itccs.org

Joseph Ratzinger, Bishop of Rome                                             The Vatican                          

Dear Bishop Ratzinger,

Your church has illegally arrested and imprisoned an Italian citizen named Paolo Gabriele for the “wrong” of possessing evidence of criminal acts by you and other Vatican officials.

On behalf of human liberty and the suffering victims of church violence, our Tribunal is compelled to respond to your act of warfare against the truth by declaring that henceforth, every known Roman Catholic priest or official who has harmed a child or protected those who have will be publicly named by our network, and will be publicly arrested and expelled from their churches.

We have instructed all of our member organizations to commence such citizens’ arrests of your guilty clergy.

This decision is made under the common law right of citizenship arrest of those who endanger children when established authorities refuse to protect the community.

Such direct action to protect our children will be accompanied by ongoing occupations and seizures of Roman Catholic Church property commencing globally on September 15, 2012.

These measures are being taken because of the refusal by you and your church hierarchy to do justice to your victims and abide by the law and morality; and specifically, because of your refusal to agree to these ten measures, issued to you on May 4, 2012 by our Tribunal:

1. Issue full reparations to survivors.
2. Surrender the remains of those who died for a proper burial.
3. Return all land and wealth taken from church victims.
4. Surrender all evidence and perpetrators of crimes against children.
5. Annul Crimen Sollicitationis and all Vatican policies that protect child rapists.
6. Expel and defrock all child raping priests and those who protect them, including the pope.
7. Agree to the licensing of all clergy as public servants.
8. Withdraw from all tax exemptions, concordats and privileges.
9. Annul the status of the Vatican as a state and abolish Rome’s authority over its congregations.
10. Redistribute the wealth of the Vatican Bank to church victims and the community, as Christ commands.

To reiterate, we are commencing to publish worldwide a list of known child raping priests and their protectors, and we will thereafter perform citizens’ arrests of these criminals and expel them from their office and churches.

You, Joseph Ratzinger, and your fellow criminal conspirators among the College of Cardinals will be among those persons so named and targeted for arrest, expulsion and banishment.

Unanimously resolved and Signed,

The Executive Council,

The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State

Brussels

cc: world media and governments

Eyewitnesses to church crimes murdered by agents of the Vatican and the "Crown of England"  (left to right): Johnny "Bingo" Dawson, Ricky Lavallee, William Combes

Johnny Bingo Dawson, led occupation of Anglican churches; Died from police beating, December 6, 2009

Ricky Lavallee, eyewitness to Bingo’s beating, Died suddenly from undisclosed cause, January 3, 2012

William Combes, eyewitness to abduction of children by Elizabeth Windsor aka “queen of England”, Killed in Vancouver General Hospital, February 26, 2011

by Kevin D. Annett

It’s a church! No, it’s a state! Stop! You’re both right!

Vatican Human Rights Council

Paolo Gabriele is languishing in a secret church prison tonight in Vatican City after being arrested by church police for having some of the Pope’s private papers in his possession.
The Pope’s former butler and a father of three children is threatened with thirty years in a papal jail for having uncovered some of Joseph Ratzinger’s dirty secrets.
Paolo might as well not be an Italian citizen, since his civil rights vanished once he crossed the Vatican. The law of the church supersedes that of any nation, it seems, since clearly the Pope can arrest and jail anyone he doesn’t like.
It’s quite abominable. How many corporations get to arrest and put on trial in their own private courts one of their employees who’s found with internal company documents?
How often does the CEO of such a company get to shelter and exonerate child rapists in his firm, hide the crime from the police, and silence those who know about it all?
Does the company itself get to launder money, finance wars, conduct genocide and crimes against humanity, and depose governments, and never answer for these crimes?
The Vatican Incorporated is the one company in the world that can do all this. And what’s more, they even get massive financial subsidies from taxpayers in over a hundred countries to do so!
That said, it’s a sign of the degree of institutional rot and panic erupting in Rome these days that members of the papal inner circle are breaking ranks and squealing on their boss. Paolo’s arrest follows hot on the heels of the forced resignation of the chief of the Vatican Bank, Gotti Tedeschi, who allegedly had blown the whistle on shady transactions by the bank.
It’s small wonder the papacy is crushing a lone employee like Paolo so rapidly. Some of the documents held by the butler suggest that the Pope personally accepted bribes to award Vatican contracts to friends and supporters of his, and that he engineered a cover up of the whole thing, including by expelling Vatican City governor Archbishop Carlo Vigano last year when he asked the Pope to come clean.
One can’t help but be reminded of the last days of Richard Nixon. But the former president cum gangster, at least, was legally accountable to the United States Congress. The Pope is answerable only to himself. He is, under his own laws, both “Master and God”: church and state all rolled into one, all powerful ruler of humanity.
Roman Emperor Aurelian invented that title known as “Dominus et Deus” in the year 273 when he created a new religious cult of sun worship that evolved into state Christianity under a later Emperor, Constantine. For the first time, and ever since then, one ruler was designated as having absolute authority over everyone, and could therefore never be challenged.
Adolf Hitler was a pale imitation.
When Aurelian’s god-emperor evolved into the papacy, Europe inherited a monster called Christendom that would cause more death and atrocity than any force in human history. Sadly, over the centuries governments have accommodated themselves to this monster since historically they arose in partnership with it, and derived their authority from papal sanction.
What Martin Luther called “the two swords” – church and state working in tandem – is still the governing principle that allows so-called “canon law” to supersede civil laws in most nations, with the result that men like Paolo Gabriele can simply disappear with the nod of a pope.
We really are still in the middle ages, in many ways: and we techno-serfs still blindly clamor for justice from institutions run from the top-down by men who consider themselves gods.
Joseph Ratzinger is an expert at making people disappear, having run the papal Inquisition – renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – for many years. But the very absoluteness of his power as Grand Inquisitor made Ratzinger many enemies, and the latter are gathering nowadays to help expose their adversary.
The details of Ratzinger accepting bribes, for instance, actually came from Vatican Secretary of State archives to which Paolo Gabriele could not have had access. Only senior Cardinals could have released such damning evidence.
This kind of power struggle in the papacy is nothing new, but since it is happening amidst efforts to criminally indict the Pope for concealing child rapists and obstructing justice, many of the Curia are worried that the institution will suffer permanent damage: a fact quite unacceptable to the money boys who stand behind the papal throne.
To quote a senior Italian state senator who spoke to me in Rome in the spring of 2010,
“The Vatican, the mafia, and the government, they’re really all the same men, and they have one major concern: to hold on to their revenues. They are terrified that the ORI (Vatican Bank) will suffer from these scandals and will lose its credit standing with the banking cartels. They will never let that happen, even if the heads of popes have to roll in the dust.”
So it’s an interesting question: who is more powerful, ultimately – the “Master and God” himself, or his creditors? The image, or the finances?
For men like Paolo Gabriele, or any victim of priestly rape, the answer is perhaps moot. For whoever is in charge in Rome is like any self-governing dictator: one who cannot be reasoned or negotiated with, but simply overthrown.
I believe the world is finally waking up to that fact. The issue now is, how will we unite across faiths and borders to finally unseat the God Emperor and his vile kingdom?
Our network has given the Vatican until September 15 to undertake ten steps to relinquish its power and do justice to its victims. After that day, the church will have lost its right to operate in our communities. And the occupations that will strike Roman Catholic churches and facilities after that date will include the targeting of secret papal prisons where men of conscience like Paolo Gabriele are being held.
We will free Paolo, if he is not free by then.
When Jesus of Nazareth first spoke publicly, he announced that God had sent him to release the captives, give sight to the blind, and let all the oppressed go free. The papacy of his day killed him for it, and the Vatican cemented that murder in its subversion of his message.
But fortunately, you just can’t keep a good man down.
 

Stand with Us on Sunday June 3 and Bring the Vatican to Justice:
A Call for Solidarity Actions to Support Irish men and women who Survived Church Terror

John Deegan, Mary Lawlor and Dave O’Brien are uncommon heroes who endured torture at the hands of the roman catholic church – and who are battling today to win justice. On May 4 in Dublin, they confronted Archbishop Dermot Martin and the Vatican with ten demands which must be enacted by September 15.

Those who raped and murdered children with impunity have no where left to run. The system that has protected them is collapsing in the face of the courage of those like John, Mary and Dave.

Don’t let these warriors fight alone. Stand with them on the first Sunday in June: the day before they are to meet again with church officials in Dublin.

We ask you to stage solidarity protests and sit ins at catholic churches in your community on Sunday, June 3 during the regular mass. Share a simple message: Agree to the Ten Demands, or face further disruption.

The demands are summarized below. Please click here to view the full communiqué.

We also ask you to use this event to help prepare for September 15, and the launching of our new, global civil disobedience campaign of disruption and banishment aimed at the world’s oldest and deadliest corporation: the roman catholic church.

1. Issue full reparations to survivors
2. Surrender the remains of those who died for a proper burial.
3. Return all land and wealth taken from church victims
4. Surrender all evidence and perpetrators of crimes against children
5. Annul Crimen Sollicitationis and all Vatican policies that protect child rapists
6. Expel and defrock all child raping priests and those who protect them, including the pope
7. Agree to the licensing of all clergy as public servants
8. Withdraw from all tax exemptions, concordats and privileges
9. Annul the status of the Vatican as a state and abolish Rome’s authority over its congregations
10. Redistribute the wealth of the Vatican Bank to church victims and the community, as Christ commands

What I held in my hand yesterday caused me to flee from the University of British Columbia library, and seek solace in the deep forest that surrounds the campus where I grew up, and where I have discovered the unimaginable.
It was an unusual reaction, for I had encountered much worse over the years. But after seeing the document, something snapped in me and made nothing else possible than to rush to the woods, fall to the bountiful soil behind a hidden tree tangled in moss, and dig my hands desperately into mother earth and sob like I had not done since I was a child.
I lay there for some time, after the tears were spent, and gradually the quiet bird song and sunlight merged with a perfect aroma I had not breathed for so long: the forest loam itself, and its rich, musky decomposition so alive and sweet.
I hugged the ground and buried my face in our good earth, and felt suddenly that my own corrosion from the long and hard years could be the source of something more than personal agony. For I turned over just then and scribbled on a piece of paper,
My pain and suffering is the nursing log out of which so many and so much will grow.
I lay on my back, wonderfully calm and spent, and looked again at the photocopied document I had unearthed that morning from the government archives in Koerner Library’s microfilm section.

Extracted teeth

It read,
“Department of Indian Affairs, Dental Report: St. Paul’s Catholic Indian School, Squamish Mission Reservation, May 1924”.
And beneath that title was listed the names of fifty-six children who had had their teeth extracted without painkiller by Dr. E. Fraser Allen of Vancouver.
No anesthesia.
Matilda Miranda was seven years old, and six of her teeth were yanked from her jaw without anesthesia. Theresa George was eight, and five of her teeth were similarly pulled. Leonard Rodrigues, age 10, Ralph Atkins, age nine, Doreen Thomas, age nine: all denied painkiller. Over 80% of the group of fifty-six “students” at St. Paul’s Indian school were tortured thus.
Dr. Allen was paid $20.54 for his efforts, including the cost of $1.50 for his tools and amalgam dressing. It took him about a half hour to yank out all those little teeth, according to the good doctor’s report of May 7, sent to C. C. Perry, the local Indian Agent.
That meant he yanked out a tooth, on average, every ten seconds: non stop.
Harry Wilson never opened his mouth much when he first spoke to me, in the fall of 1997, because his teeth were such a mess.
“Naw, I never go to a dentist” he explained sadly. “They never gave us painkiller at residential school, when they pulled our teeth”.
Harry’s teeth were yanked over forty years after the same torture was performed by Dr. Allen on the St. Paul’s children: a different school, and a Catholic one, but identical to the practice inflicted on Harry at a United Church Indian residential school in Port Alberni in 1967.
Harriett Nahanee had the same story, at the same school in 1946. So did Vera Little, at the Anglican school in Alert Bay in 1953. And the husband of Alia MacKenzie-Point at the Chehalis reservation in 1969.
I can’t hate Dr. Allen, or any of the other specialists who have ripped the teeth and the innocence from children with the full sanction of church and state for so many years. For like you and I, these torturers learned quickly how to numb themselves to the screams and the blood in order to get on with their job.
That struck me with a sudden clarity, alone in the forest, after my own tears had washed away my numbness, and I began, as always, to grapple with how to share this new evidence with the world in a way that would make others do something more than believe that the crimes did happen, and still happen. And yet I knew that, as with all the other evidence of these grisly acts done to aboriginal children, very few people would want to know the horrible truth, let alone dare to do anything about it.
Tempted by the old despair, I stared just then at what I had scribbled moments before: My pain and suffering is the nursing log out of which so many and so much will grow. And then an answer echoed in me, from something Alice Miller had written once:
We can never find empathy for the suffering of others until we have faced and embraced the pain done to ourselves.
I’ve often noticed how the church goers who trudge past our offered leaflets on a Sunday morning bear the same look, when confronted by what their church did, and what their collection money helps to cover up: people who are resigned. Batter someone enough, and they become that way.
We are all so weary of the battering we have each endured since infancy, and yet are so incapable of feeling we can do anything to stop it. Even the very life-giving sky above seems to mock life itself these days, stained by vile chemical trails spewed by corporate and military madmen far beyond our reach. What can even our best integrity and courage do in the face of the enormity of the violence we face?

Torture survivor Harry Wilson (left) and Kevin Annett, 1997, Vancouver

Harry Wilson, and his counterparts Matilda and Theresa and all the other helpless little victims, knew the same despair, and some of them found a way to endure. And like Harry, who was able to tell what happened to him, when my own tears freely flowed the other day I found it easier to face the truth and find a light where there shouldn’t have been one. So Alice Miller must be on to something.
When we see our lives and our worlds for what they are, and can say so, we gain a power over what seemed like fate or irresistible injustice: sort of like naming a demon and calling it to leave a possessed soul. That’s the power of knowing our true history, individually and as a whole, and not denying the darkest moments, but describing them out loud, for what they are.
Rising up from the forested earth, I felt like a demon had indeed left me, and a warm surge of love filled me for those long dead and violated Indian children who still wait for justice. That kind of love doesn’t allow apathy or timid excuses: it does not rest until right is done. It was blessing beyond expression that day to feel the old flame arise in me again, born from my own grief, and theirs.
I ran joyfully from the woods on the sunlit path towards the bus stop, armed again with my being and the documented truth in my bag, and I knew that the time to act is always present in us. And from somewhere, the words of Rabbi Hillel sounded then:
If I am not for myself, then who will be?
If I am only for myself, then what am I?
If not now, when?