De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Late in the 1990's, a priest in the diocese of Cairns, Australia was accused of abusing children. The priest fled home to his native Gozo, a small island in the Maltese archipelago. Cairns Bishop James Foley, ( who has exhibited public cause for concern previously ) told The Cairns Post he had been in email contact with the current Bishop of Gozo, where this man Joseph Sultana is still serving as a priest. The Times of Malta reports Cairns Bishop James Foley, who offered the victim religious counselling when informed of the abuse in November 2009 ,  "The current Bishop of Gozo and I have exchanged emails on this matter, initiated by him after this was reported in the media in Malta," Bishop Foley said. "Now I have no authority or jurisdiction over Joseph Sultana. "The alleged victim and his solicitors have been urged by myself and our lawyers that this matter should be in police hands, as they are the only ones with the means and the authority to investigate...

  If you care about the Church, you're probably struggling a bit at the moment for lots of reasons. With Jorge Bergoglio at the reins as Pope Francis, it feels like a mad old parish priest well past his sell by date is running things. He doesn't care about theology, canon law, doctrine, or the effect his decisions have. He supports and promotes the UN, which has at its' heart a dubious strategy of population control . Most of his teaching seems troublingly pantheistic , and occasionally contains more than a feint whiff of direct opposition to Catholic teaching, and I quote: Today we hear the voice of creation admonishing us to return to our rightful place in the natural created order – to remember that we are part of this interconnected web of life, not its masters. #SeasonOfCreation — Pope Francis (@Pontifex) September 3, 2020 However perhaps the most troubling dimension to Jose Bergoglio's reign as the supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church is his consistent associati...

There is so much to read and so much information to take in about the devastating Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report into abuse in the Catholic Church. The harrowing 1,356-page document is the result of the office of the attorney general’s investigation into allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the dioceses of Pittsburgh, Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg and Scranton. Two other Pennsylvanian dioceses — Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown — were spared only because they had been previously investigated. The numbers speak for themselves: More than 300 priests in the six dioceses sexually abused a large number of minors over the span of seven decades. The number of victims is estimated at 1,000 at least, but it may actually be significantly higher. The report claims that the priest abusers were routinely shielded or moved by bishops and Church officials. “All of [the victims] were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by Church leaders who preferred to protect the abu...

I've been a witness to an extraordinary exchange on Facebook this week. Bishop Mario Grech has a reputation for being a bully, see this report from 2015 . He also was reported to have threatened a priest with suspension for refusing to read the heretical guidelines issued in the wake of Amoris Laetitia, see the Catholic Herald article here . Bishop Grech has also refused to explain why he has protected priests who have been found guilty of abuse by the CDF see here  while Archbishop Charles Scicluna reiterates his commitment to ‘tackle’ every case of abuse. Although more recently a Gozitan priest has been convicted for molestation in the Maltese civil courts and he was reported to the police by +Grech. This is clearly an improvement, although common consensus on the islands is that it is too little too late when one considers the lack of action till then. Earlier this week, Bishop Grech confirmed this reputation as a bully by publicly attacking a faithful Maltese...

This year in Gozo, we rented a farmhouse in Gharb, which, by extraordinary coincidence, overlooked the shrine of Ta'Pinu. The house was called Dar is-Sultan , which by my (poor) reckoning, translates to something like 'home of the king'. I recall on our first visit to Gozo, being dropped off at our accommodation, which appeared to be a mid-terraced two up, two down. It was actually very spacious and beautiful. This is the building style in Gozo and you never know what you're actually getting. It's also quite difficult to tell from the website you rent it from. A word to the wise whilst we are on that subject: a family member booked a villa in the South of France through Owners Direct at the same time as us and their communication was hacked; they ended up losing all their money before a phone call to the villa owner alerted them to the fraud. The moral of the story is always make sure you speak to the owner if you're using Owners Direct! Dar is-Sultan ...

I am just back from two weeks holiday in Gozo, which is a tiny island of the Maltese archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea just 14km long by 7.25km wide. We have been going there since the year 2,000, albeit with a few gaps where we tried different destinations. However, wherever we try, we always seem to end up back in Gozo. If we miss a year, we find ourselves longing for the island. The island of Gozo has long been associated with Ogygia , the island home of the nymph Calypso in Homer's Epic  Odyssey . Calypso, possessed of great supernatural powers, holds the hero Odysseus captive for a number of years because of her love for him before releasing him to continue his journey home. Of course, there is also the military history of the Maltese Islands, both the amazing story of Malta's heroic stand in World War II, but also the extraordinary story of the Great Siege of 1565, when the Maltese, together with the Knights of St. John, held off the Ottoman Empire, wh...