The powerful Austrian Catholic church was plunged into its second big sex scandal in a decade on Monday when a seminary run by arch-conservatives was alleged to be the site of orgies among young priests and their teachers.
The seminary in St Polten, west of Vienna, comes under the authority of the conservative Bishop Kurt Krenn.
The Vienna news magazine Profil has published pictures of priests and students engaged in sexual acts, prompting an uproar, emergency meetings of the church leadership, and calls for Bishop Krenn's resignation.
The pictures were said to be part of a cache of some 40,000 photos and child pornography videos found by church officials on computers at the seminary a year ago. While the Austrian Bishops' Conference issued a statement declaring that "homosexuality and pornography" could have no place at the seminary, Bishop Krenn refused to resign and appeared to compound the crisis by saying: "This has got nothing to do with homosexuality. It's just boys' pranks."
The Austrian church experienced its worst modern crisis in 1995 when its then head, Cardinal Hans-Hermann Groer, was accused of pedophilia. Senior church figures eventually found that he had been molesting boys for years. He was forced to retire, and died last year.
In a country that is officially 90 percent Catholic, the scandal saw thousands leaving the church and hundreds of thousands joining a petition campaign for reform.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing