U.S. Court Allows Abuse Case vs. Vatican

U.S. Court Allows Abuse Case vs. Vatican

Just wanted to add this up here before I go back to writing another essay...According to the Wallstreet Journal, this is the first time the Vatican has been held liable for sexual abuse cases in a court this high.

"The appeals court found that the church government may be held liable for actions taken in the U.S. based on the Vatican's policies or directives.

"What the court has allowed us to do is proceed against the Vatican for the conduct of the U.S. bishops because of the bishops' failure to ... report child abuse," said William F. McMurry, the attorney for three men who claim they were abused as children by priests in the Louisville, Ky., archdiocese. He is seeking class-action status in the district-court case.

The ruling marks the first time that a federal appeals court recognized that the Vatican could be liable under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a 1976 law that governs when a foreign nation or its agents can be sued, said Marci Hamilton, a constitutional-law scholar who is part of the legal team in the Louisville case.

"If someone can crack that barrier of immunity, it opens the door to other claims against the Catholic church," says Jonathan Levy, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents concentration-camp survivors in a suit against numerous parties including the Vatican bank. The Vatican, in that case, prevailed in its claim of sovereign immunity."

Children and Religion

So I am in the middle of essays and exams but did not want to neglect this for too long. A problem that I have with religious groups is how there is so much attention given to indoctrinating the children. Focusing on Christianity here, regardless of what your belief is of "interpreting" the bible - whether you take it literally or not - there are still some horrific stories in there. I say 'horrific' deliberately. When children are taught about the bible these stories are conveniently left out and they are given only the message "love one another." Now, before anyone gets upset with that statement and starts accusing me of wanting to read violent stories to kids, let me explain. While that message, "love one another," is a very peaceful and important message, that is not all that is the bible. There are rules demanding that raped women be stoned to death or forced to marry their rapist, that disobedient sons be stoned to death, and then there are the stories of slaughter. Before children can rationalize their beliefs they are presented with a clean happy notion that god means love and therefore Christianity, and only Christianity, means happiness and love as well. By the time these kids can read the bible for themselves they either feel that it has been explained well enough and see no need to read anything else in it, or force themselves to either ignore it or somehow interpret it to mean something entirely different. What is wrong with this? one may ask. If you were to wait for a certain age for children to be introduced to the bible and religion and they could read all the way through it, how many do you think would choose to believe in this particular god or at least the teachings of this book? Why can you simply not tell children to love one another rather than saying to do so because a god tells them to? I am not saying that no one would choose Christianity after an undoctrinated childhood - I know people who were raised without religion and chose this particular religion later on in life - I just have a problem with this being forced into children's minds as fact. What would happen if stories from the bible were read as bedtime stories alongside fairy tales, either presenting both as a way of life or both as simply stories?

 The image I have included is a religious tract from Chick publications intended to convert children to Christianity and can be found at www.chick.com.