Not only was he charged as guilty but Francis was sentenced to 25 yrs in prison according to the report of outcome of trial held in his absence - this is another story on how Frances tried to get his guilty paedophile friends off the hook.
Don't believe the Pope Francis sexual abuse PR stunt. Believe in payback | Sadhbh Walshe
The past is not just the past, as the church well knows, and if you want evidence that that Francis's zero-tolerance policy is merely a PR stunt, look back to the pope's time in
Argentina.
Then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was closely involved in the case of Father Julio Cesar Grassi, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of molesting a boy in his care. Details are murky, but Anne Barrett-Doyle, who runs the website Bishop-Accountability.org,
which has tracked the case closely, told me this week that Grassi remained free on conditional release until September 2013, when his final appeal was rejected, at least in part because of a private report commissioned by Bergoglio that sought to prove Grassi's innocence and, according to Barrett-Doyle, to discredit the victims.
The convicted pedophile certainly considered the current pope to be a friend and supporter – Grassi told reporters before his conviction that his Holiness
"never let go of my hand".
Was it a "sin of omission" that, of the victims granted an audience with the pope this week, none were from Argentina, where that dark cloud still hangs over Francis's apparent failure to protect children from predator priests during his tenure as archbishop? Does his Holiness tolerate ignoring victims from the developing world, where advocacy groups claim that clerical abuse is still being actively covered up and where the power differential between a predator priest and his victim is that much greater?
Not that victims here in America have any power either. On Monday morning, as the pope was busy talking "reparation", the Archdiocese of St Louis settled a law suit with a young woman who claimed she was abused for five years – allegedly beginning when she was
five years old – by former priest Joseph D Ross.
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but the archdiocese's statement called the alleged victim everything but deluded
"with a medical condition that causes her to falsify claims, exaggerate symptoms and make inconsistent statements". Did I mention that, a decade before that abuse was said to have begun, Father Ross pled guilty to charges that he molested an 11-year-old boy? And that he went away for "treatment", only to return to the church two years later? Oh, and that the St Louis Archdiocese
has spent more than $10m dollars since 2004 in payments related to priestly "misconduct"?
"At best," Snap's Clohessy told me, "this serves as a warning to other victims that if they make a legal challenge, they will be made to pay a price for it."
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So you've got a Pope here charged with being a Paedophile and child trafficking himself who has a long history of trying to discredit child victims and their testimonies in order to get his sick paedophile friends off the hook and you've got people on this thread who will question the authenticity of this tribunal court rather than ask themselves why the world courts / legal system of every country has turned a blind eye to this abuse from this Pope. Incredible, isn't it? 48 victims who could get justice no place else turn to this court and testify that Jesuit Pope Francis and the Jesuit General - the Black Pope - Adolpho Pachon are child molesters and people still want to remain in denial. What do you want to bet that these same people will admit that Bill Cosby is most likely a rapist after 25 plus women have come forward accusing him? Yet here we've got 48 victims - eye witnesses who point to these men and say they are guilty and because their Catholic? They want to give them a pass. May God judge people that deny children justice like that. May the LORD judge them severely!