The pope to be arrested for crimes against humanity?

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.

Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

They have commissioned the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to present a justification for legal action.

The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”

Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."

Last year pro-Palestinian activists persuaded a British judge to issue an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the Israeli politician, for offences allegedly committed during the 2008-09 conflict in Gaza. The warrant was withdrawn after Livni cancelled her planned trip to the UK.

“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” said Stephens. “Geoffrey and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”

Source 1

Last Friday the Associated Press broke a story involving the current Pope and his personal involvement in delaying the removal of a sexually abusive priest from the Oakland Diocese for six years.

The news is merely one more piece of evidence that has come to light in recent months as the Vatican faces fire over the culture of pervasive sexual molestation that occurs within the Clergy.

Acting in response to this constantly evolving mass of evidence detailing the Vatican's culpability in allowing the abuse to knowingly continue and the direct involvement of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, the atheist figure-heads Richard Dawkins ad Christopher Hitchens are planning to arrest the Pontiff on his visit to Britain in early September, reports The Sunday Times.

    "Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

    They have commissioned the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to present a justification for legal action.

    The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.

    Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”

    Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."

To be frank; good for them. Given the power and influence of the Catholic Church, its monetary assets and political influence it is extremely unlikely that these actions will be successful; we'll have to wait until September to find out. What it does do is fire a shot across the bow.

People are done. The Church's numbers in in decline in most of the educated world, people are tired of the lies, the scandal, and the betrayal. Whatever God may think of the Pope, that's its business; here on earth we don't look kindly on those who shield psychological villains that prey on the weak and defenseless, subverting their trust to fulfill their barely understood sexual deviancy.

When it comes to this form of abuse, the level of false-authority wielded by these "men of God" creates psychological terror beyond anything else imaginable. Raised within the Catholic faith, children are taught that priests are second only to God, a holy figure beyond reproach. These are the men they confess their sins to, whom they must trust explicitly with their inner hearts, their guilty deeds and hurtful remarks.

To be sexually abused by such a person leaves a child in a state of absolute confusion. They blame themselves, feeling they are responsible, that God chose them for this punishment, that their sins are the cause of their suffering. The few who do manage to break the wall of silence surrounding abuse are met only by the stone face of the Church as it attempts to buy their silence with money and the threat of eternal damnation.

That is the crime of the Holy See - not the abuse. It's the continuation of abuse, the stonewalling, the wish to hide it all under the rug. The doctrine of the Catholic Church permanently scars its victims, first raping their bodies, then their minds.

Crimes against Humanity?

Absolutely.

Source 2



Oh, this should be interesting. 

Lol, ok, so I didn't read all this yet, but I started laughing at the first line in your first quote.

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

I feel like it's not an ambush at all if we already all know about it.


nice, should be fun lol.

lol

There's no way this is going to work. Most likely, the entire visit is going to be canceled either by the Vatican or by the British government themselves. Still, the thought of the pope being behind bars is quite amusing.

Richard Dawkins is just looking for a way back into the public eye.

yeah, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are both huge douchebags who present the stupidest and oldest arguments against religion and pretend that they're novel. From reading that letter, the case doesn't seem to actually have any merit, and even if it did, the prime minister of Britain would issue a pardon. Besides, the Vatican may only be a permanent observer of the UN, but the UK recognizes it as a sovereign state and that is what would matter for the common law to apply immunity. Aside from which, why are they commissioning human rights lawyers to pursue a criminal charge? They clearly know it's just for show. In any case, I doubt the Vatican would allow themselves to be strongarmed by those doinks and cancel the visit.

Also, I didn't capitalize "yeah" because I wanted to annoy Irock.

Oh, I'd be so glad if I could believe it...!
But no, I know it won't happen. Church never pays for what it does. Church will always win.
Here in Spain people can't even apostate, because church won't delete the files and registers it has from them, and they will still count as christians in statistics and registers.

Really makes me sick!