Abducted Catholic priest, catechist released by Burmese militia

Beijing, China, Jan 23, 2018 / 03:48 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican’s efforts to resolve the split between underground Chinese bishops and the government-recognized Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association face another challenge, as an aging bishop faithful to Rome has reportedly declined a Vatican request to retire, to be replaced by a bishop favored by the Chinese government.

The Church in China is split between an underground Catholic Church and the officially recognized Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. Every bishop recognized by Beijing must be a member of the association.
 
The Holy See’s negotiations with the Chinese government could eventually lead to Vatican recognition of seven illicitly ordained bishops aligned with Beijing. The Holy See could be pursuing China’s official recognition of 20 bishop candidates appointed by the Holy See, some of whom have already been secretly ordained, in addition to state recognition of up to 40 bishops in the underground Catholic community.
 
Many underground bishops, priests and lay faithful have faced persecution and harassment.
 
In December 2016, the Holy See asked 88-year-old Bishop Peter Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou in southern Guangdong province to retire so that an illicitly ordained excommunicated bishop could take his place and be recognized by the Vatican, Asia News reports.
 
However, the Vatican-recognized bishop reportedly refused the delegation’s request that he retire.
 
The Holy See had previously asked Bishop Zhuang to resign in an Oct. 26, 2017 letter. A church source in Guangdong, who asked not to be named, told Asia News that at the time of the letter Bishop Zhuang “refused to obey and rather ‘carry His Cross’ for being disobedient.”
 
The bishop was secretly ordained in 2006 with Vatican approval.The Chinese government does not recognize the ordination, and considers the bishop to be a priest. The government supports Bishop Huang Bingzhang, a member of China’s parliament, called the National People’s Congress, for Zhuang’s position. This bishop was excommunicated in 2011 when he accepted episcopal ordination without the Vatican’s permission.
 
In December the elderly Bishop Zhuang was reportedly escorted to Beijing, despite poor health and cold weather, where he met separately with leaders of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, officials from China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs, and the Vatican delegation.
 
If Bishop Zhuang resigned, the Holy See delegation reportedly said, he could nominate three priests, one of whom Bishop Huang would choose as his vicar general.
 
“Bishop Zhuang could not help his tears on hearing the demand,” Asia News’ source said, explaining “it was meaningless to appoint a vicar general, who is still a priest that Bishop Huang could remove him anytime.”
 
The controversy is part of a delicate diplomatic effort to advance Vatican-Chinese relations while also considering the circumstances of underground Catholics. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli is responsible for the negotiations and was identified by Asia News as head of the Vatican delegation.
 
Even bishops in the patriotic association can be faithful to the Holy See, and they sometimes bristle against the association. Shanghai’s Auxiliary Bishop Taddeus Ma Daqin was jointly approved for ordination by the Holy See and the Chinese government, but announced his resignation from the patriotic association at his July 2012 ordination Mass. He was immediately placed under house arrest. Though he later appeared to back away from his stance against the association, he still faced isolation.
 
Initially eight bishops illicitly ordained as part of the patriotic association were awaiting recognition from the Holy See, but one of them passed away last year.
 
For its part, the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping is pursuing an effort to “Sinicize” religion. In his role as general secretary of the Communist Party, last October, Jinping called for “new approaches” to religious and ethnic affairs.
 
“The gist is to demand all religions to uphold an independent principle and follow the leadership of the Community Party,” Asia News said.
 
Other arrangements to reunify the country’s licit and illicit bishops are underway in the Diocese of Mindong in China’s eastern Fujian province. Its ordinary, Bishop Joseph Guo Xijin, is an underground Catholic who was detained for a month before Holy Week in 2017.
 
Citing local sources, Asia News said the Vatican delegation has asked the bishop to voluntarily accept a position as coadjutor bishop under Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu, one of the seven illicitly ordained bishops favored by the government. This was also among the conditions Chinese officials had proposed to Bishop Guo during his detention.

According to canon law, coadjutor bishops have the right to succeed the bishop in their diocese, meaning that, in principle, Zhan could eventually resume the leadership of a diocese.
 
Bishop Zhan did not confirm the meeting to Asia News or discuss the recognition process in detail, but said there are regular meetings between Vatican and Chinese officials about the negotiations.
 
Two leading cardinals in the region have different views of Vatican diplomacy in China.
 
In a February 2017 article for the Hong Kong’s Sunday Examiner newspaper, Cardinal John Tong Hon of Hong Kong said the illicitly ordained bishops are willing to show their obedience to the Pope. He voiced optimism that the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association could transform into a more voluntary body.
 
In May 2017, the Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen voiced skepticism of the Vatican’s current diplomatic approach towards China. In his view, the Pope’s advisors are “giving bad advice.” He doubted the goodwill of the government.
 
“They are still controlling the Church and they want to control it even more,” he said.
 
However, Cardinal Zen has also voiced optimism about the clergy of the Chinese-recognized Catholic association.
 
“The majority of the priests and bishops in the official church, they may, in their heart, still (be) very much united with the universal church, but they are under tight control,” he told CNA in February 2017. 

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Melbourne, Australia, Feb 27, 2019 / 03:46 am (CNA).- After the revocation of his bail Wednesday, Cardinal George Pell was taken into police custody for the first time while awaiting sentencing on his conviction of five charges of sexual abuse of minors.

The cardinal will be sentenced March 13, and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail for each charge. Pell is appealing the Australian civil court’s Dec. 11 conviction.

A gag order preventing media from reporting on the trial and conviction was lifted Feb. 26. The the court-imposed gag order was lifted following the decision by local prosecutors to drop further charges related to Pell’s time as a priest in the 1970s.

Pell was alleged to have committed sexual abuse in 1996, when he was Archbishop of Melbourne, and when he was a priest in Ballarat during the 1970s.

His first trial, in which he was convicted, focused on the Melbourne allegations. The second trial, which has now been scuttled, was to focus on the Ballarat charges.

During preliminary hearings in March 2017, Pell’s legal team successfully petitioned for the allegations to be heard in two separate trials. Other charges initially brought against Pell were dropped during pre-trial committal hearings.

Pell was found guilty Dec. 11 on five charges of sexual abuse of minors, stemming from charges that he sexually assaulted two former members of the Melbourne cathedral choir.

The verdict came after a five-week retrial, after a jury in an earlier trial failed to reach a unanimous verdict. In October 2018, multiple sources close to the case told CNA that the first trial had ended with the jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of Pell.

The second jury took three days to find Pell guilty of sexually abusing two choristers in the Melbourne cathedral sacristy on an unspecified date in the second half of 1996.

Alessandro Gisotti, interim Holy See press office director, confirmed Feb. 26 via Twitter that Cardinal George Pell is no longer prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy.

Pell’s term as prefect was to have expired Feb. 24. His resignation has not been noted in the Vatican’s bollettino, so it is believed his term lapsed and was not renewed, and he was not removed from office.

Gisotti’s tweet suggests that Pell’s loss of office by the expiration of his term has been communicated to him in writing, as required by canon law.

Pell had been on leave from his position as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy since 2017. Pell asked Pope Francis to allow him to step back from his duties to travel home to Australia to defend himself against the charges, which he has consistently denied.

A Vatican statement Feb. 26 said that, “as already expressed on other occasions, we have the utmost respect for the Australian judicial authorities.”

“Out of this respect, we await the outcome of the appeals process, recalling that Cardinal Pell maintains his innocence and has the right to defend himself until the last stage of appeal.”

The statement confirms that Pell has been barred from public ministry and from contact with minors during the legal process and will remain so during his appeal.

Prior to his appointment to the Secretariat for the Economy in 2014, Pell served as the Archbishop of Sydney.

In October, Pope Francis removed Pell, along with Cardinal Javier Errazuriz and Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo, from the C9 Council of Cardinals charged with helping the pope draft a new constitution for the Holy See’s governing structure.

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Washington D.C., Dec 13, 2019 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Senior police officials in the Australian state of Victoria discussed by email the way that their 2014 investigation into Cardinal George Pell could deflect public scrutiny from an emerging corruption scandal in the force.

In a 2014 email exchange, then-Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton and Charlie Morton, assistant director of media and corporate communications for the Victoria police department, discussed how to respond to a high-profile scandal which would hamper the credibility of Victoria police operations.

In an email dated April 1, 2014, Morton advised Ashton not to make a media appearance in response to the “Lawyer X” scandal, because forthcoming announcements about Cardinal Pell could distract media and public attention.

“The Pell stuff is coming tomorrow and will knock this way off the front page,” Morton wrote to Ashton.

“Unless there are some serious appeals from convicted [criminals] which might get up as a result of this, then I can’t see this continuing with the same level of profile.”

The emails emerged this week as Ashton, now Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, gave evidence at a Royal Commission inquiry into the use of police sources and the Lawyer X scandal, in which criminal defense lawyer Nicola Gobbo was recruited to work as an informant against members of the Calabrian mafia, while she was representing several of them as an attorney.

Gobbo has claimed that her work as an informant for Victoria police from 1995-2009, despite issues of professional ethics and client confidentiality, led to 386 convictions, many of which are now believed to be tainted, subject to appeal, and could be overturned.
 
The email exchange between Ashton and Morton came after a news radio host in Melbourne referred on air to the about-to-break story as one of the “biggest law and order scandals in [Victoria state] history” and predicting it could result in “killers walking free.”
 
A subsequent High Court injunction prevented publication of Gobbo’s name, or any media reporting of the case from 2014, part of a years’-long, $4.5 million legal effort by Victoria police to keep details of the case from becoming public.
 
The reference to news about Pell being used to deflect negative coverage came just two months after Pope Francis had appointed Pell to reform Vatican financial affairs, placing him in charge of the newly-created Prefecture for the Economy in February, 2014.
 
It is not clear what information the two police officials were anticipating would be released the next day, though the previous week Pell had given evidence before the Royal Commission investigation into child sexual abuse in Church institutions.
 
In 2013, Victoria Police opened Operation Tethering, an open-ended investigation into possible crimes by Cardinal Pell, although no victims had come forward against him and there had been no criminal complaints made against him at the time. Although they had found no victims or criminal accusations, in 2015 the program was expanded and put on a more formal footing.
 
In 2017, Pell was charged with sexually abusing two minors. He was convicted in 2018 on the evidence of a single victim-accuser, the second supposed victim died of a heroin overdose on Aril 8, 2014 – one week after the Victoria police email exchange. That second victim had denied on several occasions that he was sexually abused by Pell.

The cardinal’s conviction was upheld on appeal by the Victoria Supreme Court in August. The Australian High Court will hear Pell’s appeal of that decision in 2020.
 
Since the court gag order was lifted in 2019, the Lawyer X scandal has tainted successive chiefs of the Victoria police force, all of whom were aware of Gobbo’s role a mob informer and practicing criminal lawyer.
 
Much of Gobbo’s work as a lawyer was with Australian members of the Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia organization, which has established a deep presence both in Victoria and across the country, with allegations of multi-million dollar bribes to judges and close connections to local Victorian politicians in both political parties.
 
The link between the Italian and Australian branches of the organization is known to be close and ongoing.

The Lawyer X scandal has tainted several former heads of the Victoria police, all of whom were aware of Gobbo’s role and allowed it to continue. Ashton was first told of her work in 2007 when he was serving as assistant director of the Office of Police Integrity, an anti-corruption body.

Ashton told the Royal Commission on Tuesday that he saw no reason to suspect “anything untoward was going on” when he learned the lawyer was acting as a police informant against her own clients.

Gobbo, who is the niece of a former Victoria Supreme Court judge, has since said she fears retribution by police because of the scandal, refusing to go into witness protection and claiming police have threatened to take her children into protective custody to compel her cooperation.

Earlier this week, she told Australian media that “It’s not the first time that they [Victoria Police] threatened me in relation to toeing the line and doing things their way or they would take my children.”

The Victoria police force has been the subject of numerous scandals over the years. In addition to the allegations concerning Gobbo, a 2017 report found that nearly half (46%) of Victoria Police employees believe they would suffer personal repercussions if they reported corruption, with almost one in five saying it would cost them their job.
 

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