Pope Francis Removes the Secrecy Requirements for Church Documents on Child Sex Abuse & NY PML SEC 109 to keep the Orthodox, infidels & others out of Nassau OTB at the behest of Andrew Cuomo who kills NY Const Art 1 Sec 3 as act of misguided faith
Activists have called for the move to help investigators gather evidence against offenders
ROME— Pope Francis has lifted the secrecy requirement for Catholic Church documents related to priests’ sexual abuse of minors, granting a longstanding demand from activists who say it will help civil authorities gather evidence against abusers in the church.
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Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
In a decree published by the Vatican Tuesday, the pope ruled that the “pontifical secret” binding church officials to confidentiality doesn’t apply to evidence and legal proceedings regarding clerical sex abuse or its coverup.
“Office confidentiality shall not prevent the fulfillment of the obligations laid down in all places by civil laws, including any reporting obligations, and the execution of enforceable requests of civil judicial authorities,” said the decree, which Pope Francis approved earlier this month.
In an explanatory note, the president of the Vatican City State court, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, said that the lifting of the secrecy requirement applied both to the Vatican itself and to local church authorities handling abuse cases around the world.
Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, of the Vatican’s office for church legislation, stressed in another note that the change didn’t apply to the seal of the confessional, which forbids priests from revealing any information transmitted in a sacramental confession, even if it pertains to sex abuse.
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The lifting of the secrecy requirement has been long sought by campaigners against sex abuse in the clergy to help bring offenders to justice.
At an international summit of bishops on sex abuse held in February at the Vatican, German Cardinal Reinhard Marx called for revising the secrecy rules to preserve the church’s credibility on abuse. “It is not transparency which damages the church, but rather the acts of abuse committed, the lack of transparency or the ensuing coverup,” Cardinal Marx said at the time.
“Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed or not even created,” Cardinal Marx said. “The rights of victims were effectively trampled underfoot and left to the whims of the individual.”
Earlier in the pontificate, the pope’s advisory panel on child protection, led by Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley, had proposed lifting the pontifical secret on Vatican files related to abuse, but the idea was dropped until this year.
Tuesday’s announcement is the latest measure to ensue from February’s summit, which Pope Francis called in response to a string of recent abuse scandals that had beset the church in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and Australia.
In May, the pope responded to pressure to make church leaders more accountable by enacting new rules for investigating bishops over sexual abuse or its coverup, facilitating allegations by the public and requiring local dioceses to report allegations to the Vatican without delay.
Also on Tuesday, the Vatican announced that the pope had redefined child pornography under church law to apply to images of minors up to the age of 18, up from 14 under previous legislation.
The Vatican also said on Tuesday that Pope Francis had accepted the resignation of Archbishop Luigi Ventura, the papal envoy to France, who has been under investigation by Paris prosecutors for allegedly sexually assaulting a local Paris official earlier this year. The Vatican’s mission to France declined to comment. Archbishop Ventura turned 75, the age at which bishops are required to submit their resignation to the pope, earlier this month.
—Naomie Bisserbe in Paris contributed to this article.
Write to Francis X. Rocca at francis.rocca@wsj.com
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