While-Reading Quotes
An excerpt from the extracts taken from the official transcript of the deposition of Bishop Curry in one of the cases brought against the church in Los Angeles for negligent supervision of paedophile priests, given below will certainly give you an idea as to what this book is all about:
Question:Did you believe in 1986 that you could be cured of molesting children?
Answer:I don't know that I had any belief about that.
Q:Did you know in 1986 that molesting a child was a crime?
A:Yes
Q:Did you call the police?
A:No
Q:Why?
A:He came in under........a confidential understanding with the church confessing to something that he had done and I believed that that was a confidential matter.The above quote is from one of the appendices given in the controversial book titled The Case of the Pope by Geoffrey Robertson.As the blurb claims,the author is a distinguished human rights lawyer and a judge who evinces a deep respect for the good works of Catholics and their church.He explains how Vatican or the Holy See as it is popularly called remains a serious enemy to the advances of human rights.
Saying it is not his purposes(or expertise) to explore the cases at a sociological level,Geoffrey Robertson presents his arguments in the style of a court order.
Here goes another excerpt from the same book,not from the any appendix but from the first chapter itself:
.....In effect,the church has in many countries been running a parallel system of criminal justice, unbeknown-st to and deliberately hidden from the public,police and parliaments,in which the guilty went unpublished and the lips of their victims were sealed.How is it?Does it remind you of many problems around?Or is it a cancerous growth world wide?
The book is probably an answer to the question.
