Pope Benedict has admitted his church is “wounded” after recent paedophile admissions / AFP Source: AFP

In another stinging twist to the paedophile scandal enveloping the Catholic Church, the hidden-camera images were being sold illicitly, with a Bluetooth video file downloaded to the purchaser’s mobile telephone upon payment of $3 to $6.

The Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper reported the video was that of Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa, 84, engaged in oral sex in front of a church altar with a 19-year-old former choirboy.

The choirboy says on the tape he was abused by Father Barbosa for many years, since he was a minor.

Its screening on a Brazilian television station last month sparked a parliamentary inquiry into priestly paedophilia, and deepened the scandal that has come to light in Europe and the Americas, badly tarnishing the reign of Pope Benedict XVI.

According to reports quoting Father Barbosa’s lawyer, the priest had been blackmailed over the video and paid $US23,000 ($25,000) last year to prevent it being made public.

He later refused to make further payments.

Father Barbosa, who ran the parish in the north-eastern town of Arapiraca, was arrested this week and is currently under house detention, with his passport confiscated, pending the outcome of the investigation.

Two other local priests also implicated in alleged paedophilia by three former choirboys speaking in the video have been ordered to not leave town.

Father Barbosa denies being a paedophile.

ALSO;

http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2530647.ece/Catholic_nuns_also_abused_children

Catholic nuns also abused children

Published: 23 April 2010 10:14 | Changed: 24 April 2010 09:52

In the late 1950s, the Roman Catholic Hospital of Our Dear Lady Mother of in Eindhoven was hell for Petra Jorissen. The reason had a name: sister Johanetty. "We will break that little will of yours, break it," she would squeal, as she forced the remains of a meal Jorissen had just thrown up back down her throat.

Jorissen, now a 59-year-old journalist, recalled how the sister would also come to her room at night. "When I heard the squeaking of her lacquered men's shoes I immediately knew it was her," Jorissen said. "Only after she had come to my bed would she turn on her flashlight. By then, she had always carefully closed the curtains surrounding it." The sister would then fondle her genitals.

The nun did not ruin her life, Jorissen said, although she still sees her "devilish face" flash in front of her eyes at least once a day. She is not looking for financial compensation, she said. "But I do hope that there will be an inquiry into the pedagogical practices of female clerics in the 1950s and 60s."

So far, most media reports of abuse within the Catholic Church have focussed exclusively on male perpetrators. But there has also been abuse by female clerics, particularly in children's homes.

Sadistically motivated abuse

Since NRC Handelsblad and RNW started publishing testimonies from victims of abuse within the Catholic Church, 29 women have come forward. Ten women reported being abused by male priests, while 19 women said they were the victim of clerics of their own sex. Of all the reports of maltreatment by nuns, some 40 percent concern child abuse.

All the women told how physical love and tenderness were absent from the children's homes and institutes maintained by sisterly orders. Most homes knew a harsh and repressive climate, which lead to humiliation and wanton violence, sometimes sadistically motivated.

The hospital where Petra Jorissen stayed in the 1950s was run by the Sisters of Love. Jorissen was not the only one to point to this order. The Sisters ran dozens of hospitals, orphanages and hospices in the Catholic parts of the Netherlands.

Merapi Obermayer lived in the Maria Boarding School in Amersfoort. She still remembers the names of the five nuns who tormented her. Feliciana was the worst, she recalled. One time, the nun kicked her down a flight of marble stairs without warning. She called her names, such as "bastard" or "God's mistake". The boarding school is closed now, and the nuns are dead, including sister Hendrina, who did try to be nice, said Obermayer.

Screaming, beating, forcefully grabbing children by the arm or making them stand in the corner for even the most minor offences were all common practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Pedagogical principles of the era allowed for physical punishment, in school as well as at home.

The majority of the reports of abuse by nuns, however, concern sexual abuse and violence that exceed even the more lenient norms of the time. A 16-year-old nurse in training, at the Heerlen Midwives' School, was forced to have sex with a nun repeatedly over a period of eight months. When the school got wind of what was going on, the girl was expelled. "Bye bye education, bye bye future," the victim, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, recalled. The nun was allowed to stay.

'Gestapo nuns'

In the 1940s, the Kollenberg orphanage in Sittard was run by German Carmelites. "Gestapo nuns," is what Ben Jaspers called them, as he described their reign of terror. "Bedwetting was punished by pinching and twisting ears or sometimes pulling children along by their ears. We were constantly humiliated. Bedwetters were forced to stand absolutely still, wearing nothing but their dirty underwear over their head." Jaspers said he was afraid to sleep at night, fearing he might wet his bed again.

At a sanatorium run by Franciscans in Bunde, naughty children were put in a tub filled with ice cold water, a punishment applied in other places as well. Josefine Klaassen returned to Bunde recently. "I remember standing there," she recalled, "looking up at that church tower. I felt fear, sadness and helplessness come over me. As if it hadn't been 50 years since, but only 50 days."

Excessive violence was common in many children's homes, and child protective services did nothing to stop it. Ben Jaspers described how two screaming German nuns forced a five-year-old to eat cold porridge. They would hold him down and bang on the back of his head. One nun would force open his mouth and pinch his nose. The porridge would go in, and the child would vomit. The nuns would force him to eat his own sick. The scene would repeat itself, accompanied by more tears.

The violence did not have to be excessive to remain etched in a victim's childhood memory. Late in the 1950s, father Paduinus walked the halls of Huize Bethlehem children's home wearing comfy slippers. He was a god to the nuns. He smoked cigars, and girls who were busy scrubbing the floor on their knees had to catch any ash he spilled. Girls that didn’t were punished by the mother superior. "As a 14-year-old child, that hurt me," one girl who refused to catch the priest's ash recalled. "I think about it often: abuse of power. That is what it was."

US May Deploy New Intercontinental Weapons System.

Called Prompt Global Strike, the new class of weapons would allow the United States to attack with conventional weapons targets across the globe.

According to a report Friday in The New York Times newspaper, the new weapons could carry out tasks like killing terrorist Osama bin Laden in a cave, destroying a North Korean missile as it is being transported to the launch pad, or demolishing an Iranian nuclear site - all without using nuclear bombs.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush and his staff first proposed the technology, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a recent interview with ABC News the idea is moving forward under the Obama administration.

"We're also developing this Conventional Prompt Global Strike - which really had not gone anywhere in the Bush administration, but has been embraced by the new administration - that allows us to use long-range missiles with conventional warheads," he said. "So we have, we have more tools, if you will, in the deterrence kit bag than we used to."

The report says the Prompt Global Strike warhead would be launched on a long-range missile traveling several times the speed of sound that could destroy targets halfway around the world in less than an hour.

After reaching a certain altitude, the missile would release a glider that could be guided by satellites to hit a target with pinpoint precision.

Earlier this month the United States announced its Nuclear Posture Review, which limits the circumstances under which the country would use nuclear weapons, with a long-term goal of achieving a nuclear-free world.

Although the new policy is designed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in America's security strategy, officials say it will not adversely affect the nation's ability to protect itself and its allies.

"We intend to maintain a robust nuclear deterrent. Let no one be mistaken, the United States will defend ourselves and defend our partners and allies," said Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State. "We intend to sustain that nuclear deterrent by modernizing the existing stockpile. In fact, we have $5 billion in this year's budget going into that very purpose."

According to the Times report, concerns about the Prompt Global Strike technology led Russia to successfully demand that the United States decommission one nuclear missile for each new conventional weapon activated by the Pentagon.

That provision is included in the new nuclear arms reduction treaty signed by the United States and Russia earlier this month in Prague.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a private research group, says Russia's fear of a small number of conventionally armed missiles is exaggerated.

"Russia's concerns about the conversion of long-range nuclear armed ballistic missiles to conventional payloads, to carrying conventional payloads, is overblown, but nevertheless this is a challenge that the U.S. and Russia are going to have to manage in the years ahead," said Kimball.

Russia and other nations would reportedly be allowed to inspect the Prompt Global Strike silos to see first-hand that the weapons are nonnuclear.

The new weapons would be deployed far from the strategic nuclear force so other countries seeing a missile launch on their radar screens would not mistake it for an atomic attack.

The Pentagon reportedly hopes to deploy an early version of the system by 2015.