Religious Left

The Sydney Morning Herald Cardinal George Pell's determination to deny compensation to an abuse victim was uncompromising, writes Erik Jensen. The cardinal was not budging. Anthony Jones, a religion teacher at a Catholic high school in Sydney's south when he claimed he was the victim of attempted rape by a Catholic priest 26 years ago, would be offered no church compensation. Not a cent. First, some background. Jones was 29 in January 1982 when he was fondled by a local priest, Terence Goodall, who then attempted to have sex with him. Jones claims he reported the incident to the church within a month and, 20 years later, when nothing had been done, he again wrote a formal complaint to the church. That sparked an internal church investigation of Goodall. A second complaint against Goodall, received from a victim who cannot be named because he was a minor at the time of the offence, was included in the investigation. Contrary to his investigator's advice, Pell wrote to Jones ...

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AFP) — Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born. But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed. For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event. A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee. "As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems,"...

The public place was a men's room at a Waynesville park, where police were conducting a sting operation based on complaints that homosexual men were meeting there for sex. But Penland's case differs from the two notorious previous cases this summer. In both of those cases, the alleged sex acts were slated for the public place, and in one case, in exchange for money. In contrast, the priest proposed having sex "by asking him if he (Penland) could go home with the officer," the arrest report stated. "He was in the process of following the undercover officer 'home' when he was stopped." So what happened in public? A private conversation between two men agreeing to have consensual sex in private. That's because North Carolina still has barbaric anti-sodomy laws on the books, despite a 4-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidates them. So don't confuse the priest with those other guys. Penland had the decency to seek a private spot. His ...