Vatican Tells Bishops to Set Clear Strategy Against Abuse

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican told bishops worldwide on Monday to make fighting sexual abuse of minors by clerics a priority, telling them to create “clear and coordinated” procedures by next year and cooperate with law enforcement authorities when required.

The directives, detailed in a letter, are among the clearest to emerge from the Vatican since a sexual abuse scandal erupted in Europe last year. But the recommendations are not binding in church law and do not spell out any enforcement procedures or punishments for bishops who have been found to have violated church law.

The guidelines note that the sexual abuse of minors by clerics is not only an offense punishable by church law, but also “a crime prosecuted by civil law.”

Still, they play down the role of the civilian review boards that have investigated abuse in Ireland, the United States and elsewhere — and that have often faulted bishops for not stopping abuse — noting that those boards “cannot substitute” for bishops’ ultimate authority in adjudicating abuse cases.

The letter’s emphasis on the power of bishops did not go over well with some victims’ advocates, who have said that the bishops themselves have contributed to the problem by being more concerned with protecting priests than with protecting children.

“There’s no enforcement here,” the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a leading victims’ rights group in the United States, said in a statement. “There are no penalties for bishops who don’t come up with guidelines or who violate their own guidelines.”

“Until that happens — until top church officials who hide and enable abuse are severely disciplined — top church officials will continue to hide and enable abuse,” the group said.

The Vatican said the letter, signed by its chief doctrinal officer, Cardinal William J. Levada, was essentially aimed at making bishops around the world more responsive — especially in countries where they had not routinely tackled the problem of sexual abuse of minors or had even dismissed it.

“The aim of the document is to provide a common denominator for principles that everyone can bear in mind in making appropriate directives,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Monday.

Father Lombardi said the Vatican could not issue universal requirements for mandatory reporting to civil authorities because it also operated in countries with repressive governments. “Each reality is different, culturally and from the point of view of different countries’ laws,” he said.

The letter states that bishops are required to investigate all claims and send all cases deemed “credible” to the Vatican for review. It says that bishops should also listen to victims, create “safe environment” programs for minors and properly screen seminarians.

In March 2010, a sexual abuse scandal swept the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, with scores of new victims coming forward. And new revelations have revealed weakness in even the toughest “zero tolerance” norms put in place by the United States bishops in 2002, which recommend removing a priest from ministry while claims against him are investigated.

In February, a grand jury in Philadelphia indicted a church official on charges of child endangerment in connection with the transfer of priests accused of sexually abusing children, and it also indicted four men, including two priests and a former priest, on charges of raping or assaulting children.

The grand jury also said it had found “substantial” evidence of abuse by 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the investigation, and the archbishop of Philadelphia subsequently suspended 21 of them from ministry.

A review board made up of lay people accused the archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, of failing to be “open and transparent” because the archdiocese screened the cases that the panel was allowed to examine.

In Ireland, a new report by civil authorities is expected this month, after two scathing government reports there in recent years showing extensive abuse and cover-ups by church officials.

The Vatican’s letter on Monday incorporated revisions made last year to the church’s procedures on prosecuting sexual abuse, including extending the use of fast-track procedures against priests and doubling the statute of limitations for disciplinary action against priests to 10 years from the victim’s 18th birthday.

It said that local bishops did not have to make their guidelines church law, as bishops in the United States have done, but could ask the Vatican for permission to do so.

Asked why it took the Vatican more than a year to issue guidelines that did not alter church law, Father Lombardi said the letter had to be vetted by multiple Vatican offices.

“Obviously, someone can say that at important and urgent moments it’s better to treat the issue quickly and swiftly, but if there are delicate and complex issues to consider, it’s good for there to be consensus,” he said.

 

Storms’ Toll Rises as Scale of Damage Becomes Clear

The death toll, including those who were killed by storms earlier in the week in Arkansas, reached 339. On Friday evening, Alabama emergency officials announced that the state’s death toll had reached 238, a jump of 28 in one day, adding that 21 people were still missing.

Power remained out for hundreds of thousands throughout the South, rendering gas stations, grocery stores and banks useless. Fifteen hundred people were staying in more than 65 Red Cross shelters, a fraction of those who were left homeless but an indication of the numbers who are now destitute.

So far in Alabama, 654 families have been displaced from public or government-assisted housing units, according to an initial count by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Red Cross, with an eye toward the mental health issues that will surely develop in the hard days and weeks ahead, has dispatched hundreds of volunteers trained to offer psychological first aid.

Mr. Obama, who visited Tuscaloosa with his wife, Michelle, gave a sense of the scale of the disaster after a ride through Alberta, a neighborhood that was turned into a jagged wasteland.

“I’ve never seen devastation like this,” he said.

But, echoing the volunteers who have come in such high numbers that they are being turned away in some areas, Mr. Obama turned the focus toward the work ahead.

“We can’t bring those who have been lost back,” he said. “But the property damage, which is obviously extensive, that’s something that we can do something about.”

The White House announced on Friday afternoon that five cabinet members, including the secretaries of agriculture, housing and homeland security, would be traveling to Alabama and Mississippi on Sunday.

Mr. Obama declared a major disaster in Alabama on Thursday night, an action that makes federal financing available for individuals, businesses and state and local governments.

This federal money is mainly intended to cover uninsured losses, and can help individuals obtain some rebuilding assistance and cities replace public buildings. Insurance claims are already growing exponentially, and could approach $1 billion, said Ragan Ingram, chief of staff at the Alabama Department of Insurance.

Meanwhile, emergency workers in the hardest-hit states of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee were toiling on urgent needs, some of them almost cruel in their complexity. The tornado damaged two water tanks in Tuscaloosa, necessitating a boil-water advisory in much of the city — including parts of it that do not have electricity. The emergency operations centers in three of the affected counties have no power; in two of those there is no telephone service either. The countywide 911 system in Walker County is also down, according to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

About 1,000 workers were trying to restore electricity to nearly 260,000 customers of Alabama Power.

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s electricity production system, which sells to seven states, lost more than 200 towers and other structures to the storm and left nearly 700,000 customers without power across several states. By the afternoon, power was again running through high-voltage lines that stretch across 21 of the damaged towers, but 561,000 customers were still without electricity. It will likely not be restored until later next week, and the company is facing weeks of work and millions in repair costs.

“This is a historic outage,” said Scott Brooks, a spokesman.

It is too early to begin calculating the storm’s economic impact, with some major employers, like auto plants, temporarily closed and some small businesses blown away altogether. But one indication of the scale of destruction, as well as the complicated challenges of the response, is Alabama’s $5 billion poultry industry.

The industry, which is mostly located in the northern counties that were hit hardest, processes 20 million broiler chickens a week and is one of the nation’s top three producers. At least 714 poultry houses — each of which can hold up to 30,000 chickens — have been damaged or destroyed.

Millions more chickens might be without water for extended periods and were seen as likely to die. Those in damaged facilities will have to be destroyed and disposed of according to state law, which allows for burying or burning carcasses.

That alone will be a challenge, said John McMillan, the state agriculture commissioner.

“Nobody’s got an incinerator big enough to take care of 20,000 or 30,000 of them at one time, and that’s what we will have in many, many cases,” Mr. McMillan said.

Early in the morning two teams from the Tuscaloosa Fire Department set out with “human remains detection” dogs to scour areas of the city that were hit hardest: the housing projects at Rosedale Court and the largely poor neighborhood of Alberta, both of which were flattened by the enormous tornado that rolled northeastward through town.

They were search and rescue teams but held few illusions about what they were looking for — the dogs that specialize in finding survivors were not the ones the city sought.

The team in Alberta waited patiently as a white Labrador retriever named Jody from North Mississippi Search and Rescue sniffed around the giant piles of debris. She indicated interest, as the term of art puts it, in three places, and a worker began using an excavator to lift up fallen trees, walls and mounds of jumbled debris to see what was underneath.

For hours, searchers did not find anything. But given the thoroughness of the devastation, it seemed inevitable that the team would find at least one body. And indeed, at around 5:30 p.m., in another part of Alberta, they did.

Campbell Robertson reported from Tuscaloosa, and Kim Severson from Atlanta. Kevin Sack and Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Tuscaloosa.

 

Tornado Season Intensifies, Without Clear Scientific Consensus on Why

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — All the warning sirens echoing across the Great Plains, Midwest and Southeast this month leave little doubt that the tornado season — which has plowed a trail of destruction through communities from Oklahoma to Wisconsin to Georgia — is off to an unusually busy start.

So far this year, tornadoes have killed 41 people and torn apart countless neighborhoods and, this weekend, one major airport.

Now, as the country braces for several more days of potentially violent weather, meteorologists say the number of April tornadoes is on track to top the current record. There have been, according to preliminary estimates, about 250 tornadoes so far this month and, in all likelihood, more are still to come, said Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

“It’s unusual but it does happen,” said Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in tornado research. “This isn’t a sign that the world is about to end.”

Those same experts note that drawing conclusions about the true size of, or reason for, an increase in tornado activity is difficult because historical statistics are unreliable due to changes in the way storms are tracked and measured.

Although the average number of April tornadoes steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s, nearly all of the increase is of the least powerful tornadoes that may touch down briefly without causing much damage. That suggests better reporting is largely responsible for the increase.

There are, on average, 1,300 tornadoes each year in the United States, which have caused an average of 65 deaths annually in recent years.

The number of tornadoes rated from EF1 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita scale, used to measure tornado strength, has stayed relatively constant for the past half century at about 500 annually. But in that time the number of confirmed EF0 tornadoes has steadily increased to more than 800 a year from less than 100 a year, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

In April 1974, for example, there was a record 267 tornadoes reported, but the actual number that occurred is believed to be closer to 500.

“Today we seem to know about every single tree branch knocked down,” Mr. Carbin said. “We have eyes everywhere, and we have radar and satellite. It would be very difficult for a tornado to sneak through unnoticed.”

Tornadoes form when warm moist air combines with powerful dynamic winds inside a thunderstorm, sending a funnel cloud spinning toward the ground. They are most common in spring, typically peaking in May.

Though scientists believe that climate change will contribute to increasingly severe weather phenomena, including hurricanes and thunderstorms, there is little consensus about how it may affect tornadoes.

It remains unclear, partly because of the lack of historical data and partly because of their unpredictable nature, whether they will increase in number or strength or geographic range.

The large number of tornadoes so far may simply reflect normal variability, said Mr. Brooks.

Those assurances do not mean much to people like Kandice Shaw, a frequent business traveler who arrived at her hometown airport in St. Louis to find most of the windows boarded up and many other signs of storm damage. She worried about the increase in violent weather this spring. “We’ve had nothing but tornadoes,” she said. “I feel like I’m living in the Land of Oz.”

 

Tornado Season Intensifies, Without Clear Scientific Consensus on Why

 

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — All the warning sirens echoing across the Great Plains, Midwest and Southeast this month leave little doubt that the tornado season — which has plowed a trail of destruction through communities from Oklahoma to Wisconsin to Georgia — is off to an unusually busy start.

So far this year, tornadoes have killed 41 people and torn apart countless neighborhoods and, this weekend, one major airport.

Now, as the country braces for several more days of potentially violent weather, meteorologists say the number of April tornadoes is on track to top the current record. There have been, according to preliminary estimates, about 250 tornadoes so far this month and, in all likelihood, more are still to come, said Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

“It’s unusual but it does happen,” said Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in tornado research. “This isn’t a sign that the world is about to end.”

Those same experts note that drawing conclusions about the true size of, or reason for, an increase in tornado activity is difficult because historical statistics are unreliable due to changes in the way storms are tracked and measured.

Although the average number of April tornadoes steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s, nearly all of the increase is of the least powerful tornadoes that may touch down briefly without causing much damage. That suggests better reporting is largely responsible for the increase.

There are, on average, 1,300 tornadoes each year in the United States, which have caused an average of 65 deaths annually in recent years.

The number of tornadoes rated from EF1 to EF5 on the enhanced Fujita scale, used to measure tornado strength, has stayed relatively constant for the past half century at about 500 annually. But in that time the number of confirmed EF0 tornadoes has steadily increased to more than 800 a year from less than 100 a year, said Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

In April 1974, for example, there was a record 267 tornadoes reported, but the actual number that occurred is believed to be closer to 500.

“Today we seem to know about every single tree branch knocked down,” Mr. Carbin said. “We have eyes everywhere, and we have radar and satellite. It would be very difficult for a tornado to sneak through unnoticed.”

Tornadoes form when warm moist air combines with powerful dynamic winds inside a thunderstorm, sending a funnel cloud spinning toward the ground. They are most common in spring, typically peaking in May.

Though scientists believe that climate change will contribute to increasingly severe weather phenomena, including hurricanes and thunderstorms, there is little consensus about how it may affect tornadoes.

It remains unclear, partly because of the lack of historical data and partly because of their unpredictable nature, whether they will increase in number or strength or geographic range.

The large number of tornadoes so far may simply reflect normal variability, said Mr. Brooks.

Those assurances do not mean much to people like Kandice Shaw, a frequent business traveler who arrived at her hometown airport in St. Louis to find most of the windows boarded up and many other signs of storm damage. She worried about the increase in violent weather this spring. “We’ve had nothing but tornadoes,” she said. “I feel like I’m living in the Land of Oz.”