Vatican sounds alarm on financial "ticking time bomb

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican is denouncing offshore tax havens and financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps as gravely immoral and unjust, calling them "ticking time bombs" that hurt the world's poor the most.

In a new document released Thursday, the Vatican's doctrine office teamed up with its social justice department to give a more solid moral foundation to the Holy See's oft-repeated call for a more ethical global financial system.

The document, approved by Pope Francis, calls for banks to create internal ethical committees to ensure decisions work for the common good and not just the "myopic egoism" of individual corporate bottom lines. It urged better regulation of financial products and for universities to educate the next generation of business leaders about ethics, not just profits.

"The recent financial crisis could have been the occasion to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and a new regulation of financial activities neutralizing the predatory and speculative dimensions," it said.

Instead, the global financial players have returned to the "heights of myopic egoism" that excludes any consideration of the common good or the need to spread wealth and heal economic inequality, it said.

Notably missing from the document was a call for a global political authority to regulate markets and tax financial transactions. The Vatican's social justice office, which co-authored the new document, had recommended such an authority in a 2011 document that was widely dismissed even within the Vatican.

Francis and popes before him have frequently denounced growing income inequality and profit-at-all-cost mentality that drives global capitalism, including in encyclicals and other authoritative teaching documents.

Officials told a news conference Thursday that they thought it was worth articulating considerations about specific aspects of the current economic-financial system for officials who work in the field.

The effort marks something of a shift in attention for the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which under the past two popes has focused on issues of doctrinal orthodoxy and sexual morality, not social justice and the poor.

History's first Latin American pope, however, has made those issues the priority of his pontificate, and the document's publication suggests the Vatican bureaucracy is getting the message.

Chile's bishops resign en masse over sex abuse cover-up

VATICAN CITY —

In the biggest shake-up yet in the Catholic Church's long-running sex abuse scandal, every active Chilean bishop offered to resign Friday over what Pope Francis said was their "grave negligence" in investigating abuse and protecting children.

The bishops announced at the end of an emergency Vatican summit that all 31 active bishops in Rome had signed a document offering to resign.

Francis can accept the resignations, reject them or delay a decision, and the bishops remain in place until he acts. But the symbolic significance of an entire national bishops' conference resigning en masse because they covered-up for pedophiles marked a historic moment in the decades-long saga.

"We want to ask forgiveness for the pain we caused victims, the pope, the people of God and our country for the grave errors and omissions that we committed," the bishops said in a statement.

Calls for mass resignations had mounted after details emerged of the contents of a 2,300-page Vatican report into the Chilean scandal leaked early Friday. Francis had cited the report in footnotes of a 10-page document that he handed over to each Chilean bishop at the start of the summit.

In those footnotes, Francis accused the bishops of destroying evidence of sex crimes, pressuring church investigators to minimize abuse accusations and showing "grave negligence" in protecting children from pedophile priests.

"No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others," Francis wrote in the document.

In a statement in response, the Chilean bishops said the contents of the document were "absolutely deplorable" and showed an "unacceptable abuse of power and conscience," as well as sexual abuse.

"We want to re-establish justice and contribute to the reparation of the damage we caused," they said.

The whole report hasn't been made public, but even the highlights Francis included in his footnotes were astonishing. The gravity of the accusations appeared to lay the foundation for a full-scale Vatican investigation of Chilean dioceses, seminaries and religious orders. Such an investigation was ordered up after a similar 2010 summit that Pope Benedict XVI called for Irish bishops over their dismal record dealing with abuse.

Francis said the investigation showed there were "grave defects" in the way abuse cases were handled, with superficial investigations or no investigation at all.

In other cases, there was "grave negligence" in protecting children from pedophiles by bishops and religious superiors — a reference to the many cases of sexual abuse that have arisen in recent years within Chilean religious orders, including the Salesians, Franciscans and the Marist Brothers community.

Francis said he was also "perplexed and ashamed" by evidence that there were "pressures exercised" on church officials tasked with investigating sex crimes "including the destruction of compromising documents."

He said the problem can be traced to the training Chilean priests receive in seminary. He said there were "grave accusations against some bishops and superiors who sent to these educational institutions priests suspected of active homosexuality."

For years, sex abuse victims have blasted the Chilean hierarchy for discrediting their claims, protecting abusers and moving them around rather than reporting them to police and then handing out light sentences when church sanctions were imposed.

Francis, though, has also been implicated in the scandal and he took responsibility for his role as well.

The Associated Press reported earlier this year that Francis did so over the objections of other Chilean bishops who knew Barros' past was problematic and had recommended he and other Karadima-trained bishops resign and take a sabbatical.

The AP subsequently reported that Francis had received a letter in 2015 from one of Karadima's accusers detailing Barros' misdeeds. That letter undercut Francis' claim to have never heard from victims about Barros.

Francis further drew rebuke when, during a January trip to Chile, he said the accusations against Barros were "calumny" and said he was "certain" he was innocent.

After receiving the report, though, Francis did an about-face. Blaming a "lack of truthful and balanced information" for his missteps, Francis invited the three main whistle blowers to the Vatican so he could apologize in person.

https://www.statesman.com/news/chile-bishops-resign-masse-over-sex-abuse-cover/RrGKtJ89UwfUMeZl1Cq9nN/