Papa Roma vs Joe Pa
Joe Paterno, the head football coach at Penn State University was fired on November for not "doing enough" to protect kids from being raped by an assistant coach. According to a grand jury report, Paterno was told by a graduate assistant coach that he had witnessed Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in the locker room. Paterno relayed the graduate assistant's report to the athletic director and moved on. The police were not contacted and Sandusky kept assaulting boys. The president of Penn State was also fired by the board of directors.
Joseph Ratzinger, on the other hand, oversaw the sexual assaults of children in the world-wide Roman Church for two decades as the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the papacy of Karol Wojtyla (a.k.a. Pope John Paul II). Among the thousands of cases of cover-up of sexual assaults of children by priests and nuns, there are three cases in particular that are damning against Joseph Ratzinger personally. Not only did the current pope not "do enough" to protect children from rapists but he refused to remove the predators when begged to do so by lower-ranked priests.
At Penn State University, there was a higher power who did what the self-centered men would not do to themselves. When the scandal broke in the media, no one involved stepped down voluntarily. Paterno announced that he planned to retire at the end of the season and informed the board they need not take any action. The following day, the board fired him. When Joseph Ratzinger, a known enabler of hundreds if not thousands of child rapes or molestations, refuses to step down, it is incumbent upon other to knock "His Holiness" off of his pedestal and send him home, if not to jail.
HOW TO FIRE THE POPE
ARTICLES AND VIDEO LINKS REGARDING JOSEPH RATZINGER
FireThePope.com is a web site that aims to tell the story of the Roman Catholic Church's outrageous scandal of childhood sexual assaults in epidemic numbers and the concerted cover-up by the Church's higher-ups. Though Karol Wojtyla, Ratzinger's predecessor, claimed in 2001 that the scandal was an "American problem", similar crimes and almost identical cover-up practices have since been exposed in Europe, Canada, and Australia. It is only a matter of time before it is known that children in every corner of the globe known to the Roman Catholic Church have been raped and that those rapes were covered-up by the Church's local bishops and vicars.
Click on the photo to hear one man tell his story to CNN.
A Closer Look at a Massive Scandal
Though this web site includes some information on the scandal on an international scale, our focus with be the scandal in the United States of American. More specifically, we focus on a single American parish in Geneva Illinois, 37 miles west of Chicago. St. Peter Parish saw the scandal hit home when "Father" Mark Campobello was arrested in December 2002 for the sexual abuse and assault of a female student at the parish school. Shortly thereafter, another girl came forward with similar accusations against "Father" Mark and he eventually pleaded guilty and served approximately four years in prison.
The story of St. Peter does not end there, however. Efforts on the part of the parish administration and the Rockford Diocese to cover-up and keep secret Campobello's propensity to molest female students, and the fact that their cover-up allowed the priest to continue abusing, led to a $2.2 million settlement in a civil lawsuit filed by the two victims. Despite the tab paid for by parishioners, no bishop, vicar, pastor, attorney, or principal who were part of the cover-up were fired, reprimanded, demoted, or otherwise disciplined. In fact, one of the vicars was promoted, the pastor was treated like a rock star by priest-worshipping laity, and the principal was sent off into retirement with a standing ovation and a healthy pension check.
What happened at St. Peter is not unusual. Sadly, it is quite typical. Catholics everywhere are rallying around their priests, even the ones who rape little kids and the other ones who let them. The priests, vicars, and bishops who are getting promoted these days are usually the ones who do the best job covering up sexual crimes against children or criticizing the secular media. The few good priest who are left have given up on any promotion because the refuse to "play the game".
There are some events that set St. Peter apart from the rest of the crowd. In 2003, a parishioner wrote a letter to the editor, pointing out the fact that the bishop, Thomas Doran, was held in contempt of court for refusing to turn over court-ordered documents in the criminal case against Campobello and stated he would withhold donations to the diocese until the bishop decided to cooperate with the prosecutors in the case. In 2004, the parish choir director was arrested for a brutal murder in New York where he had previously lived. Michael Pavone was later found guilty by a jury and was given a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Several years later, he died of hepititis while incarcerated. Finally, the parish pastor, Joe Jarmoluk, hired a personal attorney, Canice Rice of St. Louis, and became involved with a con-man, James Grice, who claims to be filming a documentary about Jarmoluk titled Forsaken.
A Visit to St. Peter Parish in Geneva Illinois
