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Catholic Hospital Notes(under construction) Above the law?A nurse telephoned me. She had been studying this site for weeks, especially the pages about Mobbing & Bullying, loyalty, silencing, and related pages. She said it was exactly was was going on in her hospital. She wanted to know if she could quote from my site and use it as a text in classes she wanted to teach in her hospital. She spent perhaps 20 minutes telling me about what was going on in her hospital. I asked her what hospital this was. She didn't want to name it. I said, "This is a Catholic Hospital, isn't it?" She said she didn't really want to make that a part of this. Foolishly I said, "But it's name starts with 'Saint,' doesn't it?" It did. It was a Catholic Hospital. I said I knew that from her description. That's where these problems are the worst. Since I had tied the problem to her religion, now I and this site were the enemy. She not only was not going to quote from the site or teach the class, she was going to do her best to steer people away from this site. Should I steer away from this topic forever because of the repercussions that follow from going near anything Catholic? Mentioning it on a page on this site once before had devastating results for me personally and for the work I try to do here. The community that does not protect its own children from pedophiles has no depth to which it will not stoop to silence people who attempt to explain why that goes on and in what other realms it goes on. I have paid dearly already. RootsAfter the Magna Carta was created in 1215, Pope Innocent III wrote that it was “not only shameful and base but also illegal and unjust.” He wrote that the Magna Carta “dishonours the Apostolic See . . . and endangers the crusade.” The view that the church's authority supersedes all others endures. Lawyers for the archdiocese in Boston tried to prevent the government from taking Priests to trial for pedophilia by saying that the separation of church and state clause in the first amendment prohibited civil courts from deciding how the church should supervise priests. In other words, they still believe that their authority is above the law. The Superior Court ruled that that would have granted the church "unqualified immunity from secular legal redress." To a certain extent they have already. There is such a strong network protecting them. Countries in which the Catholic network has protected Catholic pedophiles include Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, France, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Malta, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Italy, The Czech Republic, India, Kenya, and the Philippines. Cases uncovered sometimes have gone on for decades. To cover up abuses that wide and deep requires the cooperation of more than just clerics. Aiding and abetting this are teachers and police officers and physicians and nurses and hospital administrators and politicians and journalists and people at every level of society who apparently hold loyalty to their church higher than any common sense understanding of right or wrong, good or evil, moral or immoral, or lawful or unlawful. This is on this site because the Catholic Hospital network is the 900 pound gorilla of health care. The way things are run there effects the way things are run everywhere. Speaking out of office in a Catholic hierarchy is grounds for excommunication. It works that way in medicine too, but doubly so in Catholic medicine. The abuses and dangers that get covered up in medicine injure and kill patients. Covering up problems in medicine is the same as covering up pedophilia in a Catholic Church. It allows the problem to endure, taking victims decade after decade. There is no place for patients to complain. Their only recourse is to find a lawyer. So medicine lobbies for liability limitations to make itself immune to lawyers. They work to accomplish a similar thing in the Catholic Church. Lawyers for sexual abuse victims in the United States suggested calling the Pope to testify in civil suits alleging church negligence. A top Vatican lawyer said that the Pope could not be compelled to testify since, as a head of state (he is monarch of the Vatican) he is immune from being called. So paddle to an abandoned oil derek at sea, declare it as a sovereign nation (this has been done), and send out minions who commit crimes in other countries. You will get away with it because, as head of a sovereign state, you are immune to prosecution. Such insulation did not promote good behavior among priests and it is not promoting good behavior among medical professionals. In 2001 San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West and Mercy Healthcare Sacramento were found guilty in court for lying on Medicare and Medi-Cal claims. A whistle blower said he was told on several occasions "not to communicate with anyone else, either in writing or orally, concerning compliance or Medicare billing issues." That is denied by them, but it is consistent with how other information is known to be handled in their hospital network. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Hirst said, "The evidence showed a deliberate choice, made at the highest levels, not to disclose" Medicare overpayments. The Commission of Investigation Into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin produced a 700-page report about the same thing in their country. Over the decades the police there conspired with the church to maintain secrecy, avoid scandal, protect the reputation of the church and preserve its assets while, through it all, priests victimized children. Such a conspiracy requires broader community support than such reports can verify solidly enough to put in print without repercussions. There need to be sympathetic politicians and lawyers and physicians and hospital administrators and even journalists to keep something this big quiet. There need to be parents and scout leaders and school teachers willing to sweep what they know under the carpet. Somehow they managed to document the involvement of the police. That goes on in the USA too, but who is going to document it? When a patient gets abused in a Catholic hospital, he/she is simply befuddled when the police will not help. -------- The orders and nuns who are strongest tend to be those who are the least liberal. (under construction) |
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