“In New Testament accounts, Peter himself is fallible, indeed lapses into denial of Jesus. Jesus even calls him Satan. But as centuries passed, the institution increasingly referred to the legacy of Peter as authoritative. By the Middle Ages, the Church developed its own internal legal system, known as canon law, and acted in its courts to enforce correct belief as well as correct conduct. Medieval canon lawyers and theologians spoke of the Church's guidance. Increasingly after the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, the guidance was described as infallible.

A key tenet of Christian faith is that God guides the Church through the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit. Catholics have held that such guidance includes the formulation and maintenance of its doctrines, and it may follow from such a view that the truth of such doctrines is divinely supported — that is, that in doctrine the Church cannot err. But surprisingly enough, no precise definition of the infallibility claimed for the Church was ever formally enacted . . .

Nobody had proposed papal infallibility before the thirteenth century when a Franciscan, Peter John Olivi (c. 1248-98), did so, and his views were condemned by Pope John XXII in 1324 as the work of the devil.”
                                                                           

“Among the most extraordinary acts of legislation on this subject was the bull of Clement II., who desired to endow the Church with the surplus gains of the brothel. Every person guilty of prostitution was forced, when disposing of her property, either at death or during life, to assign half to a convent. A tribunal was also established having jurisdiction over brothels, upon which a tax was laid, continuing in existence until the middle of the 16th century.

In Avignon, which, in consequence of the schism of the popes, may be considered a second Rome, a statute in the Church, in 1441, interdicted to the priests and clergy the use of certain baths, notorious as brothels. The license (to practice) prostitution was soon taken away in Avignon. The residence of the popes in that city had attracted a concourse of strangers from all parts of the globe, and brothels sprung up at the doors of the churches, and close to the papal residence and bishops' palaces. They brought so much scandal on the community that an edict was passed driving prostitution out of the city.”       
                                                                           

“Hundreds of Cree and Ojibwa children violated

BY PETER MOON
The Globe and Mail
Fort Albany First Nation, Ont.

After decades of sexual and physical violence against hundreds of aboriginal children, criminal charges are about to be laid against some of the priests, brothers, nuns and lay workers who ran a residential school in this isolated Cree community on James Bay.

From 1904-1973, the federal government forced thousands of bewildered and frightened Cree and Ojibwa children into St. Anne's Residential School, operated by a Roman Catholic order. Their fear was apparently justified.

Complaints lodged by many former residents of the school include heterosexual and homosexual rape, illegal abortions, sexual fondling, forced masturbation and many kinds of physical violence, including whipping bare buttocks with a wire strap and using a home-made electric chair into which children were strapped and given jolts as punishment.

 The complainants told the police that as children they were forced to eat their own vomit and kneel in painful positions for hours on concrete floors, were locked up overnight in unlit basements and were subjected to humiliations such as having to stand with their underpants over their heads if the pants had fecal stains on them.

 If parents objected to the treatment of their children and tried to keep them out of school, they were told by the missionaries that their family and welfare cheques would not be cashed and that local stores, most of which were run at the time by the Hudson's Bay Co., would not grant them credit . . .|
Many of the victims are still devastated mentally by their experiences at the hands of the people who ran St. Anne's, she said. "This was our Holocaust," she said. "They did not kill us physically, but they killed us emotionally and spiritually" . . .

Many elders and older people within the community, most of them devout Roman Catholics, do not want charges laid. They argue that the people who ran the school were "servants of God" . . .

At their peak, in the 1960's, there were about 170 aboriginal schools. The last federal residential school did not close until 1988, after a wave of scandals about abuses in them broke out in the 1960s and 1970s. It is now recognized that the schools were a dismal failure and led to generations of aboriginal children receiving inferior education while losing their cultural identification and the ability to parent and lead normal lives. The schools are blamed for suicides and alcoholism and form a significant part of the sexual and physical abuse that is now endemic in many aboriginal communities . . .”       
                                                                           

“Though the Apostolic Camera was heavily involved in the papal financial administration, about half its time was devoted to judicial proceedings, because there were interminable lawsuits and claims. The Camerarius and his clerks had judicial power over the entire papal State and over every member of the clergy everywhere. Their law-enforcement methods were mainly ecclesiastical — censures (you were declared to be not in good standing), interdictions (you were forbidden to receive the Sacraments), and excommunication (you were expelled from the Church, regarded as already damned to Hell fire, and if you died in this condition your body could not be buried with any religious ceremony or in consecrated ground. It would probably be burned, cast into the sea, or thrown into a shallow grave in the local Potters' Field.) The Camera also disposed of corporal punishments: Flogging, imprisonment with or without hard labor, exile, torture, and death by hanging (which usually implied drawing and quartering), burning, or the sword.”       
                                                                           

“During the witch-hunts and persecutions of the Middle Ages, referred to in the Craft as the Burning Times, they were rooted out, accused of non-Christian worship and practices, and executed in the hundreds of thousands (some put the figure into the millions.) Most of them were women, as the church's fear of a rampant Goddess worship turned to focus on women themselves, often identifying female sexuality with evil.”       
                                                                           

“The Number of the Beast is 666, William Blake (1805-1810)

Blake's knowledge and belief in the sacred text, Revelation, is once again evident in this particular work. Here the worship of the lamb and the sign of fire from heaven is shown in Blake's typical elusive, yet poignant style. While there is no direct threat of violence and damnation to the human population, the sheer power and majesty of the Beast is evident and may serve as a manner of indirectly warning humankind of his power and desire to deceive.”       
                                                                           

“BEAST (Apocalypse.)1. The 'beast that ascends from the bottomless pit' (Rev. 11:7) is the apocalyptic symbol of the last anti-Christian power (Rev. 13:1ff., 17:3ff., 19:19f.), . . . The Beast is usually the persecuting empire . . . He claims divine honours, wages war on the saints and is destroyed by Christ at his parousia (cf. 2 Thes. 2:8.)”       
                                                                           

“In a stunning revelation Monday night, Monsignor John Brenkle said the Diocese of Santa Rosa's total financial losses could reach $30 million, nearly twice original estimates…..Specifically, Brenkle described the 'recent discovery' of a European-based foundation that was using the diocese name and its nonprofit tax status apparently as cover for a high-yield investment scheme………Ziemann and former Vicar General Thomas Keys stepped down….'I know it's all hard to believe. You could take this script to Hollywood,' Brenkle said…..His comments and those of others underscored a growing feeling among North Coast Catholics who remain distrustful of church leaders after learning that millions of dollars raised by local parishes and schools for special projects have vanished….When [Bishop] Ziemann quit last July, he admitted to a two-year sexual relationship with the Rev. Jorge Hume Salas, a former Ukiah priest who in 1996 confessed to stealing money from St. Mary's [in Ukiah]. In a civil lawsuit filed a week before Ziemann resigned, Hume claimed the bishop coerced him into having sex in return for silence about the Ukiah incident. Ziemann has contended the sex was consensual.”
                                                                           

“The British Library has under its care the original 16th century papal Tax Books which list certain crimes and the cost of indulgences for absolution of these crimes. Below is a partial list of crimes which may be pardoned for pay:

1.  sex in church with a female
2.  priests who keep concubines
3.  incest committed by a man with his       mother, sister or female relative
4.  raping a virgin
5.  perjury and false testimony
6.  forgerers of false testimony
7.  priests who divulge others' confessions
8.  laymen who kill clergy, or other laymen
9.   priests who commit homicide
10. men who kill their fathers, mothers,       brothers, sisters or relatives
11. if murderer be a priest
12. men who beat their pregnant wives,       and those who cause miscarriage
13. women who have abortions
14. abortions instigated by priests
15. simony
16. priests who violate women at confession
17. priests who fornicate/rape nuns in the       convent
18. rape of girl or married woman
19. him who has child by his nurse
20. any unnatural lewdness”       
                                                                           

“The first African slaves arrived in America in 1619 and by 1681 their population stood at 2,000. By the eve of the Civil War (1861-65), Christianity was firmly embedded in the slave community, which then numbered about four million. Not all slaves . . . were Christians, but nearly all were aware of the way in which their peers expressed the Gospel in hopeful terms of freedom and a return to the land of their fathers.

This attitude was not welcome among the slave owners, who viewed religion as a way of strengthening the virtues forced on the slaves by the whip and the fist: obedience, industry, honesty, and respect. By and large, most white clerics went along with this interpretation.

A former slave, Charlie van Dyke, expressed the situation like this: "Church was what they called it but all the preacher talked about was us slaves to obey our masters and not to lie and steal. Nothing about Jesus was ever said and the overseer stood there to see the preacher talked as he wanted him to talk.”       
                                                                           

“Those who solicit women or boys to dishonorable actions in the Sacramental Confession are subject to this [Inquisition] tribunal. Pius IV. published a bull against them; and when this bull was first brought to Spain, all persons were commanded, by a public edict…that whosoever knew or had heard of any monk or clergyman who had abused the Sacrament of Confession [in perpetrating] these crimes, or had acted in this vile manner with wife or daughter, they should discover them within thirty days to the Holy Tribunal…..When the decree was published, so large a number of women went to the Palace of the Inquisition in the city of Seville alone to make their discoveries of those most wicked confessors, that twenty secretaries, with as many inquisitors, were not sufficient to take the depositions of the witnesses. . . .

"It is required that this solicitation be made in the act of Sacramental Confession, as [for example] if immediately after Confession, the Confessor says to the woman, 'Since you have carnally lain with so-and-so, do me the favor and lie with me.' Or if [for example] a Confessor solicits a boy immediately after Confession, carrying him into his house or chamber; or if [for example] he enjoins Penance to a woman, viz. to be whipped naked by the Confessor himself, and he himself performs the Penance and whips her with his own hand, or with a scourge; or if [for example] he persuades a woman to show her privy parts to him, which she confessed to be affected with a certain disease; such Confessors are vehemently suspected, and must abjure as such, and be enjoined fastings and prayers, and may be condemned to the Galleys, or perpetual imprisonment. . . .

"The Venetians ordered one of them burnt alive, by command of the Pope. He had been Father Confessor to some Nuns in the dominion of Venice, and had got twelve of them with child; amongst whom the Abbess and two others had children in one year. As he was confessing them, he agreed with them about the place, manner and time of laying with them.”       
                                                                           

“More than 100 men and women who say they were sexually assaulted by Mr. Porter have come forward. . . this makes the case by far the largest of its kind ever involving a priest.”       
                                                                           

“John Daignault, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who helped test each of the 68 people to determine whether they had be abused [by Father Porter] said, 'This is the largest single group of victims of one perpetrator, in a position of authority, in psychology's history.”       
                                                                           

“"Roman Catholic priests in the United States are dying from AIDS-related illnesses at a rate four times higher than the general population and the cause is often concealed on their death certificates, The Kansas City Star reported Sunday. In the first of a three-part series, the newspaper said death certificates and interviews with experts indicated several hundred priests have died of AIDS-related illnesses since the mid-1980s and hundreds more are living with HIV, the virus that causes the disease.”