Paul Schaefer, 89; led sect in Chile, convicted of abuse
By Emma Brown, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Paul Schaefer, a German-born evangelical preacher who was convicted of sexually abusing 25 children while leading one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semitic and apocalyptic sects, died April 24 of a heart ailment at a prison hospital in Chile. He was 89.
He was serving a 20-year prison sentence for the sexual abuse of the children at his enclave in southern Chile, Colonia Dignidad, or Dignity Colony, a place that human rights groups say doubled in population during the 1970s and ’80s as a detention and torture center for opponents of right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
At the time of his death, Mr. Schaefer was still under investigation for the 1985 disappearance of mathematician Boris Weisfeiler, an American citizen who went missing while hiking near Colonia Dignidad.
At the time, the Chilean government said that Weisfeiler, an experienced outdoorsman, drowned while attempting to cross a river. Years later, news reports said declassified US State Department and CIA documents indicated that Weisfeiler, a Russian-born Jew, was probably kidnapped by government security forces and then taken to Mr. Schaefer’s commune.
News reports said police found a folder with Weisfeiler’s name at the compound, and a Chilean military informant told US officials that Weisfeiler was tortured and killed there. Mr. Schaefer was never charged with a crime in the case, which is still pending.
Mr. Schaefer turned to preaching after serving in the German military during World War II. He traveled the German countryside with an acoustic guitar and a message of salvation through sexual abstinence. Armed with powerful charisma and a gift for public speaking, he collected hundreds of followers before eventually establishing an orphanage near Bonn.
Accused of molesting two boys at the orphanage, he fled to Chile in 1961 and started his commune on a picturesque ranch 225 miles south of Santiago. The enclave boasted its own landing strip, television station, power plant, as well as lumber, honey, and brick-making businesses. Mr. Schaefer built a school and a hospital, winning over some local citizens by offering them free education and health care.
However, Colonia Dignidad’s darker side soon emerged. Former members of the sect told reporters and Chilean and German officials of Mr. Schaefer’s unsavory tendencies. He was always accompanied by a handpicked coterie of boys who ran his errands, brushed his hair, and tied his shoes. He maintained total control over the lives of his followers, the former members said, forbidding contact with the outside world and using electric shocks and tranquilizers to punish those who broke his rules.
Babies were taken from their mothers at birth and raised in a communal nursery. All adults were known as uncle or aunt; Mr. Schaefer was called “permanent uncle.’’
Mr. Schaefer avoided arrest for decades, largely because of his close relationships with political and military leaders, including with Pinochet, brought to power by a 1973 coup d’etat. Thousands of political dissidents disappeared or were killed during Pinochet’s rule, and human rights groups say that many were taken to Colonia Dignidad, where they were tortured in underground chambers.
Pinochet left the presidency in 1990. Mr. Schaefer escaped a 1997 police raid and continued to evade law enforcement officials until 2005, when he was arrested in Argentina.
He was extradited to Chile, where he had been convicted in absentia of sexually abusing minors.
Chilean police found a military arsenal buried at Colonia Dignidad, including 92 machine guns, 104 semiautomatic weapons, more than 1,800 hand grenades, and an unknown number of surface-to-air missiles. They also found files detailing how people had been detained and tortured there during the Pinochet era.
In 2006, Mr. Schaefer was sentenced to 20 years for sexually abusing minors and three years for violating weapons laws. In 2008, he received additional sentences for torturing colony residents and for killing an allegedly traitorous security agent who had served under Pinochet.
Paul Schaefer was born near Bonn in 1921. He had a glass eye, having accidentally gouged out his right eye while trying to untie a shoelace knot with a fork. He joined the Nazi youth movement before becoming a Luftwaffe medic stationed in France during World War II.
Members of Mr. Schaefer’s unnamed sect publicly apologized for their Pinochet-era abuses in 2006 with a full-page advertisement in a leading Chilean newspaper. Mr. Schaefer was to blame, they said.
“He allowed our villa to be used for the detention and repression of people persecuted’’ by Pinochet, they wrote. Colony members “became real slaves of Schaefer, like robots dedicated only to obey his orders.’’
The Chilean government now controls his former colony, whose name was officially changed in 1991 to Villa Baviera. An estimated 300 people still live there.

From The Sunday Times
Andrew Sullivan
Nick Clegg catches the angry transatlantic wind
The surge in the Lib Dem’s ratings mirrors the rise of US outsiders such as Ross Perot
Perot altered the trajectory of established politics with his bid for the presidency
Andrew Sullivan 1 Comment
Recommend? (5) I’ve got a familiar feeling watching the polls in Britain these past two weeks. It’s a sense of a seismic re-evaluation by British voters of what their options really are and a searching question about why exactly they should be constrained by a two-party system that has defined their country for decades.
The feeling reminds me of 2008 and 1992 in the United States. In both cases, a largely unknown character popped onto the scene and altered the entire trajectory of established politics. In 1992 it was Ross Perot, the “plague on both your houses” candidate who was obsessed with the deficit and had plans — real plans! — to cut it. In 2008 it was Barack Obama who, while running as a Democrat, nonetheless pledged to move the United States past the “old politics” towards a more pragmatic centre.
Obama was in some ways a third party candidate: his core, young and minority voters flooded in from the political cold. His methods — both organising and fundraising online — were innovative. His opponents were two established brands for their respective political parties: Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In a deeply anti-incumbent mood, in the teeth of a steep recession and two failing wars, the voters picked the black dude and stuck with him. Almost every respectable analyst believed a black man couldn’t win in America — before he did. And this elite assumption that he couldn’t win more than intensified the passion of those who ensured he did.
I have therefore no difficulty in understanding how the Liberal Democrats have suddenly become poised to make political history. There’s widespread disgruntlement at the incumbents; there’s a brutal and lingering recession; there’s astronomical debt; there’s the bad taste in the collective mouth of the Iraq war; and there’s the expenses scandal wrapping the whole ball of anger into one seamless, ornery whole.
The background was tinder dry; and David Cameron Tories, first aggressively different on spending, then completely flaccid about it, failed to light the match that cleanly distinguished them from the past. Yes, they’d finally shed most of their own past; but they had not formulated a stronger and more radical argument for reacting against Labour’s past. And so the possibility for a candidate of “real change” — phoney or not, real or fake — was there. What was needed was some kind of spark.
Television did it. It remains an enormously powerful medium. It brings human beings — their eyes and faces and thought patterns and personal effects — into your very living room. It shakes up existing feelings. It floods the frontal cortex not with policy but with personality. When it has never been used before in a political context, it can have explosive results. So Nick Clegg benefited not just from being on an equal footing with his two rivals, he was also able simultaneously to promote an argument for real change that resonated with all the unexpected power that television can deploy.
There’s a lot of flimflam in it. The fiscal dishonesty on all sides, including Clegg’s, is transparent. The pandering to every social sector, the pledges of more money for everyone, despite a massive debt that will require huge cuts in spending in the next parliament, were an illustration of just how awful politics can be. But Clegg clearly knew how to be the most fauxsincere of the lot — and in an age of discontent the freshest face wins. And the eye-contact. Some people are television naturals. It’s hard to train for and difficult to mimic. Clegg has it. Gordon Brown and Cameron strain for a shred of it.
In the American system, of course, the upstarts have months and months to be grilled and tested and smeared and bashed. Perot’s bubble burst after a crucial televised debate with Al Gore on trade — but that was months after he strutted onto the national stage. Obama endured a year of hammering — from Clintonites and the Republicans — and proved there was mettle behind the telegenic front. Even the sudden and alarming rise of Sarah Palin — who still hasn’t held a press conference as a public figure — wilted within weeks as the sheer scale of her ignorance and delusional extremism came to light.
In Britain you now have a mere two weeks to burst the Lib Dem bubble — and crude front-page exposés in the press are simply not enough (and may even backfire — see the Twitter feed itsnickcleggsfault). Clegg is more mainstream than Perot and has similar political experience to Obama. With a solid second debate behind him, Clegg has defeated Brown twice in a row, knocked Cameron off his perch once and equalled the Tory, in my view, in the second debate. As I listened to his final talking points, the refrain was an uncanny echo of Obama’s appeal: “We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of the past ... Don’t let people persuade you that things cannot be different. They can.”
Yes he can? Of course, British politics doesn’t have the massive rallies and epic fundraising and theatrical bravura of the American campaign. But this doesn’t mean that a message of a clean slate doesn’t have real and deep appeal to those who cannot take another bout of Brown but feel less than sure about Cameron. There is a huge, if vapid, appeal for disdaining “ping-pong” politics. And Clegg appeals to every voter’s vanity that he or she really is the boss, that they are above partisanship and that they can handle something different. More to the point, the insurmountable obstacles are never actually insurmountable. The super-delegates were supposed to stop Obama. Then the white ethnics critical in swing states. Then the electoral college. But the whole joy of democracy is that the person with the most votes actually wins. If you can shake people out of existing expectations and patterns of behaviour, and you get their votes, anything can happen.
If the polls moved this quickly and this decisively in a week, they can also move again in another. Maybe the clouds will move in and Clegg will be seen as synonymous with a hung parliament and “change” voters will swing back to the Tories. But, just as easily, the trend we have seen could gain momentum — at Labour’s expense. The very unlikelihood of a clear Lib Dem victory, in a turbulent electorate in an angry time, can seem like another establishment ploy to retain power for the status quo. And that can fuel the insurgency even further.
This revolt is not unique to Britain. Incumbents are vulnerable everywhere. The Tea Party movement in the United States is not just a bunch of right-wing nutters. It’s also an explosion of discontent that the ruling classes have failed to solve the problems and assuage the anxieties of the people. Objectively, Obama continues to have a substantive 15-month record. But he can barely reach 50% in the polls even as the recovery gathers strength. It’s angry out there and voters are prepared to go places previously deemed unnecessary or impossible.
Just remember this: things can never happen until they do. They said it couldn’t happen here as well. But it did. And now it seems as normal as can be.

andrewsullivan.com

Times of London
Analysis: fear that stops Kim Jong Il from sinking
Richard Lloyd Parry Tokyo

Isolated even from his communist allies, unable to feed his own people, and hobbled by an irreparably broken economy, Kim Jong Il would appear to be a man with everything to lose from provoking rich and well-armed South Korea.
But last month’s sinking of the corvette Cheonan has shown once again how few options the rest of the world has for dealing with the world’s most tenacious dictatorship.
The obvious response, a military attack, is ruled out, not because South Korea and the US would not win, but because neither can afford the full-scale war into which it might develop.
For all their shortages of fuel and equipment, and even without their small stock of nuclear warheads, Kim Jong Il’s forces could inflict terrible harm by conventional means alone.
The hidden artillery pieces would eventually be taken out, and the bands of fanatical commandos killed, but not before they had inflicted intolerable damage on the industrialised cities of South Korea.
Two coercive options remain: sanctions and diplomatic arm-twisting by Kim Jong Il’s friends and sponsors.
The first has been tried, with little result – it is hard to isolate and bankrupt a country that revels in its independence and which went bust years ago.
As many as a few million people died of famine in North Korea in the late 1990s, and the Government survived.
After the nuclear test in May last year, military sanctions were tightened but with no obvious effect. South Korea and its supporters could impose a complete embargo, but the North would undoubtedly treat this as an act of war.
The South Korean Government of Lee Myung Bak has already suspended all bilateral aid to North Korea, and the mountain resort which Pyongyang maintains as a means of extracting revenue form curious tourists from the South has been mothballed.
Mr Lee might shut down the Kaesong joint industrial zone, where North Korean workers labour for companies from the South. But what sanction would he impose after the next provocation?
Condemnation in the United Nations Security Council would enrage North Korea, but previous resolutions have had little practical effect, and it might, in any case, be vetoed by the only country with any real leverage over Mr Kim – China.
China has it in its power to squeeze North Korea very hard by cutting off its fuel pipelines.
But it is unlikely to take such a step over one sunk South Korean corvette. More than skirmishes between the two Koreas, it fears a collapse of central authority, a massive outflow of refugees and the loss of a buffer between itself and the US troops based in South Korea.

NY TIMES
Debate on Internet’s Limits Grows in Indonesia

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Displeased that a statue of a 10-year-old Barack Obama was installed in a park here, Indonesians took their protest not to this capital’s most famous traffic circle but to Facebook. More than 56,000 online protesters later, city officials gave in to arguments that the park should be reserved to honor an Indonesian.
This example of high-tech grass-roots organizing was the direct result of the explosion of social networking in Indonesia. But the boom is prompting a fierce debate over the limits of free expression in a newly democratic Indonesia, with the government trying to regulate content on the Internet and a recently emboldened news media pushing back.
Proponents of greater freedom view social networking as a vital tool to further democratize this country’s often corrupt political system. Skeptics, especially among politicians and religious leaders, worry about mob rule and the loss of traditional values.
In its latest move, the government recently proposed a bill that would require Internet service providers to filter online content but was forced to shelve it after vociferous protest online and in the mainstream media.
Thanks to relatively cheap cellphones that offer Internet access, Facebook, Twitter and local social networking media have rapidly spread from cities to villages throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and the Philippines. In a little over a year, the number of Indonesian Facebook users has skyrocketed to more than 21 million from fewer than a million — the world’s third largest number of Facebook users.
With tens of millions of people now instantly connected, social networking has quickly become a potent, though sometimes unpredictable, political force.
Protests on Facebook and other sites successfully backed leaders of this country’s main anticorruption agency who, in a long-running feud against the national police and the attorney general’s office, had apparently been set up and arrested on false charges. The online anger prompted President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to intercede; the police and the attorney general’s office, considered among the country’s most corrupt institutions, dropped the case and released the officials in November.
In another cause célèbre, online support was critical in freeing a 32-year-old mother who was jailed after complaining about the poor service at a suburban Jakarta hospital. Prosecutors charged her under a new law governing electronic information and transactions because she had sent an e-mail message to friends detailing her complaints. A court eventually found her not guilty in December.
Tifatul Sembiring, the minister of communication and information technology, said the government would reintroduce the bill to regulate online content after a “cooling down” period.
“We want to limit the distribution of negative content like pornography, gambling, violence, blasphemy,” Mr. Tifatul said, adding that online content should be regulated in such a way as to preserve “our values, also our culture and also our norms.”
Ramadhan Pohan, a member of Parliament and a former newspaper reporter, said those online movements had deeply unsettled politicians, bureaucrats and even hospital administrators unused to such direct — and successful — challenges to their authority.
“The problem is that many officials in government are paranoid about this new online content,” Mr. Pohan said. “They are old-style politicians and bureaucrats who, if you ask them, don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. They don’t realize that in terms of democracy and freedom of expression, we’ve reached a kind of point of no return.”
In Parliament, Mr. Pohan said that he and other advocates of unregulated online media “are still in the minority.”
According to data from Facebook, Indonesia trails only the United States, with 116 million users, and Britain, with 24 million. What is more, Indonesia has the largest number of Facebook and Twitter users in Asia, according to companies like the Toronto-based Sysomos, that analyze social networking traffic.
The recent availability of smart phones that cost less than $100 and offer access to social networking sites set off last year’s explosion, said Nukman Luthfie, 45, the chief executive of Virtual Consulting, an online marketing company here.
Indonesia’s news media, which was tightly controlled until the fall of President Suharto in the late 1990s, has reacted strongly against any perceived threats against the freedom of expression. In addition to the proposed bill on online content and the new law on electronic information, the news media and human rights organizations point to other recent efforts to rein in freedom of expression. A so-called antipornography law, which was used recently to sentence four women to 75 days in jail for erotic dancing, could also stifle freedom of expression, critics say.
They add that the authorities could use these broad laws to suppress the freedom of the press, particularly online. Violations of the new laws carry heavier punishment compared with equivalent infractions committed offline. For example, a conviction for defamation online could lead to a maximum of six years in prison under the new electronic information law, while the punishment for defamation in the offline media is limited to 14 months under the criminal code.
“People in power are afraid of online media and social networking,” said Megi Margiyono, an official at the Alliance of Independent Journalists. “That’s why penalties for online media are much harsher than those for print media.”
A prominent blogger, Enda Nasution, also said the laws could smother Indonesia’s flourishing blogosphere. When Mr. Nasution, 34, began blogging early in the past decade, he said he could count the country’s bloggers on two hands. Today, according to Virtual Consulting, there are more than one million Indonesian bloggers.
In Singapore, Malaysia and other countries in the region with controlled news media, blogs often tend to be sites for information that cannot be reported in the mainstream media, Mr. Nasution said. In Indonesia, because the news media are free, “bloggers also act as watchdogs or commentators,” he added.
The recent online movements, he said, are a watershed in the evolving role of social media here.
“We don’t know where this is going to lead us,” he said, adding that supporters of regulations “are standing in the way of an online tsunami.”
“You can’t stop it,” he said. “It’s not only about technology. It’s about Indonesia redefining its values.”
But such talk unsettles many in what remains a culturally conservative society.
The information minister, Mr. Tifatul, a former chairman of the Prosperous Justice Party, Indonesia’s largest Islamist party, and a member of President Yudhoyono’s coalition government, said Indonesia had to find its own way of dealing with social media.
Mr. Tifatul uses Twitter to communicate with Indonesians almost every day, but harbors misgivings about an American-style, unfettered access to the Internet. At the same time, he emphatically rejects the model of China, which routinely blocks sites like Facebook and Twitter.
“I think we are between China and the United States,” he said. “Yes, we are free. But with freedom comes responsibility.”

From The Sunday London Times

Andrew Sullivan
Don’t come over here, David Cameron, you pinko
The Republican party has lurched so far right that it can no longer recognise mainstream conservatism
When I read the usual antiTory screeds in the British press and the dark admonitions that they might harbour some crypto-Thatcherite agenda beneath the air-brushed facade, I feel as if I’m living on some other planet. From the vantage point of the current American right, the Cameron Tories are a bunch of pinkos.
David Cameron has insisted on his credentials as a green. Since the last US presidential election, when Senator John McCain ran as someone who took climate change seriously, the Republican party consensus has been that it is a total hoax and anyone who gives credence to it is a loony leftie.
Cameron is trying to reassure middle England that the NHS is safe with the Tories. But the Republican base is in uproar over President Barack Obama’s rather modest attempt to subsidise the working poor’s access to private insurance.
Since Obama’s election, Sarah Palin has gone from being a fringe member of the right to the centre of the Republican base. McCain has been forced to ask her to campaign for him in a primary battle against JD Hayworth, a much more doctrinaire rightwinger.
If the British right is somewhat crucified in its attempt to balance right and centre, the American right is simply choosing between far right and totally insane far right. And every time you think someone in the establishment will try to tamp down “Tea Party” excess, you realise there is no Republican establishment any more. It is a party run by its base and its base is run by the most radical members of the chat radio and Fox News media machine.
Think I’m exaggerating? Take Bob McDonnell, the newly elected governor of Virginia. He ran as a moderate, saying he would focus on the economy and transport and avoid any hot-button rabble-rousing. Regarded as a future hopeful for the party, he gave the Republican response to Obama’s state of the union speech in January.
And what are two things he has done since taking office? First off, he rescinded a policy of non-discrimination against gay employees of the state government and his attorney-general asked that Virginia’s state colleges remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination rules. For good measure, last week he brought back a proclamation declaring April as “Confederate History Month” and omitted previous rote references to slavery in the wording.
The proclamation declared that “the people of Virginia” — all of them — backed the Confederacy as a principled declaration of independence, only to be “ultimately overwhelmed” by the north’s “insurmountable” resources. It had nothing to do with slavery; it was just another tea party for patriotic Virginians.
“They were fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for now,” was the view of Grayson Jennings, first lieutenant commander of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group behind the proclamation.
When McDonnell was asked why he left out any mention of the slavery issue, he said it wasn’t “significant” enough as a factor in America’s civil war.
In both cases McDonnell scrambled back his obvious attempts to placate the people who voted for him. He insisted that even though he removed gays from specific protection, he didn’t believe in actual discrimination; and a day after the entire country recoiled from his descent into old south bigotry, he conceded that removing any mention of slavery was a “major omission”. But these moves were clearly designed by his Republican aides to reflect his current Republican base.
That base simply wants no dissent and no end to the furthest reaches of the right. And it’s echoed by the conservative intelligentsia in Washington.
When arch neocon David Frum — yes, the man who co-wrote George W Bush’s “axis of evil” speech — suggested it was tactically foolish for the Republicans to declare that healthcare reform would be Obama’s Waterloo and then lose the battle, he faced the music. A day later he was dismissed as a paid fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Now recall: his apostasy was to wonder how a sane party could take Palin seriously as a future president.
The Republican party in many states is close to supporting secession rather than co-operate with universal healthcare. Critical centrists — such as Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida — look as if they won’t even come close to surviving their primary challenges before this autumn’s congressional mid-term elections.
The ratings of Fox News have gone through the roof as the echo chamber of extremism enters a fatal feedback loop. Glenn Beck, the most charismatic and popular star of Fox, has said the following and insisted he will not take his words back: “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture”; “Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalisation”; “I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself or if I would need to hire somebody to do it.”
These provocations — and teary-eyed on-screen meltdowns about the end of America — have galvanised an astonishingly lucrative industry. Beck pulls in $30m a year in various platforms. And no Republican in Congress or the states dares challenge him.
In some ways, a strong anti-government movement on the right is not an inherently bad thing. The government’s size and reach metastasised under George W Bush and the recession tipped what was a dreadful fiscal situation into a historically catastrophic one.
Ask any of the Tea Party-ers what they’d like to cut and you get nothing specific. They are as adamant in defending the defence budget as they are in supporting Medicare and social security. In fact, since they skew older, the Tea Party right is arguably more defiant about elderly middle class entitlements — the real source of the debt — than some younger, more libertarian Democrats.
Tax hikes — such as Ronald Reagan pushed through — to mitigate the deficit? Mention such a thing in Republican circles and they will run from you as if you had a suicide bomber’s outfit strapped to your chest.
My fear is that a natural anti-incumbent swing in the mid-terms will only convince the Republicans that their lurch to the far right is what they need to regain the White House and Congress. The new Tea Partyapproved freshmen will be ready to rumble; the path to a candidacy is through a Fox News television show — Palin and Mike Huckabee both have one; and the last dregs of conservative realism and moderation will be swept away.
If they nominate Palin, as I suspect they will, they may relish a suicidal lunge at the Obama legacy; or, in an unpredictable populist climate, they might even win with her.
So be a little kinder to Cameron and George Osborne and William Hague, will you? Compared with the American right, they are the soul of sanity and responsibility. Which is to say: they remain mainstream conservatives.

andrewsullivan.com

The London Times
Signature on letter implicates Pope in abuse cover-up
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Pope Benedict XVI was dragged directly into the scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church when a letter with his signature emerged implicating him in the failure to defrock a known paedophile priest.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger resisted pleas from a Californian diocese to defrock a priest with a record of molesting children, putting “the good of the universal Church”, above other considerations, according to the 1985 letter.
The correspondence, obtained by the Associated Press, undermines the repeated insistence from the Holy See that Benedict XVI has had no personal involvement in covering up the sins of paedophiles.
The letter, bearing the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s signature, was typed and in Latin, and is part of years of correspondence between the Diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed laicisation of Father Stephen Kiesle.
Vatican officials condemned what they said was a “relentless campaign” to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the sex abuse scandals.
Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s spokesman, said: “The Holy See press office does not believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations. It is not strange that there are single documents which have Cardinal Ratzinger’s signature.”
Father Ciro Benedettini, another Vatican spokesman, said: “The then Cardinal Ratzinger didn’t cover up the case, but as the letter clearly shows, made clear the need to study the case with more attention, taking into account the good of all involved.”
The diocese recommended removing Kiesle from the priesthood in 1981, the year Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which shared responsibility for disciplining abusive priests.
The case languished for four years at the Vatican before Cardinal Ratzinger finally wrote to Bishop John Cummins, in Oakland. It was two more years before Kiesle was removed.
In the 1985 letter, Cardinal Ratzinger said the arguments for removing Kiesle were of “grave significance” but added that such actions required very careful review and more time. He also urged the bishop to provide Kiesle with “as much paternal care as possible” while awaiting the decision, according to a translation by Professor Thomas Habinek, of the University of Southern California classics department.
The future Pope noted that any decision to defrock Kiesle must take into account the “good of the universal Church” and the “detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly considering the young age”. Kiesle was 38 at the time.
He had been sentenced in 1978 to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to charges of molesting two young boys in a rectory in the San Francisco Bay area. In his earliest letter to Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Cummins warned that returning Kiesle to ministry would cause more of a scandal than stripping him of his priestly powers.
“It is my conviction that there would be no scandal if this petition were granted and that as a matter of fact, given the nature of the case, there might be greater scandal to the community if Father Kiesle were allowed to return to the active ministry,” Bishop Cummins wrote in 1982.
Kiesle was eventually laicised in 1987. In 2002 he was arrested and charged with 13 counts of child molestation from the 1970s. All but two were thrown out after the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a California law extending the statute of limitations.
In 2004 he did not contest the charge of molesting a young girl in his home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in prison. Kiesle, now 63 and a registered sex offender, lives in Walnut Creek, California.

How the GOP Purged Me
by Chris Currey

I am an old Republican. I am religious, yet not a fanatic. I am a free-marketer; yet, I believe in the role of the government as a fair evenhanded referee. I am socially conservative; yet, I believe that my lesbian niece and my gay grandchild should have the full protection of the law and live as free Americans enjoying every aspect of our society with no prejudices and/or restrictions. Nowadays, my political and socio-economic profile would make me a Marxist, not a Republican.
I grew up in an era where William F. Buckley fought the John Birch society and kicked them out of the Republican Party. I grew up with -– in fact voted for the first time for –- Eisenhower. In 1956, he ran a campaign of dignity. A campaign that acknowledged that there are certain projects better suited to be handled by the government. See, business thinks in the short term, as he said. That’s the imperative of the marketplace. I invest and I expect that in a few quarters, I garner the fruits of my investment. Government, on the other hand, has the luxury to wait a few years, maybe decades, for a return on a given investment. As a former businessman, I know that first hand. Am I a Marxist for thinking that?
I witnessed the fight for equal civil rights in the 1960s. And as a proud American, I applauded the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and we became a better country because of them. Those acts made America stronger. Those acts, at their core, represented and still represent all the values upon which the Republican Party was founded. Yet today, our GOP representatives and leaders are ashamed of them. When they talk about them, you feel their discomfort, their clumsiness, and sometimes their shame. That awkwardness is so strong that it crosses the television screen and hits you in the face in your living room. Why is that? What happened to this generation of Republicans? We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, and yet we act and behave as if we are the party of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I did not like Medicaid and Medicare when they were passed. I was opposed to them. Maybe I was too young, too strong, and too ideologically confined. Yet, over the years, I saw how Medicare helped millions of elderly Americans. I saw how Medicare helped my mom in her final years battling emphysema caused by years of smoking. You have to be blind to oppose those programs. You have to be blind to wish for the suffering of millions of Americans just because you believe in personal responsibility.
As a businessman, I was torn between my bottom line and providing health coverage for my employees. I knew that if I provided them with that coverage, their productivity increases. I did my best, but the riptide of the health insurance market defeated me. And with a heavy heart, I offered them gimmicky coverages that, deep down, I knew did not provide a comprehensive and adequate coverage, but it was the only coverage I could afford.
I voted for Nixon and for Reagan. Although I did not like the deficit spending of the Reagan administration, I blamed it on and rationalized it by the necessities of fighting the Cold War. I liked Reagan — who didn’t? Even my Democrat and liberal friends liked and respected him. I voted for Clinton, twice. I thought he was the best Republican president since Ike. No, I did not make a mistake. Bill Clinton was closer ideologically to Eisenhower and Nixon than Bush I and II could ever be. I thought that Clinton practiced and articulated true Republican ideology in his fiscal discipline, job creation, smart tax cuts, and foreign policy better than anyone since Ike.
Then something happened in the 1990s. The leaders of the GOP grew belligerent. They became too religious, almost zealots. They became intolerant. They began searching for purity in Republican thought and doctrine. Ideology blinded them. I continued to vote Republican, but with a certain unease. Deep down I knew that a schism happened between the modern Republican Party and the one I grew up with. During the fight over the impeachment of President Clinton, the ugly face of the Republican Party was brought to the surface. Empty rhetoric, ideological intolerance, vengeance, and religious zealotry became the common currency. Suddenly, if you are pro-choice, you could not be a Republican. If you are for smart and sensible taxes to balance out the budget, you could not be a Republican. If you are pro-civil rights, you could not be a Republican.
It started with minorities: they left the party. Then women; they divorced the GOP and sent it to sleep on the couch. Then, the young folks; they left and are leaving the Republican Party in droves. Then, someone stood up and told my niece and my grandchild that they are not fully Americans — just second class Americans because they are homosexual. They wished hell and damnation upon my loved ones just because they are different. Are we led by priests or are we led by rational politicians? Now, we have became the party of the Old Straight White Folks. We should rename the Republican Party the OSWF rather than the GOP.
Recently, since the election of Barack Obama, common sense has left the Republican Party completely. We are in the era of craziness. As David Frum has written, a deal was there to be made over the healthcare bill. Instead, this ideological purity blinded the GOP. As LBJ said it, instead of being inside the tent pissing out, we choose to be outside the tent, pissing against the wind. And we got splashed by our own nonsense. Why did we do that? Well, when a political party shrinks its electoral based to below 30% and is composed by one demographic group, all that is left are a bunch of zealots. We shrank it by kicking out of the party those who believe that abortion should be legal but limited. We shrank it by kicking out those who believe that an $11 trillion economy, like ours, needs a strong government, not a government that can be drowned in a bathtub. We shrank it when we sanctified Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, and canonized Sarah Palin. These are the leaders of my party nowadays. How did we go from William F. Buckley to Glenn Beck? How did we go from Eisenhower and Nixon to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? I do not know. What I do know, however, is that these leaders remind of me of the leaders of the Whig Party. And if they continue on their nonsense, they will bring the collapse of the GOP.
I do not recognize myself in the Republican Party anymore. As someone said it before, I did not leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me. I have the same ideological positions on most of the issues that I had when I voted for Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush in 2000. However, I just cannot trust the reins of our government and nation, of this formidably complicated and complex gigantic machine that is the USA, to the amateurish leadership of the Republican Party.
We are living through tough times. We are being challenged like I have never seen America being challenged before. China is a formidable foe, and it is out there competing against us on every field and beating us on several fronts. While our education budgets are being slashed in every state across the nation, China is doubling and tripling theirs. These are the challenges and challengers that we are facing. And we need our best and brightest to lead us, not a half-term governor or radio/TV talking heads.
Maybe I am too old and too cynical, but I think the Republican party is in the last stages of agony. If nothing happens, we might win an election or even two, but in the long run we will lose America.

From The Sunday London Times
I believe you’ve killed the church, Holy Father

ANDREW SULLIVAN
Only a morally bankrupt Pope could call news of his role in a child abuse cover-up ‘petty gossip’
Pope Benedict XVI prays during the celebration of the Lord's Passion on Good Friday on April 2, 2010 at Saint Peter's Basilica at The Vatican
Andrew Sullivan We know two things about Pope Benedict XVI this Easter that we didn’t know last Easter. We know that he was implicated in covering up two cases of multiple child rapes and molestations, one in Germany and one in the United States. His record on this makes it hard to distinguish his career from that of many other bishops and cardinals who were indirectly but clearly guilty of ignoring or covering up their underlings’ violation of the bodies and souls of the young and the vulnerable.
The Vatican has spent Holy Week fighting back against those facts, but it cannot abolish or undo them. The German case is the most clear-cut — because it was so glaring and so directly connected to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the Pope was then known. The facts are these: a priest, Peter Hullermann, was found guilty of raping children in at least three families under Ratzinger’s authority in the late 1970s. The local priest indicated that the families would “not file charges under the current circumstances”, and the case went to Ratzinger, who decided not to report the priest to the criminal authorities, nor to strip him of his office, but to send him for therapy and retain him as an active priest, capable of molesting again. The priest subsequently raped many more children; he was found guilty in 1986 and was given a suspended sentence.
The Pope’s first defence was that he knew nothing about it and that his subordinate at the time, Gerhard Gruber, took full responsibility. We then discovered that the psychiatrist in the case had contacted Ratzinger’s office on several occasions, warning him of the “danger” the priest represented. “I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children’,” the psychiatrist told The New York Times.
We also discovered that the future pontiff was copied on a memo about the reasons for transferring the child-rapist for therapy, which also indicated that the priest would return to pastoral work almost immediately: ie, he would still be allowed to interact with children. In the dry words of The New York Times: “Neither the Vatican nor the German archdiocese had previously mentioned in their statements that Cardinal Ratzinger was sent a memo relating to the reassignment of Father Hullermann.” We also know Ratzinger chaired the meeting at which the therapy was decided upon.
The Pope has responded to the news by having surrogates disparage The New York Times and publicly referring to “petty gossip” in an apparent allusion to these new facts.
The US case is more complicated. It involved the abuse of 200 deaf boys by one Father Lawrence Murphy in Wisconsin. The rapes, molestations and abuse continued for decades, and the hierarchy refused to take action. Many of the children had been sent to the school because their parents couldn’t cope; Murphy, according to reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “would come into their dorm at night, take them into a closet and molest them. [One victim, Arthur Budzinski,] said he told Archbishop William E Cousins and other officials about the abuse in 1974 when he was 26. The archbishop yelled at Budzinski, he said. He left the meeting crying”.
By 1996 — two decades later, with Murphy’s victims now at the 200 mark — the case went to Rome. Because some of the abuse had happened within the confessional itself, Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), had responsibility. The bulk of the blame for this abuse lies with the local archbishops, who sat on the case for decades, but when it did come to Ratzinger’s attention in 1996, the CDF dragged its feet, did not defrock the priest and, as the priest neared his death, encouraged an end to a canonical trial.
In this case, Ratzinger could more credibly argue he was out of the loop. But you wonder: if you were responsible for handling the case of a priest who you knew had abused, raped and molested up to 200 deaf children for decades, would you not believe it was your business to resolve it swiftly? Would you be concerned, as the documents from the case reveal he was, about the risk of “increasing scandal” and the “need for secrecy”? Would you encourage the archbishop to drop the trial in view of the priest’s ailing health and imminent death?
I can only speak for myself — a wayward Catholic sinner, a married homosexual who still clings to the truth of the Gospels and the sacredness of the church. I wouldn’t do any of those things. Full stop. If I knew I had any role — witting or unwitting — in allowing children to be raped by someone I could have stopped, by someone over whom I had authority, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would be haunted for the rest of my life. The thought of covering up for someone who forced sex on deaf children in closets at night is incomprehensible to me. Allowing someone who had raped three children to go elsewhere and rape many more, when you were explicitly warned that this man was a walking danger to children? I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but: no. Never. Under any circumstances; in any period of time; for whatever reason. Even if my failure were mere negligence, my conscience would be racked.
So, why, to ask the obvious question, isn’t the Pope’s? Even criminals in prison treat child molesters as the lowest of the low, the darkest manifestation of human evil. How can the Pope have any moral authority on any subject until and unless he has explained this series of events, held himself accountable and repented, if not resigned? Instead he carries on as if nothing has changed, as if nothing in these revelations about his life really matters.
It has to matter. A pope with no moral authority simply cannot function as a pope. Yes, he has ecclesiastical power. But ecclesiastical power without moral authority merely exposes the hollowness of an unaccountable, self-perpetuating clerisy. Does he think we don’t know? Does he understand that any parent of any child will be unable to imagine themselves in the same moral universe as this man?
He will not quit, of course. And he will not personally repent for these personal failings in public. This is all “petty gossip” fomented by enemies of the church. It’s old news. He has reformed things. He has, in the words of the Vatican, “nonresponsibility”. Others will take the fall for those crimes of the past. And the broken souls and bodies that remain out there — the scarred victims of this abuse of power — where are they this Easter? What place do they have on this, our holiest day?
They will have to seek justice from the state and healing from God. If they retain the hope of Easter, that good can eventually outlast evil, that darkness can cede to light, I pray they can cling to the faith that is still ours in a church that is increasingly alien. Peter denied Jesus three times. But Easter still came.
That is what many of us still cling to, through the incomprehension and betrayal. We still have our faith even if we can no longer trust the hierarchy of our church. Its moral authority is over. Our moral struggle never ends — until we find salvation in the God who loves children and doesn’t rape them.

andrewsullivan.com

Devil of a Scandal

By MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES
The Devil didn’t make me do it. The facts did.
Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist for the Holy See, said in Rome that The Times’s coverage of Pope Benedict, which cast doubt on his rigor in dealing with pedophile priests, was “prompted by the Devil.”
“There is no doubt about it,” the 85-year-old priest said, according to the Catholic News Agency. “Because he is a marvelous pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the Devil wants to grab hold of him.”
The exorcist also said that the abuse scandal showed that Satan uses priests to try to destroy the church, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too ... fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”
Actually, falling into temptation is eating cupcakes after you’ve given them up for Lent. Rape and molestation of children is far beyond what most of us think of as succumbing to worldly temptation.
This church needs a sexorcist more than an exorcist.
As this unholy week of shameful revelations unfurls, the Vatican is rather overplaying its hand. At the moment, the only thing between Catholics and God is a defensive church hierarchy that cannot fully acknowledge and heal the damage it has done around the globe.
How can the faithful enjoy Easter redemption when a Good Friday service at the Vatican was more concerned with shielding the pope than repenting the church’s misdeeds? The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, told those at St. Peter’s Basilica, including the pope, that he was thinking about the Jews in this season of Passover and Easter because “they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms.”
Amazingly enough, it turns out that the Franciscan priest was not referring to the collective violence and recurring symptoms of the global plague of Catholic priests who harmed children, enabled by the malignant neglect of the Vatican. He was talking about the collective violence and recurring symptoms of those critics — including victims, Catholics worldwide and commentators — who want the church to face up to its sins.
Father Cantalamessa went on to quote from the letter of an unnamed Jewish friend: “I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
As they say in Latin, “Ne eas ibi.” Don’t go there.
Mindful of the church’s long history of anti-Semitism, Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic literary editor and Jewish scholar, noted: “Why would the Catholic Church wish to defend itself by referring to other enormities in which it was also implicated? Anyway, the Jews endured more than a bad press.” This solidarity with Jews is also notable given that Italy’s La Repubblica reported that “certain Catholic circles” suspected that “a New York Jewish lobby” was responsible for the outcry against the pope.
It’s insulting to liken the tragic death of six million Jews with the appropriate outrage of Catholics at the decades-long cover-up of crimes against children by the very men who were supposed to be their moral guides. Even the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, tried to walk the cat back: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate comparison.”
Father Cantalamessa was expressing the sense of self-victimization permeating the Vatican at a time when more real victims are pouring forth. News reports said that the abuse hot line set up by the Catholic Church in Germany imploded the first day out when more than 4,000 callers charging abuse flooded the lines.
There is the pope’s inability to say anything long, adequate and sincere about the scandal and what role he has played, including acceding to the petition of the Wisconsin priest who abused 200 deaf kids that he should not be defrocked in his infirmity, to spare his priestly “dignity.” And there is his veiled dismissal of criticism as “petty gossip.” All this keeps him the subject of the conversation.
It is in crises that leaders are tested, that we get to see if they succumb to their worst instincts or summon their better angels. All Benedict has to do is the right thing.
The hero of the week, for simply telling the truth, is Ireland’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. His diocese is Dublin, where four archbishops spent three decades shrugging off abuse cases.
“There is no shortcut to addressing the past,” he said during a Holy Week Mass. “This has been a difficult year. We see how damaging failure of integrity and authenticity are to the body of Christ. Shameful abuse took place within the church of Christ. The response was hopelessly inadequate.”
Amen.

John Forsythe, ‘Dynasty’ Actor, Is Dead at 92

By ANITA GATES NY TIMES
John Forsythe, the debonair actor whose matinee-idol looks, confident charm and mellifluous voice helped make him the star of three hit television series, including ABC’s glamour soap “Dynasty,” died on Thursday at his home in Santa Ynez, Calif. He was 92.
His publicist, B. Harlan Boll, said the cause was complications of pneumonia, following a yearlong battle with cancer. Mr. Forsythe had earlier received a diagnosis of colon cancer, and in 1979 underwent quadruple bypass surgery.
Mr. Forsythe may be best remembered as Blake Carrington, the dapper, silver-haired but ruthless Denver oil tycoon on “Dynasty,” which ran from 1981 to 1989 and took its place as a symbol of the affluent decade of the Reagan administration. He often expressed amusement that the role, as the object of two women’s fierce affection — that of Joan Collins and Linda Evans — had made him a sex symbol in his 60s.
His first leader character in a series was another dashing, well-dressed, self-possessed man of means: Bentley Gregg, the playboy Beverly Hills lawyer in the sitcom “Bachelor Father” (1957-62). Gregg was bringing up his teenage niece (Noreen Corcoran), whose parents had died in an accident.
Between those two series, Mr. Forsythe played a crucial role in “Charlie’s Angels” (1976-81), the hit show about three young, attractive female detectives, originally played by Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett. Mr. Forsythe’s part was as the sexy telephone voice of their boss, a millionaire private eye who had others handle his cases.
His role in “Dynasty” brought him four Golden Globe award nominations and two Golden Globes as well as three Emmy Award nominations.
Mr. Forsythe was often endearingly forthright with interviewers. In 1981 he told The Associated Press: “I figure there are a few actors like Marlon Brando, George C. Scott and Laurence Olivier who have been touched by the hand of God. I’m in the next bunch.”
Another time, speaking of a fictional nation featured in the later seasons of “Dynasty,” he said: “Moldavia — we’re still living that down. That was one of our less effective story lines.”
It was certainly one of their most preposterous. The story hit its peak with a season finale in which revolutionaries barged into a royal wedding with machine guns blazing; half the glamorous cast were left for dead until fall.
John Lincoln Freund was born on Jan. 29, 1918, in Penns Grove, N.J. His family later moved to New York City, where his father was a stockbroker and where John graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.
He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but dropped out after three years because of a particularly successful summer job as an announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. People liked his voice so much that he easily moved into radio acting.
Mr. Forsyth made his stage and film debuts in the early 1940s. In 1942 he appeared on the New York stage in a supporting role as a coastguardsman in “Yankee Point,” a home-front drama. His first credited movie appearance was as a sailor in “Destination Tokyo” (1943), starring Cary Grant. That same year he was in the ensemble of “Winged Victory,” Moss Hart’s Broadway tribute to the United States Army Air Forces, the military’s aviation branch during World War II, in which Mr. Forsythe served.
Beginning in 1948, Mr. Forsythe did guest appearances on dozens of television series. Twice in the early 1950s he played a newspaper editor, in “The Captive City” (1952) and “It Happens Every Thursday” (1953).
He was back in a military uniform for his big Broadway break, playing a bumbling American officer in occupied Japan in “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1953). Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, called Mr. Forsythe “as perfect in the part of the captain as Henry Fonda was in ‘Mister Roberts.’ ”
Mr. Forsyth did several Broadway shows, including replacing Henry Fonda in “Mister Roberts,” and was an original member of the Actors Studio, New York’s bastion of Method acting. But for the sake of his family, he chose the security of television.
“I’ve had a good time,” he told The Globe and Mail, the Toronto newspaper, in 1984. “But if I had been willing to starve so that I could play Hamlet, I might have been a better actor than I am today.”
Like many television regulars, he had his share of less successful network ventures. They included three sitcoms: “The John Forsythe Show,” in which he played an Air Force major running a girls’ school (it lasted one season, 1965-66); “To Rome With Love,” about a widowed professor living in Italy (1969-71); and “The Powers That Be,” about a clueless United States senator whose life is run by others. It ran for 21 episodes (1992-93), possibly because viewers weren’t interested in seeing a clueless John Forsythe.
One of his finest television roles was outside the series format. He starred as the theater critic Al Manheim in the acclaimed 1959 television film “What Makes Sammy Run?”
His film career covered various genres. He played a helpful artist in Alfred Hitchcock’s comic mystery “The Trouble With Harry” (1955); a wealthy political type in “Kitten With a Whip” (1964), a crime drama with Ann-Margret; the rich man whose family makes his young wife disappear in “Madame X” (1966); and the chief murder investigator in “In Cold Blood” (1967).
His last full-fledged major film appearance was in the 1988 holiday comedy “Scrooged.” He played a contemporary Marley’s Ghost, returning from the dead in rotting golf clothes.
Mr. Forsythe’s voice was heard, however, in the 2000 “Charlie’s Angels” film and its 2003 sequel. His last television appearance was in May 2006, participating in a “Dynasty” cast reunion.
Mr. Forsythe was briefly married (1938-40) to Parker McCormick, with whom he had a son. Three years after their divorce, he married Julie Warren. They had two daughters and were together, for more than 50 years, until her death in 1994. Nicole Carter became his third wife in 2002 and survives him.
He is also survived by his son, Dall; his daughters, Page Courtemanche and Brooke Forsythe, all of Southern California; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
“I always said life consists of love and work,” Mr. Forsythe told a writer for TV Guide not long after his second wife’s death. “I tried to balance it 50-50. And, of course, now I’m so happy I did.”