WORLD - international news items related to the Catholic Church

National Catholic Reporter, July 16, 1999 by Matt Kantz

Former Irish nun Found guilty of rape

Dublin Central Criminal Court has found a former Sister of Mercy guilty of raping a 10-year-old girl.

Under Irish law anyone who assists in a sexual assault can be charged with rape. This is the first time in Ireland that a former female religious has been prosecuted for a sexual offense.

During the seven-day trial, the victim, now 21, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said she was indecently assaulted twice by Paul "Pablo" McCabe, now 50, while Nora Wall, now 51, held her down.

Wall, who was known as Sr. Dominic when she was a member of the Mercy order and administrator of St. Michael's Child Care Center in Cappoquin, County Waterford, denied the charges.

The victim's allegations were supported by another witness, who was also a child in the care of the home, who claimed to have seen one of the attacks sometime in 1987-88.

McCabe, who claims to be a schizophrenic, said that the victim had consented to sex with him on her 12th birthday.

Vatican denies link to U.S. insurance

The Vatican distanced itself July 1 from a U.S. insurance scandal and the two priests who reportedly provided a cloak of respectability for a missing financier who is being sought in the disappearance of $300 million.

In an official statement, the Vatican said a charitable foundation established by Martin Frankel, the missing money manager, had neither legal standing with the Vatican nor an account at the Vatican bank.

Investigators in the United States suspect the charity, St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, was a front Frankel used to buy several American insurance companies. Frankel is suspected of embezzling more than $300 million from those companies.

Fr. Peter Jacobs of the Washington archdiocese, president of the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, and Msgr. Emilio Colagiovanni, an emeritus judge on the Roman Rota (the court of appeals of the Holy See), claim they were persuaded by Frankel to support the foundation in return for sizable gifts to the church.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the Holy See had no relations with Jacobs and neither furnished nor received funds from the foundation or the Monitor Ecclesiasticus Foundation, of which Colagiovanni is president.

Nearly $2 billion is also missing from the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation. Frankel disappeared May 5-after a fire at his home in Greenwich, Conn.

CIA knew of Pinochet abuses, documents show

U.S. documents declassified June 30 show that the CIA knew almost immediately after Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile that his military regime engaged in "indiscriminate killings" and other abuses to wipe out opposition.

"The regime shows no sign of relenting in its determination to deal swiftly and decisively with dissidents," CIA field officers reported to headquarters on Oct. 12, 1973, one month after the coup that ousted Salvador Allende, a Marxist who had been elected president.

The only information the agency reported to Washington was how many Chileans were killed, a figure Pinochet's lieutenants kept as a carefully guarded secret.

Pinochet, 83, is in London faring extradition to Spain, where charges of human rights abuses by his regime are pending.

Cardinal criticizes new British medical guidelines

Cardinal Thomas Winning of Glasgow, Scotland, has urged support for a campaign against new British medical guidelines that would give legal protection to doctors who hasten the death of their patients by withdrawing food and fluids.

Winning, chairman of the Joint Bioethics Committee of the bishops' conferences of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, called the guidelines "sinister" and "worrying" in a June 30 statement.

The British Medical Association published its new guidelines in London June 23. Since a 1993 ruling in the House of Lords, health authorities have been allowed to withdraw food and fluids from patients in a vegetative state provided the authorities have the approval of a court and the patient's family.

Now, the medical association wants to eliminate consultation with the courts and the families and extend the criteria to cover all patients.

The guidelines are not legally binding, but if a doctor has followed them rigorously a prosecution is unlikely.

Dr. Michael Wilks, chairman of the association's medical committee, said the guidelines would simply give doctors a more "secure, legally robust framework" for decision-making.

"We recommend that any decision to withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration should be reviewed by a senior doctor from outside the immediate team, and I believe that both doctors and families will find this helpful and reassuring," Wilks said in a statement.

However, Winning said the guidelines "will cause very real anxiety among thousands of patients and their families. ... In essence, the guidelines give doctors the power of life or death over stroke victims, accident victims, the elderly and those with Alzheimer's disease."

U.N. population conference reach agreement

Over the objections of the Vatican, Nicaragua and Argentina, a United Nations conference on stabilizing the world population, has adopted a proposal that public health systems "train and equip health service providers and ... take other measures to assure that ... abortion is safe and accessible in countries where abortion is legal."