\nCatholic lawmaker Peter King ripped Church leaders as hypocrites Thursday for the Vatican\u2019s foreign minister claim that the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is worse for America than the Sept. 11 attacks.
\n\u201cIf there\u2019s anyone in the world who has no right to speak on sexual abuse, it\u2019s the Vatican,\u201d said Rep. King, an anti-abortion Republican. \u201cThis is the height of hypocrisy.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an interview published Wednesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo described the abuses as \u201ca tragic episode in the relationship with Islam\u201d and said the scandal would fuel hatred for the West and for Christianity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe torture? A more serious blow to the United States than Sept. 11. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves,\u201d Lajolo was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n
Disturbing photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused and sexually humiliated by American military at the Abu Ghraib prison have stunned the world, and prompted some Democrats to call for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign or be fired.<\/p>\n
King said the Catholic Church should be the last group to claim moral high ground on issues of sexual abuse, given the past several years of revelations about priests abusing children for years while church officials failed to stop such behavior.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever the United States has done to prisoners in Iraq is nothing compared to what priests and nuns did to Catholic kids for decades while the Catholic hierarchy covered it up,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink of the thousands of kids in the U.S. and Ireland who were abused by priests and nuns \u2014 you wonder where the Vatican\u2019s moral compass is.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because three of you have sent it to me in the last hour: Peter King blasts Vatican “hypocricy.” Catholic lawmaker Peter King ripped Church leaders as hypocrites Thursday for the Vatican\u2019s foreign minister claim that the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is worse for America than the Sept. 11 attacks. \u201cIf there\u2019s anyone in the world…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}