possible reason was their fear of possible certain death going up against some one armed with an assault weapon while armed only with pistols.  Thus, not only did the assault weapon allow more students to be killed and wounded, but it may have intimidated trained and armed deputies from acting notwithstanding department policies that required them to enter the building.  The easiest way to have prevented the massacre? Take assault weapons out of the equation by banning them and confiscating those in circulation was was done in Australia two decades ago (which ended that nation's mass shooting problem). CNN looks at the deputies' failure to act:

When Coral Springs police officers arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 in the midst of the school shooting crisis, many officers were surprised to find not only that Broward County Sheriff's Deputy Scot Peterson, the armed school resource officer, had not entered the building, but that three other Broward County Sheriff's deputies were also outside the school and had not entered, Coral Springs sources tell CNN. The deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles, the sources said, and not one of them had gone into the school.

With direction from the Broward deputies who were outside, Coral Springs police soon entered the building where the shooter was. New Broward County Sheriff's deputies arrived on the scene, and two of those deputies and an officer from Sunrise, Florida, joined the Coral Springs police as they went into the building. Some Coral Springs police were stunned and upset that the four original Broward County Sheriff's deputies who were first on the scene did not appear to join them as they entered the school, Coral Springs sources tell CNN. It's unclear whether the shooter was still in the building when they arrived. The resentment among Coral Springs officials toward Broward County officials about what they perceived to be a dereliction of duty may have reached a boiling point at a vigil the night of February 15, where, in front of dozens of others, Coral Springs City Manager Mike Goodrum confronted Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. A source familiar with the conversation tells CNN that Goodrum was upset that the Broward deputies had remained outside the school while kids inside could have been bleeding out, among other reasons. The Broward County Sheriff's Office confirmed to CNN that it is investigating the claims that, in addition to Peterson, three other deputies did not try to enter the high school after the shooting began. "What I saw was a deputy arrive ... take up a position and he never went in," Israel said at a news conference. Israel said Peterson should have "went in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer." Peterson was suspended without pay, after which he resigned.

County Superintendent Robert Runcie said, "I'm in shock and I'm outraged to no end that he could have made a difference in all this. It's really disturbing that we had a law enforcement individual there specifically for this reason, and he did not engage. He did not do his job. It's one of the most unbelievable things I've ever heard."

Israel also announced an investigation into how two other deputies had handled warnings about the gunman prior to the shooting.

Australian Abuse Report: Catholic Church Must End Celibacy Rule

Ever since the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal first exploded in Boston over 15 years ago, the Church hierarchy and Church apologists like blow hard William Donahue of the Catholic League (a largely two person operation) and the cite Church Militant have worked hard to blame gays for the wide spread abuse of children and youths by Catholic priests.   Great efforts have been made to ignore the roles of (i) Church's bizarre 12th century view of sexuality and (ii) the unnatural rule of mandatory celibacy for Western rite priests (no such requirement applies to Eastern rite priests) have played in creating the atmosphere for widespread abuse.  Now, after a years long study, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has released a report that lays blame squarely on the celibacy rule, a rule first implemented by the Church hierarchy to preserve Church funds and assets from the costs of maintaining priest' families (money has always been the Church leadership's real god).    A piece in DeutscheWelle looks at the report's findings which will not be happily received by the bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican.  Here are some article highlights:

Among the 189 recommendations put forward by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse are two for the Catholic Church to lift its demand for mandatory celibacy and enforce mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, even if it is heard during confession.

A five-year study from Melbourne's RMIT University on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church found that mandatory celibacy is the major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse.

DW spoke to Professor Des Cahill, who co-authored the report with Dr Peter Wilkinson.
DW: How did you come to the conclusion that mandatory celibacy is a risk factor for child sexual abuse?

Professor Des Cahill: In the [psychological and psychiatric] studies of priest offenders, the key facts were that the offending priest perpetrators were either psychologically immature or psychologically mal-developed and suffering from loneliness, lack of intimacy and sexual deprivation, and they became terrorized with their own sexual desires and sexual thinking. In their sexual deprivation their thinking mutated towards children, and so they began grooming young children and eventually abusing them sexually and emotionally. . . . . I and the Commission in the report make very clear that homosexuality is not the cause of clerical sex abuse.

Does that mean sexual deprivation and lack of physical relationships is the major reason that someone might become a child sex offender?

It's the clericalist incubating culture, and celibacy is part of that. One of the elements is the lack of contact with women. Take the example of the Christian Brothers who are the major teaching order for boys in Australia. Young men who were educated in all-male Catholic schools, went to all-male minor seminaries and then went on to all-male novitiates, perhaps went to university and became teachers, but didn't have much contact with the feminine. Then they lived in all-male communities, teaching in all-male schools.

Eugen Drewermann would argue that is a psycho-spiritual recipe for disaster and that's what happened among the Christian Brothers in Australia. 22 percent offended sexually against the boys they were in charge of, especially in orphanages and farming schools in country areas.

[T]he profile – and the Royal Commission is strong on this – of Catholic clerical offenders is different from the profile of child sex offenders generally. They offend much later in life, they are better educated, and in other aspects of their personality profile they are reasonably normal although, as the Royal Commission points out and as we point out in our report, there is a high degree of narcissism amongst Catholic priests and that also is a factor in the offending. They are totally focused on self and their own sexual identity, their own sexual thoughts etcetera.

Would lifting the ban on mandatory celibacy result in a decrease in child sex abuse in the Catholic Church?

When we looked at Eastern Rite Catholic Churches we found there was virtually no clerical sex abuse because in those eastern churches the priests have a choice between marrying or not marrying. In the Latin Rite Catholic Church, [priests] took on celibacy as part of the priesthood package. This is why the Royal Commission has recommended – and it was based partly on our report – the Australian Catholic Bishops make a request to the Vatican that married persons should be admitted to the Catholic priesthood.

What effect does the seal of confession have on cases of child sexual abuse being reported?

Until now in Australia priests have not been required to report any cases of child sex abuse. The Royal Commission has recommended this should be applied to Catholic priests even when they are hearing confessions. Already there is opposition to that from the two leading archbishops in Australia.

There is a tension between the seal of confession and obligation towards the welfare of vulnerable children. Unfortunately Pope Pius the 10th in 1910 lowered the age of confession from 13-14 to seven, which meant offending priests had access to younger children and were able to begin the process of grooming those children, and that, I think, is one reason why the problem became worse in the 20th century.

It should be noted that celibacy is not the only causation factor.  The Southern Baptist Convention which clings to similar 12th century views of sexuality likewise has a huge sexual abuse problem.  Ridiculous obsessions with all things sexual, rejection of modern knowledge, and the embrace of ignorance all seem to also play a role in setting the stage for sexual abuse.