itccs | June 23 2012
But what about those that ordered him? Placing the Pope and Crimen Sollicitationis on Trial
How the mighty are falling.
Watching William Lynn go to jail is immensely pleasurable, partly because it reminds me of the rapid collapse of the Richard Nixon administration years ago, as the conviction of successive Presidential flunkies eventually led prosecutors right to the door of the Executive office.
Being students of history, the Vatican mob must be nervous today, regardless of their success in nullifying their main concern in the Lynn case, which was the charge of criminal conspiracy against him. For such a conviction would have connected Lynn’s protection of child rapists in his charge to the Vatican policy that shielded him for so long – namely, Crimen Solicitationas – and to Pope Benedict himself, who has personally authorized the policy.
Crimen Solicitationas is the law in the Roman Catholic church that orders every priest and Bishop in the world to protect child raping clergy or face excommunication. It is a clear command to obstruct justice and conspire in an enormous, global assault on the innocent, and it implicates the Catholic hierarchy as a whole in a crime against humanity.
The historic conviction of William Lynn, as the first member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America to go to jail for aiding and abetting clerical child rapists, is no small feat, considering the political weight of the papacy and its strange ally in the Obama administration, which did its utmost to derail the Lynn case. But where Lynn’s conviction will lead is uncertain, since the entire matter of whom and what allowed him to help terrorize and destroy generations of children was ignored by the court’s decision.
This fact is odd, considering how early on in the court proceedings it was established that Lynn was not acting alone, but clearly was following the instructions of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, the boss of Lynn’s Philadelphia Diocese who Lynn served as an aide. Last January, Bevilacqua suffered a convenient and sudden death the day after he was declared fit to stand trial in the Lynn case.
Vatican machinations aside, if William Lynn’s conviction is to have the long-term significance that many survivors of church terror hope it will, it must be followed by a legal assault on the Vatican and its policy of Crimen, which is the executive order that authorized William Lynn to do what he did in the first place. Any failure to do so will be analogous to convicting an Auschwitz S.S. guard for mass murder while ignoring the Wannsee Protocol, or the orders from his superiors in Berlin.