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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY

THE INAUGURAL MASS OF BENEDICT XVI'S PONTIFICATE





See preceding page for earlier posts today, 4/24/10.


Saturday, April 24

ST. FIDELIS OF SIGMARINGEN (b Prussia 1777, d Switzerland 1622), Capuchin Friar and Martyr
He was born Mark Rey and his father was Burgermeister (mayor) of Sigmaringen. Always known for his charity,
when he became a lawyer, he dedicated his services to defending poor people. Eventually, he decided to become
a Capuchin like his brother George, and divided his ealth between poor seminarians and the poor. He was sent
as part of a missionary team by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith to the Calvinists and
Zwinglians of Switzerland. Not an easy task, for he was immediately accused of opposing a peasant movement
for independence from Austria. Despite warnings, he continued to preach but had a strong presentiment of
death. He started signing his letters 'Pater Fidelis, prope diem esca vermium' ('soon to be food for worms').
He escaped a gunshot fired on him while preaching but eventually he was ambushed and killed. He was canonized
in 1746 as the first martyr of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/042410.shtml



OR today.



THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met today with

- H.E. Charles Ghislain, Ambassador of Belgium, who presented his credentials. Address in French.

- Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops (weekly meeting)

- Participants in the national convention on "Digital Witnesses: Faces and languages in the
cross-media era", sponsored by the Italian bishops' conference. Held at the Aula Paolo VI.
Address in Italian.


Also today, the Holy Father named the co-presidents, secretary and general moderator of the
Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Bishops Synod to be held in October at the Vatican.

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POPE RECEIVES NEW
AMBASSADOR FROM BELGIUM





(24 Apr 10 – RV) Pope Benedict XVI today received the new ambassador from Belgium to the Holy See, Charles Ghislain.

In his address, Pope Benedict underlined that “The Church works for the common good and wants to have the opportunity to bring its message to humanity, in respect for freedom of conscience”.

There are over seven million Catholics in Belgium, about three quarters of the total population, spread across eight dioceseS. However, recent pew figures show an annual decline in Church attendance and vocations to religious life. This despite it being home to one of the worlds most famous and ancient Catholic universities, Louvain (Leuven).

The Pope spoke of his conviction that despite these social changes which have taken place in Belgium, Christianity is still an important foundation for the nation, and the Gospel principles of brotherhood and solidarity have much to offer the country’s growth.

Pope Benedict described life and human dignity as precious assets and spoke of their fragility, referring two recent disasters in Belgium: the collapse of a building in Liège, in late January, and a rail accident in Buizingen in March.

These catastrophes - said the Pope – “measure the fragility 'of human existence and the need to protect it... for authentic social cohesion and respect in diversity”.

Finally, Benedict XVI took the opportunity to greet the new archbishop of Brussels, Mons. Andre Leonard, and expressed his appreciation for the whole work of the Church in Belgium.




NB: This meeting took place a day after the Holy Father accepted the resignation of Belgium's longest-serving Catholic bishop who admitted to improper relations with a boy when he was a priest and up to his early years as bishop.

Also, last year, the Belgian Parliament approved a rsolution of censure against the Pope claiming the Catholic ban on condom use has caused millions of deaths from AIDS in Africa.

However, the King and Queen of Belgium came to the Vatican last October for the canonization of Fr. Damien of Molokai and were received in audience by the Pope.


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Fr. Lombardi is back in form with a fine editorial:

The message from Malta





(24 Apr 10 – RV) In his weekly editorial, Vatican Press Office Director Fr Federico Lombardi S.J, has drawn attention to the message from Malta: a Church capable of recognising its wounds sincerely and of obtaining the grace of healing.

The Pope's first foreign trip this year was marvellous. Once again, concerns or fears raised on the eve [of his departure] proved unjustified. The friendly soul and Catholic roots of the Maltese people prepared a welcome for Pope Benedict XVI of unforgettable warmth and spontaneity. It was a constant crescendo right up to the festive flotilla of accompanying boats across Valletta Harbour and the final enthusiasm of the youth, a true song of vitality and hope.

Paradoxically, the moment that the world media were waiting for and had discussed the most was the only one that escaped their attention, taking place on a more personal level, in the discretion of prayer: the meeting with some victims of sexual abuse.

But the way in which some participants have spoken of it has deeply touched countless people: a great weight has been lifted from their hearts, healing has begun, confidence and hope reborn. The following Wednesday, the Pope spoke of "shared suffering" and his "emotion".

Some days before, he had said that repentance is a grace, and arriving in Malta to commemorate the shipwreck of St. Paul, he noted that this accident was a new departure for the faith and hope of the islanders.

Thus, the meeting with the victims found its meaning of hope in the context of the Pope’s encounter with a vibrant and pilgrim Church, capable of recognizing its wounds sincerely but also of obtaining the grace of healing. We needed this message.





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Collages by Gloria, indefatigable collagist on Beatrice's site....


The octogenarian Pope:
Busy 2010 for an 83-year-old

By John Thavis




The Holy Father at the GA on 4/21/10.

VATICAN CITY, April 23 (CNS) -- Almost lost in the recent furor over clerical sex abuse is that Pope Benedict XVI just turned 83 and is approaching one of the busiest stretches of his pontificate.

At an age when most Church officials have long retired, over the next six months the German pontiff will make six trips, preside over dozens of public liturgies, close the Year for Priests, chair a Synod of Bishops on the Middle East and keep up a steady stream of audiences, both public and private.

A major document on Scripture in Church life is expected before summer. In his spare moments -- which are few -- the Pope is still working on his second volume of Jesus of Nazareth. [As I understand it, the book should be going to press soon! When he spoke to Rabbi Neusner about it in January, he said he was just completing the bibliography.]

Recent media reports have drawn a portrait of a weary Pope, overwhelmed by the onslaught of criticism over the Church's handling of sex abuses cases. Yet on the public stage, Pope Benedict has shown few signs of succumbing to job fatigue.

In Malta in mid-April for a 27-hour visit, he appeared to nod off for a few seconds during Mass. But although that moment was well photographed, it was the exception to the rule.

[If you watch the video of the Mass, the moment Mons. Marini touches him, he raises his head ever so gracefully and gradually to an upright position - no sudden start, not a sign that he was caught unawares!]

Throughout the visit, he appeared happy and relaxed -- notably as he chatted with young people aboard a boat in Valletta's Grand Harbor. If the story line was a dispirited Pope alarmed by a drop in approval ratings, he clearly wasn't following the script.

Nor is the Pope about to go into hiding. There's far too much on his schedule.

A typical week in late April, for example, included four days of private talks with African bishops, speeches to new ambassadors, a meeting with a prime minister, commemoration of the church's annual vocations day, a general audience talk, another talk at his Sunday blessing and a speech to Catholic digital media experts in Italy.

Oh yes, and a brief celebration of the fifth anniversary of the official start of his pontificate.

In May, things will get really busy. He will travel to northern Italy May 2 to see the Shroud of Turin, a visit that includes four other major events and speeches: a meeting with Turin residents, Mass in a main square of the city, a meeting with young people and an encounter with the sick.

The pope will travel to Portugal May 11-14, visiting the Marian shrine of Fatima as well as the capital of Lisbon and the city of Porto. The Pope could have made this an overnight stop in Fatima, but he broadened the trip because he wants to deliver a message on Christian values to the wider society at a time when the country appears ready to legalize same-sex marriage.

Back in Rome, he will celebrate Mass at St. Peter's Basilica for Pentecost May 23. In early June, he will mark the feast of Corpus Christi with Mass and the traditional procession through Rome.

Then on June 4-6 he will head to Cyprus, where he will meet with Church leaders of the Middle East. The next weekend, he will preside over a vigil and Mass June 10-11 at the Vatican to close the Year for Priests; thousands of priests from around the world are expected to attend.

Later in June, he will ordain priests in a lengthy Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. He then will mark the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul with two liturgies, evening prayer at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls June 28 and Mass the next day in St. Peter's Basilica, where he will present palliums to new metropolitan archbishops.

Things usually slow down in summer, but not as much this year. The Pope has announced he won't be taking a real vacation in the northern Italian mountains. Insiders say he wants to spend more time writing, and he can get more done at his villa outside Rome. Volume 2 of Jesus of Nazareth is overdue, and the Pope would like to put the final touches on the book over the summer, if not before.

In September, which used to be a slow month for Popes, Pope Benedict will travel to England and Scotland on what could be his most challenging trip of the year.

It's a four-day visit, and the program is packed: the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, a major address at Westminster Hall in London, where St. Thomas More was put on trial; liturgies in London and Glasgow; and an encounter with Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury.

Closer to home, the Pope will travel to central Italy in July to mark the eighth centenary of the birth of St. Celestine V -- who is best known as one of the few popes in history to have resigned.

That will no doubt stir the imaginations of journalists. Expect to read lots of stories on whether Pope Benedict might resign. He has given no indication that abdication is even a remote possibility, and his health appears good.

But people remember that in 2002, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said rather bluntly of the ailing Pope John Paul II, "If he were to see that he absolutely could not (continue), then he certainly would resign."

As he turned 83, Pope Benedict looked as though he could keep up the pace indefinitely. Only one Pope has lived longer in the past century -- Pope John Paul II, who was 84 when he died. [Oops, Thavis is forgetting Leo XIII, who died in July 1903 at the age of 93, and whom Benedict XVI will honor with a visit to his natal town of Carpineto Romano on September 5 on this bicentennial year of Leo's birth. The late Fr. Neuhaus always referred to Leo XIII when speaking of Benedict's age.

The other trips outside Rome scheduled in 2010: A pastoral visit to Palermo on October 3, and his trip to Spain (Santiago de Compostela, Nov. 6, and Barcelona, Nov.7).]





And from our own indefatigable amd gracious Forum host, Gloria - some snapshots by Spaziani from the April 14 GA.

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I hope everyone who has EWTN was able to watch the Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary Form, offered today for Pope Benedict XVI at the Washington Basilica. It has just ended - two and a half hours of a most solemn and beautiful Eucharistic Sacrifice with the participation of a full cathedral (seating capacity 3,500).

The commentator said people flew in from other states to attend it - it was impressive to see them at Communion, kneeling at the basilica's communion rail, many women wearing veils or some sort of head covering. Mons. Slattery must have spent at least half an hour giving Communion (Other priests gave Communion to those who did not come to the Communion rail).

Fr. Zuhlsdorf was one of the commentators, along with a priest from the FSSP, which also provided the deacons who assisted Mons. Edward Slattery of Tulsa in the celebration. Mons. Slattery was magnificent, singing the Latin prayers in a robust baritone, and enunciating them beautifully, whether he was speaking or singing, with the added gift of a splendid homily on the mystery of suffering, as a significant reflection on the Holy Father's fifth anniversary. The Basilica's Schola Cantorum provided appropriate choral music all throughout.

I found myself in tears many times, considering that this was the first Traditional Mass said in this Basilica in 45 years! - and therefore, the first time its High Altar was used for Mass in all that time. The whole panoply of clerics assisting in the Mass, and the sight of them kneeling reverently as the celebrant offered the Body and Blood of Christ in front of a very well-placed Crucifix on the High Altar sent shivers down my spine - so reminiscent it is of all those images we have always seen going back to Gregory the Great saying Mass.

Naturally, I wonder when Pope Benedict XVI will consider it the right time and the right occasion to celebrate the Extraordinary Form himself in pbulic - could he be waiting for the third anniversary of Summorum Pontificum (either July 7 when he promulagted it, or Sept. 14, when it came into force)? That would be a most special event.


Some pictures:

Below, Interior of the Basilica, and right, the High Altar.

The following videocaps courtesy of


Above panel, clockwise from top left: Vesting prayers; Entrance procession; the congregation; and prayers at the foot of the Altar.

In right bottom photo, note the liturgical gloves worn by Mons. Slattery.

A background to the Mass today. This is how the Paulus Institute described their special project:




The Paulus Institute invites you to participate in an historic liturgical event in honor of Pope Benedict XVI, under the theme of “The Spirit of the Liturgy.”

We have arranged to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Pope Benedict’s inauguration with a Pontifical Solemn Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington DC, April 24, 2010, at 1 p.m. His Excellency, Edward Slattery, the bishop of Tula, Oklahoma will celebrate the mass from the throne according to the rubrics of the Extraordinary Form.

The Mass will be offered in the Extraordinary Form (Traditional Latin Mass), as encouraged by Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict. It will be the first such Mass said at the High Altar of the Shrine in nearly half a century. The priests of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter will assist at the Mass.

The National Shrine is the largest Catholic church in the Western Hemisphere and among the ten largest in the world. The Shrine seats 3,500, with a total capacity of 6,500. We will be announcing the Mass to Catholics not only regionally, but throughout the Eastern U.S. and beyond.

To honor His Holiness Pope Benedict on this special day, we are especially encouraging those Catholics to come who may not already know this Mass. In particular, we are inviting young adults and university students, whom Pope Benedict has recognized are attracted to the Mass in the Extraordinary form.

Consistent with the mission of The Paulus Institute, this Mass is an activity undertaken with our signature objective: to have broad impact in the Catholic Church, as our patron St. Paul inspires.

The Mass is presented for all the Catholic Faithful. We strive to enhance the appreciation of the Mass as Holy Sacrifice, to build respect for the Holy Eucharist, and to solidify belief in the Real Presence. As Pope Benedict has written—

The Church stands and falls with the Liturgy. When the adoration of the divine Trinity declines, when the faith no longer appears in its fullness on the Liturgy of the Church, when man’s words, his thoughts, his intentions are suffocating him, then faith will have lost the place where it is expressed and where it dwells. For that reason, the true celebration of the Sacred Liturgy is the centre of any renewal of the Church whatever.”




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Pope asks the faithful
to give the Internet a soul






(24 Apr 10 – RV) The need to give the Internet a soul and humanize the dynamics of the digital world was at the heart of Pope Benedict XVI’s message Saturday to participants in a conference on modern means of mass communication.

Promoted by the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), “Digital Witness” draws together experts in information technology, social networking, web journalism and blogging to focus on the language we use and the way we communicate as Christians in the online society.

In his greeting to the Pope, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, CEI president and Archbishop of Genoa, greeted him on the anniversary of the formal start of his Petrine ministry, and said on behalf of the CEI and the convention participants, "We thank you for the strength that comes from your limpid Magisterium... especially in times like these when we are being tested, when, as you sau, we wish that God could be with us to defeat evil, while we enter into the mystery of Christ's suffering which redeems the world".

Pope Benedict told the 8,000 participants that the task of every believer who works in media, is to ensure the “quality of human contact, guaranteeing attention to people and their spiritual needs”.

“This is increasingly urgent in today’s world”, he said, at a time when Internet appears to have a “basically egalitarian” vocation, but at the same time, “marks a new divide", the "digital divide" that "separates the included from the excluded".

"The dangers of homologation and control, of intellectual and moral relativism, are also increasing, already recognizable in the decline of critical spirit, in truth reduced to a game of opinions, in the many forms of degradation and humiliation of the intimacy of the person."

Thus, said the Pope, we see, a "spiritual pollution" even as "we no longer look one another in the face”. So we must “overcome those collective dynamics that risk reducing people to "soulless bodies, objects of exchange and consumption”.

The new media must become a “humanizing factor”, focused "on promoting the dignity of persons and peoples". Only then, will "the epochal times we are experiencing be rich and fertile in new opportunities":

"Without fear we must set sail on the digital sea facing into the deep with the same passion that has governed the ship of the Church for two thousand years. Rather than for albeit necessary technical resources, we want to qualify ourselves by living in the digital world with a believer’s heart, helping to give a soul to the Internet’s incessant flow of communication".







Pope warns of Internet risks


VATICAN CITY, April 24 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday the Internet and the ongoing process of media convergence carry a risk of conformity of thought and control.

Benedict said that while the Internet is egalitarian and creates the opportunity to be informed and stay connected, it also comes with risks.

The Pontiff noted that the digital divide adds to the gap already separating wealthy nations from poor ones. He also mentioned the "dangers of conformity, of control, of moral and intellectual relativism, which can already be recognized in the decline of critical spirit."

The Pope was addressing a meeting on digital technologies and new media promoted by the Italian Bishops' Conference.

He urged the media to promote the dignity of peoples and put themselves at the service of the truth.

Benedict has tried to bring the Vatican into the Internet age and launched a YouTube channel last year. Officials say the 83-year-old Pontiff also e-mails and surfs the Web. [I can believe e-mail, because he simply would let Birgit Wansing or Georg Gaenswein type it in for him, but much as I hope he could, does anyone believe he has time to surf the Web at all? Probably, once in a while, with a jumbo monitor, and GG surfing some sites that the Holy Father might like to sample.]

Last year, the Pope made clear that he was disappointed that Vatican officials hadn't done a simple Internet search to discover the Holocaust-denying comments of an ultraconservative bishop before his excommunication was lifted. [Again, I must insist they would not have found any if they surfed before January 21, they day the decree wa signed and the day on which a Swedish TV channel ran Wiliamson's interview. Then all the retrospective statements popped up!]

The case embarrassed the Vatican, and Benedict said on that occasion that the Holy See needed to make greater use of the Internet.



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A sampler of possible lunatic fringe outrages that could be commited against the Holy Father before and during his visit to the UK:

UK foreign Office apologises
for Pope 'condom' memo


April 24, 2010


The Foreign Office has apologised for a "foolish" document which suggested the Pope's UK visit could be marked by the launch of "Benedict brand" condoms.

The junior civil servant responsible had been put on other duties, it said.

Called "The ideal visit would see...", the paper suggested the Pope be invited to open an abortion clinic and bless a gay marriage during September's visit.

It was obtained by the Sunday Telegraph. Foreign Secretary David Miliband is said to be "appalled".

The UK's ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, has met senior officials of the Holy See to express regret on behalf of the government.

The paper was attached as one of three "background documents" to a memo dated 5 March 2010 inviting officials in Whitehall and Downing Street to attend a meeting to discuss themes for the papal visit.

It suggested Benedict XVI could show his hard line on the sensitive issue of child abuse allegations against Roman Catholic priests by "sacking dodgy bishops" and launching a helpline for abused children.

The official responsible said in a cover note: "Please protect; these should not be shared externally. The 'ideal visit' paper in particular was the product of a brainstorm which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas."

An investigation was launched after some recipients of the memo objected to its disrespectful tone.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the department was "deeply sorry" for any offence the document had caused.

"This is clearly a foolish document that does not in any way reflect UK government or Foreign Office policy or views. Many of the ideas in the document are clearly ill-judged, naive and disrespectful," he said.

"The text was not cleared or shown to ministers or senior officials before circulation. As soon as senior officials became aware of the document, it was withdrawn from circulation.

"The individual responsible has been transferred to other duties. He has been told orally and in writing that this was a serious error of judgement and has accepted this view."


The Foreign Office's sick attack
on the Pope: what did you expect?


April 24, 2010

A magnificent scoop from my colleague Jonathan Wynne-Jones, who reveals in The Sunday Telegraph that Foreign Office proposals for the Pope’s visit to Britain included suggestions that he should bless a gay marriage and even launch papal-branded condoms.

[Foreign Minister] David Miliband has apologised; the Catholic hierarchy is furious, accusing the FO of “disrespecting” the Pope. (Yup, Malcolm McMahon, the bishop in charge of education, used “disrespect” as a verb.) My reaction is to say to the Bishops of England and Wales:

NOW do you finally understand what sort of snide, cheap and ignorant prejudice has flourished under this Government and its civil servants – wall-to-wall secularists for whom the Roman Catholic Church is at best an antiquated irrelevance and at worst a sick joke?

And has it occurred to you that this document was probably being drawn up just as your own bureaucrats at Eccleston Square were turning a blind eye to the Magisterium so they could “work with” Ed Balls?

Oh, sure, the Foreign Office says: “This is clearly a foolish document that does not in any way reflect UK Government or Foreign Office policy or views” – and, of course, most of these proposals wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

But reflect the attitudes of Brown’s government and its politically correct employees is precisely what the document does.

[I'm sorry, but 'political correctness' was hardly the intention of the smart-aleck who drew up the memo and his fellow brainstormers. Unequivocal contempt and ridicule of the Holy Father are what they wished to convey. After all, secularism obviously has no code of conduct except whatever the individual decides that pleases him. In this casae, that can exclude any sense of decency, let alone respect, even if token, for the leader of more than one billion Catholics whom your government has invited as a state guest!]


4/25/10
P.S. Pop sidebar to the UK visit by the Holy Father:


Susan Boyle will sing
at Papal Mass in Glasgow

By JAMES O'BRIEN
April 25, 2010


Susan Boyle will sing for Pope Benedict at a massive outdoor mass in Glasgow later this year in September.

Catholic Church leaders have asked the 'Britain's Got Talent' star to perform before a crowd of 150,000. [Presumably, she will sing an appropriate hymn at Communion, as Placido Domingo and other celebrities have done in previous Papal masses abroad.]

A senior Church source stated: "Susan has agreed to sing and everyone is delighted. It is a done deal.

"There are still some of the finer details to be ironed out but it has been approved by the highest echelons in the Vatican.

"Susan has described it as a dream come true and it will be an extra attraction for everyone attending."

A spokesman for the Catholic Church stated: "We would be delighted if Susan Boyle was to perform on the day at Bellahouston Park. She is top of our wish list."

Pope Benedict XVI will visit Edinburgh and Glasgow at the start of his four-day tour of the UK from September 16-19.

It is now nearly thirty years since the last papal visit to Scotland, when Pope John Paul II celebrated mass at Bellahouston Park on June 1, 1982, in front of 300,000 worshippers.

Susan's album 'I Dreamed a Dream' has sold over ten million copies. The Catholic Celtic supporter has described the notion of singing for the Pope as one of the most exciting moments of her life.

[Notice that the Church in Scotland appears to be expecting a crowd only half of what turned up for John Paul II's Mass in 1982. I hope it is merely setting low expectations 'just in case'...Let us pray the faithful will prove these low expectations wrong!]

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While not all the major Italian newspapers came out with an article looking back on the first five years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate, even La Repubblica avoided any negative articles about him during his birthday and papal anniversary. I would like to think that Repubblica's editors have kept a last shred of traditional decency in respecting older people if only for their age.

But there was no lack of enthusiastic and loving tributes to Benedict XVI from a spectrum of Italian writers and the general public - and my only regret is that I have been unable to translate the best ones, especially since these were also written during the Malta visit. I will post them one by one as I am able to translate.



Two ways of judging Benedict XVI:
The Italians give him love,
the New York Times - spite

by ELIZABETH LEV

Apirl 24, 2010

ROME -- From my perch in Italy this week, I've been wondering whether the New York Times and I were at the same celebration for Benedict XVI's fifth anniversary as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. The indictment of his pontificate printed in the Times would have us believe that the occasion was marked by scowls and howls, but from St. Peter's Square, things looked quite different.

The festivities got a running start in Malta, where the Pope was greeted by throngs lining the streets to show their support and appreciation.

Archbishop Paul Cremona of Valetta welcomed the Pope with the words, "Holy Father, we already know who you are." This was just one reminder that for most of the Catholics on that historical island, the media does not define the papacy.

Indeed, an astonishing 25 percent of the Maltese population came out to see the pope, significantly delaying his arrival at the Grotto of St. Paul, where some 50,000 showed up for Mass.

While the New York Times article told the story of Benedict's papacy through instances of sexual abuse, the Italian media have a different take, and the Maltese hailed him as another St. Paul, who was shipwrecked on their island 1,950 years ago.

In fact, Benedict's encounter with the sex abuse victims of Malta proved Catholics can find healing and reconciliation within the Church despite the horrific experiences some endured. During the private encounter, the Pope was reported to have had tears in his eyes as he listened to the stories of suffering and betrayal.

While the BBC reported that the Pope was avoiding the question of pedophile priests -- again misusing the word pedophile, which only applies to 0.03% of sex abuse cases -- Pope Benedict was meeting with eight men, such as Lawrence Gresch and Joseph Magro, who both declared afterward that they found peace with the Church as a result.

My Politics Daily colleague David Gibson, who was reporting from Rome, suggested that Pope Benedict met with the Maltese "under pressure" but it wasn't the first such meeting; he took the U.S. media by surprise by encountering a group of people who had suffered molestation in Washington, D.C. back in April of '06. (And let's not forget that it was Benedict who spontaneously instigated this unprecedented outreach, listening to and praying with these victims, not the world media.)

Back in Italy, the national news agency ANSA, published a very different view of these five years than that of the New York Times; the Italian press outlet rightly remembered the achievements of this pontificate, including his "triumphant 2008 visit to the United States," and his 2009 visit to Africa, where the controversy generated by his skepticism regarding condom use for the prevention of AIDS "did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of a young and vital Catholicism," ANSA reported.

AP's Nicole Winfield claimed that Benedict suffers from a "chronic inability to manage his message," whereas Elisa Pinna of ANSA noted that the pope's most important messages, from his three encyclicals, "God is Love," "On Christian Hope" and "Charity in Truth," to his book Jesus of Nazareth, were not only acclaimed, but were bestsellers worldwide.

Regarding the sex abuse situation, ANSA praised Pope Benedict for his efforts dating from his days as Cardinal Ratzinger when he was "one of the first to recognize the gravity of the situation" and for his "rigorous and transparent policy" in dealing with sex abusers.

In the United States in the 1970's, a shocking 10 percent of priests had been accused of molesting a minor under the age of 18. This number dropped to 8 percent in the 1980s and by the time the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith led by Cardinal Ratzinger was put in charge of the problem in 2001, the number had dropped to less than 4 percent.

Since 2001, the number of priests accused of sexual abuse with a minor has diminished to the point where last year there were only six accusations of clerical sexual molestation toward someone under 18. This decrease has been credited to the norms enacted by the man who became Pope Benedict.

Twice the New York Times cited Benedict's controversial 2006 speech in Regenburg to justify Benedict's papacy as one that "has been marked by missteps, mismanagement and media disasters."

That same incident however, earned thePpope the title of "Benedict the Brave" from the Wall Street Journal, which took a very different view of the affair. In that spirit, bishops in both Germany and the United States took the opportunity to praise Benedict's courageous steps forward in dialogue with Muslims and Jews.

Benedict has visited three synagogues the New York, Rome and Cologne as well as mosques in Istanbul, Amman and Jerusalem, but this significant gesture didn't rate mention in the Times piece.

In Italy, the great papal dilemma was what do you get the guy who has the Vatican Museums and all of its stuff? This year, the Italian Bishop's Conference came up with the perfect anniversary gift by proclaiming Monday April 19 a day of prayer and inviting Italians in every parish in throughout the peninsula to drop into Mass or to pray a Rosary for both Pope Benedict and for the victims of sexual abuse.

While the New York Times report dismissed Pope Benedict as an "interim pope" intended to give the "Vatican a breather" after the 26-year pontificate of John Paul II, a look at the long history of the papacy suggests that predicting papal reigns is a tricky affair. After all, Pope Sixtus V managed to rebuild the city during his five-year pontificate and in 1900 Pope Leo XIII opened the Holy Door for the Jubilee at the age of 90, despite a decade of reports of his imminent demise.




Many thanks again to Gloria on Beatrice's site for her collages - I will post them fullsize in BENADDICTIONS.


Benedict XVI, the holy risk taker
Guest Editorial
by ROBERT ROYAL

April 25, 2010

Robert Royal is president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C.


Up until just a few months ago, it seemed clear what Benedict’s legacy was shaping up to be.

In his very first homily after his election, he invoked the legacy of John Paul II and promised that as “the Successor of Peter, I also wish to confirm my determination to continue to put the Second Vatican Council into practice, following in the footsteps of my predecessors and in faithful continuity with the 2,000-year tradition of the Church.”

It may look like there are two elements here, council and Tradition. But in fact there is only one: a dynamic tradition, ever ancient, ever new. And it may seem that all this is just what popes are supposed to say.

But as the past five years have shown, one thing we can say about Benedict XVI is that he is a holy risk taker. His major initiatives need to be understood in this context, even though they have also provoked controversy.

The address at the University of Regensburg is remembered in secular circles primarily for a few phrases that seemed to criticize Muslims.

But in fact, the whole thrust of that lecture was to place squarely in front of Europe and the rest of the Christian world the large challenge of rediscovering faith and restoring the full meaning of reason in the spiritual journey — or acceptance of certain decline.

As he did earlier as a theologian, Pope Benedict has been one of the most sophisticated and profound commentators on European and world culture — so much so that it is not enough to have heard some of his addresses; they also need to be read and studied.

At the same time, he has shown a gentle pastoral manner — witness the way his demeanor had the American press, remarkably, eating out of his hand during his 2008 visit.

His bold moves in reforming the liturgy and permitting the use of the old Latin form have led some to regard him as merely backward looking. But in fact he’s gathering up the experience of the half century since the council and seeking to establish liturgical forms both appropriate and deepened for the third millennium.

Contrary to the common view, his approach to the Society of St. Pius X has been careful, except for the unfortunate oversight about the extremism of that group’s Bishop Richard Williamson, which even SSPX has repudiated.

Benedict’s bold outreach to Anglicans and Orthodox as well shows an ambitious intention to gather together as large a swath as possible of the living forces of Christianity in order to make a new effort at evangelization in a narrowing world that desperately needs fresh air.

But as we all know, the last few months have put all this in jeopardy and may eclipse Benedict’s real achievements for some time to come. For all the unfair attempts to tar him with responsibility for one or another instance of priestly child abuse, the evidence is flimsy to nonexistent to nonsensical.

In fact, as the scrutiny continues, he will emerge, as has already begun to happen, not as one who should resign, but as the one who has done most within the Church to clean out the priestly “filth” that he courageously went out of his way to mention five years ago, just before he became Pope.

The rest of his pontificate may be spent atoning for the sins of others in public, but in a less public way, the initiatives he has set in motion will be a blessing to our generation and many more to come.

Many thanks, bold-hearted Benedict!


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April 25, Fourth Sunday in Easter

Third from left, a depiction of Mark's martyrdom; the statue is by Donatello.
ST. MARK, EVANGELIST & MARTYR
Little is known of Mark's early life, except that he was born in Judea. The Acts and Paul's letters tell us he was a friend of both Peter and Paul. Peter called him 'my son', and Mark's house in Jerusalem apepared to have been a gathering place for the early Christians. He travelled with Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey, but Paul did not want him along on the second one, though apparently they made up later as Paul asked him to visit him in prison. His Gospel is the oldest and shortest of the four Gospels, and Eusebius says it is his account of what Peter preached. Ten to 20 years after Christ's Ascension, Mark came to Alexandria, in Egypt, where the Church he founded is now the Coptic Orthodox Church. He is considered the first bishop of Alexandria and the founder of Christianity in Africa. He died a martyr under Nero's rule, when anti-Christian feeling led the people of the city to drag him through the streets with a rope around his neck until he died. He is the patron saint of Venice, where in 825, two Venetian merchants brought his relics from Alexandria. The Copts venerate his head at the St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. [NB: I have just now realized that in a strange oversight, the Holy Father has not given a catechesis on St. Mark or St. Luke. Since neither of them was an Apostle, one might have expected their stories to follow the first catecheses oon St. Paul in the Apostles series, before the cycle on the early Christians which began with Timothy and Titus.!]
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/nab/readings/042510.shtml



OR today.

Both papal events yesterday - receiving the credentials of the new Belgian ambassador, and an address to an
Italian conference on the new media - do not even get mentioned on Page 1, nor the usual Rinunce e Nomine,
though they are reported in the inside pages. Is a commentary by Lucetta Scaraffia on the state of neuro-
physiology more important to the OR? Besides, the international 'news' reported on Page 1 is all generic -
the Taliban threat to Pakistan's nuclear arms; Iraq still caught in terrorist violence; Obama's administration
does not mind Hamas in a future Palestinian government; and thousands of civilians still suffering from the
effects of Sri Lanka's long civil war.



THE POPE'S DAY

'Regina caeli' - Recalling that this Sunday is also known as the Sunday of the Good Shepherd, the Holy Father spoke on the Church's World Day fof Prayer for Vocations, calling on the faithful to pray for more vocations and to pray for our priests to be stronger witnesses to the Gospel of Christ in their own lives as an example to the flock entrusted to their spiritual care.

He also reminded the faithful that today the Church beatified two priests - the 18th century Carmelite Angelo Paoli who was known as Rome's 'apostle of charity' and 'father of the poor', beatified in St. John's Lateran; and Jose Tous y Soler, a Catalonian Capuchin who founded a charitable sisterhood, and was beatified today in Barcelona.

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[The Boston Globe is pontificating to the Pope with all the usual MSM do-goodisms and meaningless moralizing - all the while, reiterating MSM's character assasination by unfounded and loose accusations of Benedict XVI's personal culpability in the matter of sex abuses by priests! And completely ignoring everything that the Church and Benedict XVI have said and done, in the past or recently, to address the problem. It is as if the Pope had never even written the Letter to Irish Catholics!


Rather than resign, Benedict
should devote papacy to healing

Editorial

April 25, 2010


As he celebrates his 83d birthday and fifth anniversary as pope this month, Joseph Ratzinger — now Benedict XVI — has been given a mission for the rest of his life. It is to rescue the Roman Catholic Church from a scandal for which he is partially to blame.

It will not be enough to express sorrow over victims and shame over the conduct of priests who molest young boys, though the Pope’s statements along those lines in recent days may be a sign that he understands the magnitude of the clergy sex abuse crisis. It’s a unique scandal, cutting at the underpinnings of the Church. It jeopardizes the relationship between clergy and laity, and implicates the Pope himself in a sweeping cover-up.

There is now no doubt about Benedict’s efforts, as a cardinal, to slow down investigations of even cases in which a priest’s guilt was unchallenged. When a priest convicted of tying up and abusing two young boys asked to be dismissed, then-Cardinal Ratzinger warned that “the good of the Universal church’’ must be considered in weighing whether to go along with the request. He raised such concerns in multiple cases in contexts that clearly suggested he was willing to downplay offenses in order to protect the church’s reputation.

There is no precedent for atoning for such lapses in judgment. Calling for Benedict’s resignation, as the Rev. James Scahill of East Longmeadow recently did, is one option. Only the Pope can punish the Pope. Indeed, Benedict’s resignation might make sense if he were the central problem, and removing him would make it go away.

But that’s not the case. His actions, though serious, were similar to those of other church leaders. As Pope, he at least has been more responsive to clergy sex abuse than his predecessor.

That’s not to say he’s done enough. On Wednesday, in the course of describing a meeting with eight men on the Mediterranean island of Malta who had been abused by priests, Benedict spoke publicly of the revelations for the first time promising “Church action.’’ A Vatican statement later declared that “the Church is doing, and will continue to do, all in its power to investigate allegations.’’

But what might “all in its power’’ mean? To give substance to Benedict’s promise, the Church must work closely with legal authorities, and explicitly reverse an ambiguous order that some Church officials interpreted as discouraging their cooperation with civilian investigations.
[DONE SINCE 2003, AT LEAST, YOU MORONS!]

But Benedict’s mission should be broader and deeper. The scandal has exposed a cosseted, secretive culture among some members of the all-male clergy, suggesting that some priests and bishops are so far removed from the realities of everyday life that their own moral compasses are awry.

This mind-set has made it all too easy for Church officials to mistake outside scrutiny for anti-Catholic animus.

It has kept the clergy from recognizing the extent of the suffering of victims and their families, and the need to win back the trust of whole communities.

Benedict should devote the rest of his life and his papacy to promoting healing. He should throw open the doors of the Church, and bring sunshine to the darkest corners of the Vatican.


[Except that those having the Globe mindset are congenitally unable to see actual 'open doors' and 'light' which do not correspond to their idea of what they think should constitute 'open doors' and 'light' in the Catholic Church!]


I THINK CARDINAL O'MALLEY SHOULD WRITE A REBUTTAL LETTER RIGHT AWAY!

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*turning green and throwing up*

Maybe this unworthy Globe piece is better off in the toxic waste threat.
In any case: it's what's expected of them. It must be wonderful so be so predictable! [SM=g7707] [SM=g1782470]




I decided to post it here - though entirely in purple (if gangrene-green were not visually offensive, it would have been my color choice from the start for all such sick invective) - because the Boston Globe did break open the US sex-abuse scandal a decade ago, and yet, today, it seems to ignore completely how much the Vatican and the US Church did afterwards in response to the situation they made public.

Unfortunately, predictable repetition is one of the easiest tools that propagandists can use, because although 'you cannot fool all of the people all of the time', it is equally true that if you repeat a lie often enough, it comes to be perceived as truth!

The Globe editorial is also emblematic of all the armchair Popes like John Allen and Marco Politi, who have no scruples about preaching to the Pope or talking down to him as if he were an ignorant schoolboy who stubbornly makes the same mistakes over and over - it is not just ignoring his exceptional intellectual and moral authority, it is failing to even respect that he is an intelligent adult!

TERESA


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Speculation: Pope will make
historic apology for abuse

By John Phillips in Rome

Sunday, 25 April 2010


Pope Benedict XVI is planning to make the first general apology for the abuse of children and minors by Roman Catholic priests when he meets thousands of clergymen from around the world in June at the climax of the International Year for Priests, Vatican sources say.

In the past there have been papal or church apologies for individual cases of paedophilia or for abuse in specific countries, for example during the German Pontiff's recent visit to Malta.

What is being prepared now would be the first time a Pope seeks to atone publicly for the extent to which paedophilia has been a major stain on the modern history of the Church touching a constellation of countries, say the sources at the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy.

It could be considered comparable to the historic step that the previous Pope, John Paul II, took in apologising to the Jews for historic church anti-Semitism and for misdeeds during the Crusades, they say.

Vatican officials hope such an unprecedented act of penance by Benedict, together with thousands of clergymen in St Peter's Square, 9-11 June, will do much to lay to rest the scandal and defuse protests that might disrupt his trip to Britain in September. PUH-LEEZ! If the Pope says anything at all, it won't be for those reasons,, i.e., it won't be a PR move at all, but something that needs to be said and has the proper occasion and setting for being said in the concluding ceremonies of the Year for Priests - which he decreed precisely to purify and sanctify the priests of the world anew, in view of all the degradations the priesthood has undergone since Vatican II!]

The encounter will form the climax of the special year of events designed in part to encourage vocations to the cloth but which instead has been marred by the mushrooming paedophile scandal. [MSM always speak as if the fact of sex offenses by priests were something just revealed. It's a mock scandal that they have set up, almost 100% hypocrisy, reflecting the conventional reflexive hypocrisy of the bourgeois who profess to be 'horrified' by something they know has existed all along and that they themselves have perhaps been guilty of.]

The Pope has indicated repeatedly that he is considering ways to steer the Church toward turning the page and finding an exit strategy from the maelstrom. [MSM is always reading what the Pope says, as primary proclaimer and defender of Chrit's teachings, in terms of the secular society's image-conscious mentality, where every action or statement is considered as nothing more than a PR move.]

"The shipwrecks of life can form God's project for us, and can also be useful for new beginnings in our lives," he told journalists on his aeroplane as he flew to Malta last weekend.

He made the point while travelling to celebrate the 1,950th anniversary of St Paul's shipwreck on the small island while on his way to Rome as a prisoner to stand trial, in the year 60 AD.

One veteran Vatican watcher said that using the image of the shipwreck to allude to the abuse scandal "suggests it can be read as not only causing the shipwreck of the church in countries across the globe today, from Ireland to the United States and Australia, from Austria, the Netherlands and Italy to Germany, Malta and others too, but also part of God's plan to purify, reform and revitalise the Church".

In speeches during his Maltese sojourn, Benedict underlined how great good can arise from a shipwreck, as happened when St Paul's stay led to the Maltese becoming one of the first Christian peoples and retaining their faith intact for nearly 2,000 years.

Vatican sources said the Pope considers the jamboree with the priests in June an appropriate occasion for him to lead the whole Church in a "Day of Request for Pardon" of the victims and their families for the wrong done by a small percentage of priests [Well, I did not expect this bit of honesty, for a change!] in abusing children and minors in many countries, and the wrong done by bishops in covering up that abuse or protecting the predators.

The meeting would be appropriate for a day of fasting as well as penance, they say. On the papal flight last week-end Benedict made a second allusion to the abuse scandal, and its devastating effect on the moral authority of the Church and its pastors, describing the Church as the body of Jesus Christ "wounded by our sins".

['Devastating' it may seem to outsiders and bourgeois Catholics, but they said the same thing of Humanae vitae and of the same priest 'scandal' when it first erupted in the US a decade ago, just to limit ourselves to recent examples. Christ built his Church on a Rock that has prevailed for two millennia - there is no reason to think it has been shaken by this media-generated storm.except in superficial commonplace perception.

And when the Pope says the Church has been wounded by the sins of its priests, he is not expressing anything new. The Church as the People of God is composed of human beings who are all sinners - and it was precisely for their redemption and ongoing purification that God came to earth and became man. For every priest who has sinned against minors, there are a thousand who have lived their lives as faithfully as they can to their vows.]


The respected Vatican watcher added: "It is clear that Benedict has been reflecting and seeking to understand the abuse scandal with the eyes of faith. He seems to be developing a theological and spiritual frame for reading and dealing with this shameful and humbling reality in the life of the Church in the 21st century and discerning an exit strategy from it."

[How unfortunate that the 'respected Vatican watcher' has thoughtlessly fallen into the MSM trap himself. Does he really think that the Pope needs to develop de novo 'a theological and spiritual frame' for dealing with evil and sin??? What was the past 2000 years of basic Christian teaching if not that?]

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'REGINA CAELI' TODAY:
World Day of Prayer for Vocations





Recalling that this Sunday is also known as the Sunday of the Good Shepherd, the Holy Father spoke on the Church's World Day of Prayer for Vocations, calling on the faithful to pray for more vocations and to pray for our priests to be stronger witnesses to the Gospel of Christ in their own lives as an example to the flock entrusted to their spiritual care.

He also reminded the faithful that today the Church beatified two priests - the 18th century Carmelite Angelo Paoli who was known as Rome's 'apostle of charity' and 'father of the poor', beatified in St. John's Lateran; and Jose Tous y Soler, a Catalonian Capuchin who founded a charitable sisterhood, and was beatified today in Barcelona.

This is what he said in English:

This Sunday the Church celebrates the World Day of Prayer for Vocations.

As we rejoice in the new life that the Risen Lord has won for us, let us ask him to inspire many young people to centre their hearts on the things of Heaven (cf. Col 3:1-2) and to offer themselves joyfully in the service of Christ our Good Shepherd in the priesthood and religious life.

Confidently entrusting this petition to Mary, Queen of Heaven, I invoke upon you God’s abundant blessings of peace and joy!





Here is a full translation of the Holy Father's words today:

Dear brothers and sisters,

On this fourth Sunday of Easter, called Good Shepherd Sunday, we observe the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, which this year has the theme "Witness inspires vocations", a theme that is "closely connected to the life and mission of priests and consecrated persons" (Message for the XLVII World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Nov, 13, 2009).

The first form of witness that inspires vocations is prayer (cfr ibid.), as the example of St. Monica shows us, who, supplicating God with humility and insistence, obtained the grace of seeing her son Augustine become a Christian. He wrote: "With bo uncertainties, I believe and affirm that through her prayers, God granted me the intention not to propose, not to wish, not to think, not to love anything other than arriving at the truth" (De Ordine II, 20, 52, CCL 29, 136).

Therefore, I invite parents to pray so that the heart of their sons may open up to hearing the Good Shepherd, and that "the smallest seed of vocation... may become a luxuriant tree, laden with fruit for the good of the Church and all mankind" (Message cit.).

How can we listen to the voice of the Lord and recognize it? In the preaching of the Apostles and their successors, in which the voice of Christ resounds, who calls to communion with God and the fullness of life, as we read today in the Gospel of St. John: "My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand" (Jn 10,27-28).

Only the Good Shepherd guards his flock with immense tenderness and defends it from evil, and only in him can the faithful place absolute trust.

On this special day of prayer for vocations, I particularly call on ordained ministers so that, inspired by the Year for Priests, they may feel committed "to a stronger and more incisive evangelical witness in today's world" (Letter to decree the year for Priests).

May they remember that the priest "continues the work of Redemption on earth". May they learn to pause gladly before the tabernacle; adhere "totally to their own vocation and mission through severe asceticism'; Christianly shape the people entrusted to them; cultivate carefully the priestly fraternity" (cfr ibid.).

May they take the example of wise and zealous pastors, as did St. Gregory Nazianzene, who wrote to his fraternal brother and Bishop, St. Basil: "Teach us your love for the sheep, your solicitude and capacity for understanding, your watchfulness... severity in gentleness, serenity and obedience in activity...the combats in defense of the flock, the victories achieved in Christ" (Oratio IX, 5, PG 35, 825ab).

I thank all those present and those who with their prayers and affection sustain my ministry as the Successor of Peter, and upon each one I invoke the heavenly protection of the Virgin Mary, to whom let us now turn in prayer.

After the prayers, he said:

This morning, in Rome and Barcelona, respectively, two priests were proclaimed Blessed: Angelo Paoli, Carmelite, and José Tous y Soler, Capuchin. I will refer to the latter later,

I am happy to recall that Blessed Angelo Paoli, native of Lunigiana who lived between the 17th and 18th centuries, was an apostle of charity in Rome, where he was called 'father of the poor'. He dedicated himself especially to the sick at the San Giovanni Hospital, and took care of convalescents as well.

His apostolate drew strength from the Eucharist and from devotion to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, as well as from an intense life of penitence.

In the Year for priests, I gladly offer his example to all priests, particularly to those who belong to Religious Institutes of active life.

Later, in his greeting to Spanish-speaking pilgrims, he said:

On this Sunday of the Good Shepherd, when the Church celebrates the Day of Prayer for Vocations, the beatification took place in Barcelona of the Capuchin priest José Tous y Soler, founder of the Capuchin Sisters of the Mother of the Good Shepherd.

Despite numberless trials and difficulties, he never allowed himself to be overcome by bitterness or resentment. He distinguished himself for his exquisite charity and his capacity to tolerate and understand the deficiencies of others.

May his example and intercession help everyone, especially priests, to live faithful to Christ.

In Catalan, he said:
May our Blessed Josep Tous i Soler bless and protect us.


Addressing the Italian pilgrims, he said:

I address a special greeting to the METER Association, which for 14 years, has promoted the National Day for Child Victims of Violence, Exploitation and Indifference.

On this occasion, I wish to thank and encourage, above all, those who are dedicated to the prevention of such violence, and to education, particularly parents, teachers, and so many priests, sisters, catechists and animators who work with children in the parishes, in schools and in associations.






The following story by AP advances its agenda of trying to nail down the Holy Father for personal culpability in the sex abuse scandal, and reflects the current media strategy - uncoordinated to be sure, but reflexive and indicative of their common mindset: In the absence of any new muck they can spatter the Pope with, they now read everything the Pope says in the light of the 'scandal' they persist in mongering, and as though they had forced the Pope to face up the scandals!

In 2005, where were they when he denounced the 'filth' within the Church committed by those who are supposed to 'belong' to Christ? That was reported by MSM fleetingly as if to say 'Here's another Church figure spouting fire and brimstone' - and not one among them felt compelled at all to re-examine where the Church was after the furor a few years earlier over the US scandals!

Perhaps because in March 2005, less than a month before Joseph Ratzinger would be elected Pope, MSM only considered him as a 78-year-old Church has-been on the verge of retirement, and not worthy of further notice!



Pope says priests
must protect children

by NICOLE WINFIELD



VATICAN CITY, April 25 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI told priests Sunday to safeguard children in their charge from evil and win the "absolute" trust of their flock, even as his own papacy is clouded by accusations he and other top churchmen failed to protect minors adequately from pedophile clergy.

Since a trip to Malta a week earlier when he wept with adults who had been sexually abused as children by priests, Benedict seems to be stepping up his reaction as the scandal deepens and widens, posing the most challenging crisis in decades for the Roman Catholic church.

Benedict, in remarks to the public in St. Peter's Square Sunday, told priests they must "fight for the defense of the flock," defend their charges from "evil" and ensure that faithful can place "absolute trust" in their pastors.

He urged them to model themselves on Jesus the "Good Shepherd," who, "with immense tenderness, safeguards his flock and defends it from evil," adding "only in him can the faithful place their absolute trust."

But Benedict made no admission of responsibility for devising and overseeing what victims in lawsuits contend were strategies to protect the church from scandal instead of children from harmful priests.

[For God's sake, he was giving a mini-homily about Good Shepherd Sunday and the Church's World Day for Vocations! And there is no culpable responsibility for him to 'admit', as AP and its slanderous media cousins insist against all available facts!

The pathetic condition of media is obvious when in the past few days, their persistent headline has been about an abuse victims suing Benedict XVI for abuses he suffered in the 1950s (when Joseph Ratzinger was nowhere near the Curia), on the hilarious basis his publicity-seeking lawyer is now advancing that the Vatican is a business enterprise!

That they give more prominence to this, and the similarly absurd publicity stunts of an Ali Agca, than to the Pope's meeting with some victims in Malta - which got its 15 minutes of media fame and no more - illustrates media bias quite graphically. In seeking to bring down the Pope and the Church, they have lost all sense of proportion, of logic, and of decency.]


In his remarks from his studio window in the Apostolic Palace, he appeared on guiding the world's 1.1 billion Catholics through the Church crisis. He thanked the crowd and "all those who with their prayers and affection support my ministry" as Pontiff. [As any decent person would do, you do not take any good deed for granted!]

Benedict singled out for praise an Italian church group that promoted Sunday as a national day to remember abused children.

The Meter Association combats pedophilia in the Italian Catholic church. But while hailing its work in defending children from "violence, exploitation and indifference," the Pope never used the word "pedophilia" and did not mention the violence that children have suffered at the hands of priests and, in at least a couple of cases, even bishops.

[The Pope greeted METER in a one-liner during his general greeting to Italian-speaking pilgrims. He is neither stupid nor a masochist - why would he parrot what the media wants him to say, opportunely or not, which in this case was not at all opportune? Also, MSM has used pedophilia as a blanket pejorative term, even if most of the cases on record are not pedophilia (sexual obsession and violation of children) but efepbophilia (in whcih the victims are adolescents).]

Instead the Pope focused on the good clergy do for children. [AND WHY NOT? The good deserve to be praised and encouraged, never taken for granted or ignored.]

"Above all, I want to thank and encourage all those who dedicate themselves to prevention and education" against violence, Benedict said, singling out parents, teachers and the "so many priests, nuns" and others who work with young people in parishes, schools and church groups.

Meter was founded by the Rev. Fortunato Di Noto, [COLORE=9910#FF]who has complained that some cases of pedophile priests were handled "with imprudence" by the Church. [A remark Fr. Di Noto made months or years ago is reported, whereas his recent statement of support for Benedict XVI on the Pope's birthday is not, nor his prominent participation in the conference on the use of the Internet to spread the message of the Church, which the Pope addresed yesterday.]

Benedict so far has resisted calls [by the media!] that he take responsibility for his own actions, first as archbishop in Germany, and later in his long years heading the Vatican watchdog office against immorality.

Revealed in the scandals has been a pattern of transferring molesting clergy from parish to parish. In some cases abusers were sent to missions in faraway countries, including in Africa where many impoverished parents depend on the Church for the welfare and education of their children.

Victims' lobbies have been skeptical that real change is in motion, starting from the top, despite recent promises from the Vatican that "effective measures" to protect children are in the works, and Benedict's recent decision to accept the resignations of some bishops, including an Irish one last week who failed to report abuse to police.

The Catholic dissident group We Are Church, while appreciating Benedict's latest efforts, has lamented that the action is late in coming.

Still, Benedict's open talk about abused children and his admonishment to priests to protect minors is an abrupt turnaround from the defensive parries the Vatican was making only a few weeks earlier against the seemingly relentless scandal revelations.

Only three weeks earlier, the Vatican turned its most solemn religious occasion Easter Sunday Mass into a ringing defense of the Pontiff against what one top cardinal scornfully dismissed as "petty gossip." [Only the most malicious mind could call Cardinal Sodano's tribute a 'defense' of anything. All he said was that the Church was behind the Pope, and he made the remarks before the Mass began. The translation 'petty gossip' is AP's choice when the sense in which it was 'public chattering'.]

Since then, nearly every day the scandals' shock value seems to spiral upward, tainting the ranks of bishops, who are all appointed to their posts by pontiffs. [And no one ever makes mistakes appointing people? Barack Obama knowingly appointed a confessed tax cheat to be his Treasury Secretary - in charge of the tax services of the country, among other things - and no one outside the Republicans reproves him for that!]

On Friday, Belgium's longest serving bishop resigned because he sexually abused a young boy for years, including after becoming bishop. It was also recently revealed that a Norwegian bishop resigned because he had molested a child as a priest. [So? At least, they have owned up and resigned, and hopefully, will make the appropriate penitence for their sins. Winfield and all her colleagues at AP and the MSM have never sinned at all????]

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Pope Benedict to create
a new dicastery for
'new evangelization' in the West

by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from

April 25, 2010


He is profoundly concerned about the widening media campaign regarding sexual abuse of minors by priests and the attempts to involve him personally, but Benedict XVI never fails to surprise!

In the next few weeks, the Vatican will announce the creation of a new dicastery in the Roman Curia dedicated to the evangelization of the West, and it will be headed by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, currently rector fo the Pontifical Lateran University and president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Pope Benedict is said to be preparing the Apostolic Letter which will formalize the decision to create the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization, dedicated to re-evangelizing the countries which have been Christian for centuries but where Christianity's hold on peoples appears to have been considerably weakened.

Europe, the United States and South America will be the principal zones of jurisdiction for the new dicastery, alongside the centuries-old Propaganda Fide, or Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which is dedicated to introducing Christianity in the mission lands of Africa and Asia.

The new dicastery would be the first innovation in the Roman Curia by Benedict XVI, whom many had expected to streamline the Curia.

The expression 'new evangelization' was used for the first time by John Paul II in June 1979, speaking in Nowa Huta, a dormitory city for Polish workers that seemed to be the Communist model of a city without God - it had no religious symbols or churches. The term became a key word in the Polish Pope's itinerant Pontificate.

The idea of a dicastery dedicated to this purpose first came from Don Luigi Giussani, the late founder of Comunione e Liberazione, who proposed it to John Paul II in the early 1980s, as recounted by Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes in his introduction to Fr. Massimo Camisasca's third volume on the history of C&L.

Since the context was different at the time, there was no follow-up. [How was the context different? Western Europe was already quite de-Christianized, and certainly eastern Europe after more than 30 years of communism was!]

According to authoritative sources, the person who brought up the idea once more this time to Benedict XVI, about a year ago, was Cardinal Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice, who is also very much involved in the efforts to reinforce Europe's fading Christianity.

Apparently, Benedict XVI welcomed the suggestion and immediately thought of putting the new council under Mons. Fisichella, a theologian, as the most appropriate head of the new structure.

Fisichella is about to complete five years as rector at the Lateran, and is expected to be replaced by Mons. Enrico Dal Covolo, the Salesian priest chosen by Benedict XVI to preach the last Lenten spiritual exercises for the Pope and the Roman Curia.

Fisichella would also be giving up the presidency of the Pontifical Academy for Life [where he has been involved in a dispute with some members over his statements regarding the medical abortion of a nine-year-old Brazilian girl's twin pregnancy that resulted from rape by her stepfather].

The relationship between a de-Christianized West and the faith has always occupied the attention of Joseph Ratzinger.

"The Church is always evangelizing, and has never interrupted its path of evangelization," he told a conference of catechists in 2000, "and yet, we are observing the progressive process of de-Christianization [in the West] and the loss of essential human values which are very concerning".

"That is why," he continued, "we must seek - beyond permanent evangelization, which has never stopped and must never stop - a new evangelization that can have an impact on that world which no longer has access to 'classic' evangelization. Everyone needs the Gospel. The Gospel is meant for everyone, and not just for a specific circle, and so, we are obliged to find new ways to bring the Gospel to everyone".

If he assumes the new position, Fisichella - who continues to be the chaplain of the Italian House of Deputies - will remain in the Roman Curia and automatically becomes a candidate for cardinalship.

Earlier speculation considered him the leading candidate to replace retiring Cardinal Severino Poletto as Archbishop of Turin. The other candidates are the Bishop of Alessandria, Giuseppe Versaldi, a protege of Cardinal Bertone; and the Bishop of Vicenza, Cesare Nosiglia, reportedly supported by Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian bishops' conference.

Meanwhile, the current president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Mons. Gianfranco Ravasi, is considered a growing possibility to succeed the retiring Archbishop Dionigi Tettamanzi of Milan. Ravasi spent most of his career before coming to the Vatican two years ago in the Curia of Milan.

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It took me a couple of days to decide what to do with this article which is much praised in the blogosphere. It is certainly comprehensive and makes a number of significant points, but in the end, I think Mr. Bottum should have reread his article again before submitting it - because it contains some premises and assumptions that are, at best, questionable, and at worst, objectionable.

Since Peggy Noonan wrote that first column in the Wall Street Journal seeing nothing but good in the media, and David Goldman praised Ross Douthat for his fence-stting act in the New York Times, and the Anchoress called John Allen 'the greatest Vatican reporter ever', I feel like I'm looking at a parallel universe where people far more intelligent and qualified than I am seem to have selectively lost their critical faculties - and now this article, that, among other things, callously says this media-generated scandal is 'killing' Benedict XVI, and that cannot make up its mind if the media is being anti-Catholic in what it is doing???? Am I just being overly defensive and irrationally hyper-critical?



Anti-Catholicism, again:
The permanent scandal of the Vatican

BY Joseph Bottum

May 3, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 31

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and editor of First Things.

The day the Antichrist is ripped from his papal throne, true religion will guide the world. Or perhaps it’s the day the last priest is gutted, and his entrails used to strangle the last king, as Voltaire demanded. Yes, that’s when we will see at last the reign of bright, clean, enlightened reason—the release of mankind from the shadows of medieval superstition. War will end. The proletariat will awaken from its opiate dream. The oppression of women will stop. And science at last will be free from the shackles of Rome.

For almost 500 years now, Catholicism has been an available answer, a mystical key, to that deep, childish, and existentially compelling question: Why aren’t we there yet? Why is progress still unfinished? Why is promise still unfulfilled? Why aren’t we perfect? Why aren’t we changed?

Despite our rejection of the past, the future still hasn’t arrived. Despite our advances, corruption continues. It needs an explanation. It requires a response. And in every modernizing movement — from Protestant Reformers to French Revolutionaries, Communists to Freudians, Temperance Leaguers and suffragettes to biotechnologists and science-fiction futurists — someone in despair eventually stumbles on the answer: We have been thwarted by the Catholic Church.

Or by the Jews, of course. Perhaps it’s no accident that anti-Semitism should also be making a reappearance these days. The poet Peter Viereck’s famous line — “Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals” — gets quoted in too many contexts to express the connection anymore, and, God knows, the history of Catholicism has plenty of anti-Semitic sins to expiate.

Still, Jews and Catholics do have this much in common: In moments of uncertainty and doubt, the people of the West go haring back again to their old gods and traditional answers — blaming the Jews and the Catholic Church.

As it happens, the question Why aren’t we there yet? is, in its way, a biblical question. Christianity spread across the world the Bible’s new idea of history — born from the vision that God is a God who entered time, and time is moving toward a goal. Even modern nonbelievers still somehow believe this part; in important metaphysical ways, their progressive view of the world remains Christian, albeit with Christ stripped out.

Innumerable books have been written about the good effects of this forward-aiming view of history, from Christopher Dawson’s old Progress and Religion to Rodney Stark’s recent The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.

Perhaps not enough has been said, however, about one of its bad effects. As we wait for the Second Coming — or its many secular stand-ins — an odd, hysterical impatience can take hold. We worked so hard, and still the change in human nature didn’t come. Still heaven didn’t get built on earth.

Evil must have intervened, and since the past is the evil against which progress fights, what more obvious villain than the Catholic Church, that last-surviving remnant of the ancient darkness?

Welcome to the Year of Our Lord 2010. Welcome to our own odd hysteria.

The best sign of such hysterical moments may be the difficulty of anything sane or sensible being heard in them. As Newsweek noted on April 8, the surveys and studies over the past 30 years show “little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue.”

Nonetheless, in 2002, after the last set of revelations, “a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent” of Americans “thought Catholic priests ‘frequently’ abused children.”

A poll released on April 13 this year found that between 8 and 11 percent of Canadians say they know personally a victim of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest — which works out to well over 2 million people, out of a national population over 33 million.

Given the number of Canadian claims over the last 50 years, that would require every abuse victim to know thousands and thousands of people — but the poll respondents aren’t lying, exactly. They’re responding, quite accurately, to an atmosphere, reinterpreting the past and reinventing the present to conform to the ambient understanding of the world.

Even in such an atmosphere, however, it’s worth setting down the sane, sensible thing to be said about the new round of Catholic child-abuse cases that has obsessed first Europe and now America in recent weeks.

The scandal has two parts, which need to be distinguished. The first part — the more evil, disgusting part — is over, thank God. Every sufficiently large group has a small percentage of members with sick sexual desires. By their very calling, Christian ministers ought to have a lower percentage. For a variety of reasons, however, Catholics suffered through a corruption of their priests, centered around 1975, with the clergy’s percentage of sexual predators reaching new and vile levels.

The Church now has in place stringent child-protection procedures, and even with obsession over the scandals raging in Europe, almost all the cover-ups now being discussed, real and imagined, are more than a decade old. Besides, the younger priests, formed in the light of John Paul II’s papacy, seem vastly more faithful to Catholic spiritual practice and moral teaching.

Still, the second part of the scandal remains, for it involves not the mostly dead criminals but the living institution. The bishops who ruled over those corrupt priests in the 1970s and 1980s catastrophically failed to act when they needed to.

Some of this came from the short-sighted and anti-theological advice that dominated Catholic institutional thinking in that era. The lawyers told the bishops, as lawyers do, never to admit anything, and the psychologists told them not to be so medieval.

There’s an irony when the 2009 Murphy Report, the official Irish investigation, noted, “The Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon-law rules” on defrocking and trying priests.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, those same Church authorities were blamed for having the old canon-law rules, which lacked compassion and didn’t recognize the psychiatric profession’s supposed advances in curing pedophilia. And so, instead of being defrocked, guilty priests were often sent off to treatment facilities and, once pronounced cured, were reassigned.

The bishops of the time don’t get off that easy, however. Lawyers and psychologists contributed to the mess, but the much larger portion of the failures came simply from the bishops’ desire to avoid bad publicity and, like military officers, to protect the men in their unit when those men get themselves into trouble.

For these episcopal failures, every Catholic is now paying — in nearly $3 billion of American donations lost in court judgments, in suspicion of their pastors, and in deep shame.

The general figures of child abuse in the world today are shocking. One widely reported study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence suggested the United States has 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. It’s a little hard to believe. More than 12 percent of the population were abused at least once as children?

But Charol Shakeshaft’s respected study insists that 6 to 10 percent of recent public-school students have been molested. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, claims 10 percent is a conservative estimate. John Jay College’s Margaret Leland Smith says her numbers come closer to 20 percent.


All this, while (as the papal biographer George Weigel points out) the most recent audit found six credible cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in 2009, in an American church of 68 million members, with all the perpetrators reported to the police and stripped of priestly faculties by their bishops.

“The only hard data that has been made public by any denomination comes from John Jay College’s study of Catholic priests,” an April 8 Newsweek story noted. [BTW, I continue to be amazed and perplexed that Newsweek ran the story at all! It has a virulently anti-Catholic religion editor in Lisa Miller, who does not appear to be aware of her appallingly basic ignorance of the religion she writes about so cavalierly and contemptuously.]

Limiting their study to plausible accusations made between 1950 and 1992, John Jay researchers reported that about 4 percent of the 110,000 priests active during those years had been accused of sexual misconduct involving children. Specifically, 4,392 complaints (ranging from “sexual talk” to rape) were made against priests by 10,667 victims.

“I don’t like it when Catholic leaders fall back on the ‘child abuse happens everywhere’ defense,” Ross Douthat observed on the New York Times website. “I do like it, however, when mainstream media outlets do their job and report that there’s no evidence that the rate of sex abuse is higher among the Catholic clergy than among any other group.”

[The problem is they rarely do. MSM hardly ever provides any context when it reports in the 'scandal in the Church':

#1 No context of scope - By not providing any figures, such as those cited above, stories imply a) that the great majority of Catholic priests are sex perverts and the great majority of bishops criminal enablers, and b) that only Catholic priests are ever guilty of this perversion.

2) No context of time - By not specifying that the cases that have surfaced in Ireland, Germany and other countries now, took place at least a decade ago, and more of them decades ago, they deliberately give the casual reader the impression that all of these cases took place recently and that sexual abuse of children is actively ongoing on an alarming worldwide scale in the Catholic Church.]


In fact, it’s lower. If the John Jay study is right, the rate of clerical abuse over the past 50 years, including the peak of the crimes around 1975, was considerably lower by Allen’s figures, and much lower by Smith’s figures, than the abuse rate of the general male population.

Then there’s Ireland — ground zero for the European scandals raging now, just as Boston was for the American scandals back in 2002. Brendan O’Neill, editor of the Spiked-Online website and no particular friend of the Church, points out that the Irish government’s official commission spent 10 years, from 1999 to 2009, intensively inviting, from Irish-born people around the world, reports of abuse at Irish religious institutions.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of students who passed through Catholic schools in the 85 years from 1914 to 1999, the commission managed to gather 381 claims — with 35 percent of those charges made against lay staff and fellow pupils rather than priests.

“It might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless,” O’Neill concludes. “Very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.”

And yet, precisely because priests are supposed to behave better than other people do, fulfilling their vows of celibacy, it’s not an answer to point out that higher percentages of children are abused by other segments of the population.

There were never a lot of these Catholic cases, but there were enough — with every single one a horror, both in the act itself and in the failure of the bishops to react forcefully and quickly.

The Catholic Church didn’t start the worldwide epidemic of child sexual abuse, and it didn’t materially advance it. But the bureaucracy of the Church sure as hell didn’t do enough to fight that epidemic when it broke out among its own clergy.

All of which is pretty much what Pope Benedict preached at a Mass in Rome on April 15 and repeated when he met with abuse victims in Malta on April 18. “I have to say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word repentance, which seems too harsh,” he explained. “Now under the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins, we see that the ability to repent is a grace, and we see how it is necessary to repent, that is, to recognize what is wrong in our life.”

What more does anyone want from the Catholic Church?

Everything, is the answer. This, they think, will finally bring about whatever desire for the Church they’ve been nursing for decades. An end to what they call the sickness of clerical celibacy, for example. Or to the unfair authority they say the bishops hold, or to the lavender-tinged homosexual gang they imagine is running the seminaries, or to the leftist Jesuits they believe dominate Catholic higher education.

Liberal Catholics see the scandals as a chance to discredit conservatives, and conservatives as a chance to discredit liberals. Maureen Dowd, who regularly devotes her New York Times column to bite-sized rehashes of Mary McCarthy’s old Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, opines on “the Church’s Judas moment.”

The liberal theologian Hans Küng accuses the Pope of directly engineering the cover-up. The left-leaning National Catholic Reporter declares it “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history,” and another liberal Catholic magazine demands theological reform, to be achieved by arraigning “Benedict in the Dock.”

All this, while the hard traditionalist Gerald Warner takes to the pages of the Telegraph in England to blame the crimes on the liberalizing changes of Vatican II.

Everyone is working, whether deliberately or not, to keep the hysteria alive. Abortion supporters have seized on the news as a way to damage the pro-life movement, and proponents of the recent American health care bill are using it to punish their opponents for giving them trouble during the congressional vote.

The tattered figures of old anti-Catholic Protestantism — in isolated Bible churches of the fever-swamp right and isolated Episcopal chanceries of the fever-swamp left — feel newly empowered. Feminists, homosexual activists, therapists, talk-show hosts, plaintiff’s attorneys: The scandals are a hobbyhorse all the world hopes to ride to victory. [Exactly what the malicious media masterminds were counting on and got! - To parlay a few strategically chosen factoids, half-truths and downright lies into an exponential explosion of public outrage against the Church and the Pope, one that every existing anti-Catholic aggrupation could then further exploit opportunistically to promote their respective agendas.]

Several Catholic commentators have charged that the European and American press is out to destroy the Church. “The New York Times is conducting a vendetta against this traditionalist Pope in news stories, editorials and columns,” Pat Buchanan announced in a column on April 6. But this, too, only adds to the hysteria. [Why? Why should calling things as they are add to the hysteria? As if trying to be politically correct - i.e., inoffensive, i.e., hypocritical, i.s., dishonest - will attenuate the venom on the other side in any way!]

For all the journalistic sins that have been committed in recent weeks, what the media primarily want is a story to sell — and since the narrative of hypocrisy remains nearly the only moral shape a modern newspaper story can have, a tale of immoral clergy is ready-made for reporters. [Yes, but the fallacy of Bottum's argument is that it ignores the more blatant hypocrisy of the MSM itself - who have encouraged and promoted the individual's full and unrestricted right to do as he pleases, including and especially with his body, and now purport to be the paladins of a newly-discovered puritanism - but exclusively against Catholic priests, because the liberals hailed Nabokov's nymphet-obsessed Humbert Humbert as their kind of hero, promote all kinds of unnatural sex though associations like the notorious NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), and apparently found nothing wrong in a Dutch political party dedicated to the promotion of unnatural sex acts.]

And then the news begins to feed on itself. Each story about Catholicism makes the next story bigger, more worth pursuing. The reported cases are mostly decades old, but that doesn’t matter, once the frenzy catches hold. Anti-Catholic motives in the media are beside the point. [NO, they are not! Assuming the MSM's primary interest is to sell, their anti-Catholicism is enjoying a hell of a good ride on that interest, or perhaps, even more fundamental, anti-Catholicism in itself is so prevalent that it sells!]

The utter conventionality of reporters, together with the cycles of the news business, explains more than enough. Catholicism in general, and the Pope in particular, are news right now, and news sells.

The self-denominated New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the rest — have latched on, as well. ['As well'? They were the first to make the msot of it for self-promotion and nuisance value, more than anything.]

The Pope “should be in a police station being quizzed about his role in covering up and thereby enabling the rape of children,” opined one British writer. He should be in chains “before the International Criminal Court,” said another.

Religion is the cause of evil, they know, and so this evil must have been caused by religion — which is why their lawyers have tried to arrange for Benedict XVI’s arrest during his trip to England this fall.

Add it all up, and you get a time in which the European papers are howling about “systematic rape and torture,” “a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel,” and the Catholics’ “international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists.”

A particularly bizarre moment came on March 29, when Mehmet Ali Agca’s views were published. “The Turkish man who shot Pope John Paul II says Pope Benedict XVI should resign over the Catholic Church’s handling of clerical sex-abuse cases,” the AP wire item explained.

He’s hardly alone in demanding the Pope’s resignation, but the more likely scenario is that the whole thing will kill Benedict. The man turned 83 last week; he’s old, and he looks ill and miserable in his recent appearances. [Can this be Fr. Neuhaus's successor at First Things saying this? Has he watched any videos of the Pope recently? Or at all?]

Bad as his loss would be — yet one more penance Catholics would pay for those corrupt priests and the bishops who failed to confront them — the conclave to choose his successor would be even worse.

As things now stand, the papal election would be headed by Angelo Cardinal Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and a figure already accused of benefiting from the financial misdeeds of Fr. Marcial Maciel, the sexually corrupt founder of the Legion of Christ.
[How can Bottum get it so wrong? Sodano is 82 himself and therefore ineligible to take part in the Conclave itself in any capacity, even if he is dean of the College of Cardinals, which only means he is the most senior cardinal in terms of when he was made cardinal. And who is to say, anyway, that he will necesarily outlive Benedict XVI????]

Rome would become an unimaginable media circus — hours of airtime to fill every day, while waiting for the white smoke from the Vatican, with nothing to talk about but the scandals. [It seems to be tasteless, or at the very least, inopportune and certainly unnecessary, to indulge in this kind of speculation now!]

For almost 10 years now, the Catholic Church has been putting in place policies on child abuse stricter than those of any other large institution in the world.

“We were the model of what not to do,” as New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan put it, “and now we are the model of what to do.”

But the newspaper accounts of a newly elected pope would be, nonetheless, a mad race to find something, anything, to link him to the bishops’ failures to act against pedophiles in the previous generation.

And if they found what they sought — as they would, given how slight the perceived connection has to be — the sex-abuse scandal would become for that Pope what it is now for Pope Benedict: the chief identifier, the narrative hook, for his entire pontificate. [Only if the Pope allows the media to define what he and the Church are about! Fortunately, Benedict XVI is the last man in the world to do that, and he has so many other things going for him - and nothing against him, factually, on the sex abuse issue - that his inherent greatness and goodness can and will win over all the negativity.]

Make no mistake: The narrative demands that Benedict be pulled in, with Der Spiegel in Germany and the New York Times in America running stories in March that tried to mire the Pope in it all, from his time as the archbishop of Munich and, later, as an official in Rome under John Paul II. [DUH!]

None of it implicates him directly; the newspapers have yet to find an instance of the man organizing a cover-up. A professor of theology for two and a half decades, he has always been less than a stellar administrator, however, and it’s imaginable that something genuine will surface to show that he didn’t pay sufficient attention at the time.

Nonetheless, the stories so far haven’t held up. On April 19, Der Spiegel reported that Fr. Gerhard Gruber, the diocesan assistant from Ratzinger’s time in Munich, might have admitted he was pressured to say falsely that he, and not the future pope, was responsible for the covered-up transfer of a German pedophile in 1980. Two days later, the Wall Street Journal demolished the story by actually interviewing Fr. Gruber, who denied it.

The Vatican correspondent John Allen, the Canadian priest Raymond de Souza, the American writer Phil Lawler, and others have similarly published point-by-point refutations of other charges of cover-up against Benedict — all their accounts based on the fact that this man was the one who, unlike John Paul II, actually saw there was a problem.

In 2005, he openly denounced the “filth in the Church and in the priesthood,” which, if the received narrative about cover-ups were true, ought to have made it impossible for him to be elected to the papacy less than a month later. [A very important point no one else has pointed out. Thank you, Mr. Bottum.]

The current frenzy does share at least a few characteristics with previous outbreaks of anti-Catholicism. [Does this not undermine Bottum's earlier statement that anti-Catholicism was not the prevailing motive for the current anti-Catholic media campaign????]

You could lift great chunks of today’s commentary and drop them unchanged into newspaper accounts of that 1836 anti-Catholic classic The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During her Residence of Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal.

For that matter, the New Atheists’ recent ravings about Catholicism could slip unnoticed into the yellowing anti-Catholic pages of Robert G. Ingersoll’s 1896 How to Reform Mankind and Paul Blanshard’s 1949 American Freedom and Catholic Power.

“Anti-Catholic Bias Irrelevant to Scandal,” insisted the headline over an April 6 op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer by a historian from New York University named Jonathan Zimmerman. “America has a long, hideous history of anti-Catholic bigotry,” Zimmerman agrees. “But whereas earlier attacks on Catholics were based on fantasy, the abuse scandal is altogether real.”

The trouble with this line is that the abuse scandal is not “altogether real.” It’s plenty real, God knows, but some small handful of the original accusations were untrue — child abuse is not the unique crime in which no false charges are ever made — and the current media frenzy is not about finding new cases but about discovering ways to connect the Vatican to the old cases.

It’s true that critics need to be able to challenge the Church without being accused of anti-Catholicism. Catholics themselves do it all the time, as Zimmerman observes, and nearly every reform movement within the Church — from the Benedictines, through the Franciscans and the Jesuits, and down to Opus Dei in our own time — began with denunciations of the immoral or unspiritual clergy of the day.

And yet, something else, something that Catholicism’s detractors refuse to acknowledge, is in the air these days. The child-abuse scandal is a hole smashed through the defenses of the Church, a breach made by the genuine crimes of the clerical predators and the bishops who coddled them. But more is now being forced through that breach than it will bear.

Take the pressure from the media to find new stories within an established, hot-selling narrative. Add to it the culture’s frightened uncertainty about its children in the new sexual dispensation. Mix in, as well, a distaste for the Church, which stands as the last major Western institution still holding out against such social changes as the new respectability of abortion, euthanasia, promiscuity, and same-sex marriage.

And the result is a rage and a frenzy dissociated from the actual crimes that caused it — a hysteria that is bringing back to life the old tropes of historical anti-Catholicism. [There, you have it! Quod erat demostrandum. Mr. Bottum!]

There is one difference between the old anti-Catholicism and the new, however, and it involves the reaction of Catholics themselves. Against the Know-Nothings of the 19th century, America’s Catholic immigrants rallied to the Church (and to the Democratic party). And here in the 21st century, they have — well, what are Catholics doing?

An irony of the outraged European reaction to the scandals is that the continent is already one of the least Christian places on earth. Only 4 percent of Germans, for example, are reported to be in church on a Sunday morning, and Western Europe these days simply doesn’t contain enough practicing Catholics for the news of the scandals to cause a significant number to lose their faith. [Though MSM has not failed to try and make that claim, as well, especially with disaffected German Catholics who are only too glad to have a pretext to leave the Church formally so they don't have to pay a Church tax at all!]

Old and mostly outdated legal entanglements of Church and state (especially church taxes and state-supported Catholic schools) remain the only European reservoir of Catholic power. [I am not sure that was ever a power at all, and I get the impression that Catholics schools are supported by the state in only a handful of European countries these days. All these arrangements were doomed anyway, and the hysteria about abuse of children will provide only the occasion for their loss.

Some such thing seemed to be in the mind of the Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor, whose rambling thoughts on the scandals were published on March 28 in the Washington Post. O’Connor long ago left the Church, but she still devotes a considerable amount of her time to criticizing it: “Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him,” she pronounced, ex cathedra, and “the idea that we needed the church to get closer to Jesus” is “blasphemy.”

America has its own share of this ex-Catholic irony. “Though I am no longer a practicing Catholic, I am, undeniably, culturally Catholic,” a columnist for the Huffington Post explained. “And I, like many others who have left the flock, should have a say in pressuring the Church to reform itself.”

What’s interesting about all this is that it seems to come, as a sort of post hoc explanation, entirely from people who left Catholicism for other reasons. After the American revelations of abuse in 2002, dozens of news articles appeared, each trying to find out why the scandals didn’t actually seem to have made Catholics lose their faith.

This year, the media reports over Easter were similarly a chronicle of attempts to find serious churchgoers who have left the Church because of the scandals.

“As the faithful fill churches this Holy Week, many Roman Catholics around the world are finding their relationship to the church painfully tested,” one news story began — although the only example the reporter could find was a woman who explained, “I don’t believe in confession to the priest because I don’t know if that priest is more of a sinner than I am,” which suggests a certain unfamiliarity with either Christian doctrine or Catholic practice.

“Scandal Tests Catholics’ Trust in Leadership,” a headline in the New York Times declared on March 29, but the story mostly proved that even European Catholics are not losing their faith.

“The controversy appeared at the forefront of many worshipers’ minds,” the reporter insisted — and yet, “turnout was often strong on Sunday, even in some of the cities directly affected by the crisis. At St. Ludwig Church in Berlin, the city where recent disclosure of molestation at an elite Jesuit high school in the 1970s and ’80s opened up the scandal in Germany, the noon Mass was filled to capacity.”

Indeed, “with pews packed, churchgoers stood in the rear. One woman spoke of the victims she knew personally but said the scandal had not led her, nor anyone else she knew, to consider leaving the Church.”

Packed pews, strong turnout, filled to capacity — that’s not supposed to be the storyline. The April 16 CNN poll showed approval of the Pope at 59 percent among American Catholics, and the March 31 Gallup poll had Catholic approval at 61 percent. These are massive drops from the 81 percent Catholic approval rate the Pope had after his 2008 visit to the United States, and the rate will likely decline further in coming months. [Should anyone really take - or trust - a poll at the peak of a media frenzy? You are polling hysterical reactions fueled by the latest thing the pollee has read or heard!]

But none of it suggests that Catholics are actually losing their faith because of the revelations of these old priestly crimes and the bishops’ shameful cover-up.

‘What else did you expect from that generation?” one young seminarian sneered when I asked him about the priest scandals. “Those old 1960s and 1970s types thought they were God’s gift to the ages. That they were smarter, better, more spiritual than anyone else had ever been. They said they didn’t need the old supervision and rules — the old wisdom about human behavior — that Catholicism had built up over centuries of experience. And, yeah, so, of course, when they finally got some power of their own, they ruined the liturgy, they wrecked the churches, and they buggered little boys. None of it should have been a surprise.”

What else did you expect from that generation? It’s not a satisfying explanation for why some priests 30 years ago were so corrupt. For that matter, the student was as arrogant, in his own way, as the generation he condemns. [Arrogant, perhaps, but right! It's up to him not to let the arrogance get in the way of sincerely living his vocation.]

But the line does suggest one easy rationalization available to young Catholics. Large numbers of them have drifted away from the Church, but those who remain, formed during John Paul II’s pontificate, already see themselves as agents of change: the remnant, repairing with greater fidelity and stronger belief the damage done by the old priests and bishops. News of these scandals doesn’t change their self-image; it confirms their picture of themselves.

Even they, however, are not out defending Catholicism in the world. George Weigel, Raymond de Souza, and a few other commentators are publicly standing up for the Church, but the general response of ordinary Catholics in America has been a sigh and a mumble.

The Vatican bureaucracy — poorly governed, it must be said, during Benedict’s pontificate [Only 'during Benedict XVI's Ponitificate'? What was it like under Paul VI and John Paul II? — well governed???] has swung ceaselessly and cluelessly between oblivious silence and tone-deaf whining.

[That's not fair, It suggests that Mr. Bottum has not really been following all the Vatican statements lately on the issue. It is still not an ideal communications set-up but some responses lately have been prompt and on target. Father Lombardi's editorials on Vatican Radio are far from whining. And Bottum ignores individual initiatives like that of Cardinal Levada right after the New York Times story on the Murphy case. When was the last time the Vatican Press Office could be accused of 'oblivious silence' in this matter? I doubt that Jaoquin Navarro-Valls had any better luck back in 2001-2003 dealing with the MSM and all the outcry over the US 'scandals'!]

For that matter, Catholicism no longer has as defenders the once-great ethnic blocs of European Catholics. The Irish, for example, ceased to see themselves as Catholics more than a generation ago. And Ireland has now, in Brendan O’Neill’s useful phrase, redefined itself as a nation of the victims of Catholicism.

Thanks to 10 years of the government-run inquiry into Catholicism, “many of Ireland’s social problems — including unemployment, poverty, drug abuse and heavy drinking — are now discussed as the products of Ireland’s earlier era of abuse rather than as failings of the contemporary social system.” [And therefore, of the Irish themselves, as I have always maintained. Why do they scapegoat the Church for their failings, when everyone concerned in the Irish problem is Irish - bishops, priests and victims are all Irish, and Irish first before they are Catholics!]

Who does that leave to speak against the hysteria? A handful of non-Catholics can get away with it.

Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the Center for Inter-Religious Understanding, defended the Good Friday sermon at the Vatican in which the Franciscan priest Raniero Cantalamessa quoted a letter from a “Jewish friend” who said the attacks on the Pope reminded him of the “more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

The Lutheran theologian John Stephenson darkly warned that the frenzy was part of a turn against all of Christianity.

“Enough already,” wrote Ed Koch in the Jerusalem Post.

“Should Richard Dawkins be Arrested for Covering up Atheist Crimes?” asked an irritated Irish journalist.

“This tragedy should not be used as an excuse to attack a large and revered institution that does much good throughout the world,” Harvard law school’s Alan Dershowitz noted on April 9, and eventually a few more contrarians, professional opposers of conventional wisdom, will cry foul.

But for the rest of us, the charge of tolerating child-molesters — the accusation that we cannot feel the pain of the victims — remains too poisonous.

At the peak of the day-care abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, any suggestion that the public reaction was disproportionate to the provable facts was met with excoriation.

Yet it now seems plain that the narrative of children being raped at day care centers and preschools was being made to carry more than it would bear — that it was expressing our cultural anxiety and outrage about modern neglect and abuse of children.

Even today, no one doubts that some children were molested in American day care centers; given the general figures for pedophilia, it must have been so. But the cultural emotion — the drive to find an explanation for our fear and shame — somehow resulted in wild visions of Satanists in charge of our toddlers.

One cannot compare the charges of those days to the Church’s current situation. Day care workers who are now recognized as innocent served years in jail as a result of that panic, while few today claim the railroading of innocent priests.

And yet, this much seems true: The current hysteria over the Catholic sex-abuse scandal derives at least in part from the same source that fed the panic over rape at preschools and day care centers 20 years ago.

These are, in this one respect, two chapters of a single story — the story of a culture whose views of sexuality put its children at risk.

That risk is real. Our contemporary understandings of sex are a jumble of contradictions and insanities, and the young are among those paying the price.

The news reports about the Catholic scandals have purchase on us precisely because they echo down the canyons of our cultural anxiety. And to account for that anxiety — to localize and personalize its causes — Catholicism is far more useful than outlandish charges of Satanism ever were.

For some of the commentators on the current scandals, any stick is a good one if you can poke it at religion. Most people, however, are just looking for an explanation. [What's to explain? In any community, some persons are inherently flawed and will commit sin! All we can do, as Pope Benedict XVI told Jospeh Magro in Malta is pray, and pray together for the victims, the offenders and the Church.]

They worked so hard to build the life the contemporary world demands, and still they are anxious. They rejected the sexual strictures of the past, just as they were taught to do, and still their children are in danger. [Which is a wrong assumption!]

There must be a reason for the unfulfilled promise of modern sex and modern life. There must be a mystical, magical key that will unlock the door to paradise. Why have we been thwarted? Why aren’t we there yet?

The Catholic Church, of course. That’s the answer.


An interesting cultural hypothesis, and undoubtedly true in part. But it wouldn't be so at all, if there were no latent anti-Catholicism just waiting to be stirred up, and safe to unleash! If this had been a case involving Jewish rabbis (even with the relatively tiny Jewish population on the globe), political correctness because of the Shoah would have prevented any outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment. And If this had involved Muslim imams, the MSM - out of sheer fear for their lives and security - would simply have said, "You know what? That's their own business!' and left it at that!]

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Monday, April 26

Extreme right, John Paul II at San Pedro's Canonization Mass.
ST. PEDRO DE SAN JOSE BETANCUR (b Canary Islands 1626, d Guatemala 1667)
Lay Franciscan, founder of the Bethlehemite Fathers and Sisters
He is both the first saint from the Canary Islands (Spain) and of Guatemala. Hermano Pedro (Brother Pedro), as he is
familiarly called, lived as a poor shepherd on Tenerife, the main Canary island, until he was 27, when he left to join
a relative in Guatemala. He first landed in Cuba where he worked until he could earn enough to go on to Guatemala. He
enrolled in a Jesuit school but could not keep up academically. He joined the secular Franciscan order at age 29, and
managed somehow to open a hospital for the convalescent poor, a shelter for the homeless, and a school for poor children,
not hesitant to knock at the door of rich Guatemalans for their aid. It led him to set up the Order of the Bethlehemite
Fathers, whose rule was approved after his early death (he was only 41), along with an Order of Bethlehemite Sisters.
He is credited with originating the tradition of the Christmas Eve 'posadas' procession now observed in many Latin
American countries, during which the faithful commemorate Mary and Joseph's efforts to find lodgings in Bethlehem.
Hermano Pedro was beatified in 1980, and John Paul II canonized him during his visit to Guatemala in 2002.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/nab/readings/042610.shtml




No OR today.


THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met individually today with 5 bishops from Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone
who are on ad limina visit.



Sorry for the very late start today.


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Thanks to mercator.net, which apparently translates him regularly, here is one of at least three excellent articles about the current 'MSM vs the Church' by Catholic sociologist Massimo Introvigne, that I have not found time to translate. It was originally published in Italy in April 16, and mercator.net published this translation April 21. I apologize for the delay.


In their anti-Church campaign,
MSM today are simply following
the Nazi playbook

by Massimo Introvigne



“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of members of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”

An editorial from a great secular newspaper in 2010? No: It’s a speech of May 28, 1937, by Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich.

This speech, which had a large international echo, was the apex of a campaign launched by the Nazi regime to discredit the Catholic Church by involving it in a scandal of pedophile priests.

Two hundred and seventy-six religious and forty-nine diocesan priests were arrested in 1937. The arrests took place in all the German dioceses, in order to keep the scandals on the front pages of the newspapers.

On March 10, 1937, with the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) HAD condemned the Nazi ideology. At the end of the same month, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda headed by Goebbels launched a campaign against the sexual abuses of priests. The design and administration of this campaign are known to historians thanks to documents which tell a story worthy of the best spy novels.

In 1937, the head of the counter-espionage service of the German military was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945). He became gradually anti-Nazi, and at the time was maturing the convictions which led him to organize the failed assassination attempt against Hitler in 1944, following which he was hanged in 1945.

Canaris disapproved of Goebbels’S maneuver against the Church, and instructed a Catholic lawyer named Josef Müller (1878-1979) to carry to Rome a series of highly secret documents on the subject.

In different phases, Müller – before he was arrested and sent to the Dachau extermination camp, where he survived, and later became the post-war Minister of Justice in Bavaria – carried the secret documents to Pius XII (1876-1958), who asked the Society of Jesus to study them.

With the approval of the Secretary of State, the study of the Nazi plot against the Church was entrusted to the German Jesuit Walter Mariaux (1894-1963), who had inspired an anti-Nazi organization in Germany called “Pauluskreis.” He was later prudently sent as a missionary in Brazil and in Argentina.

There, as leader of the Marian Congregation, he exercised his influence over an entire generation of lay Catholics, among whom was the noted Brazilian Catholic thinker Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (1908-1995), who attended his group in São Paulo.

In 1940, in London in English and in Argentina in Spanish, Mariaux published two volumes on anti-Catholic persecution by the Third Reich under the pseudonym “Testis Fidelis.” They contained over seven hundred pages of documents with comments, which aroused great emotion in the entire world.

The expression “moral panic” was only coined by sociologists in the 1970s to identify a social alarm created artificially, by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers through statistical folklore, as well as “discovering” and presenting as “new” events which in reality are already known and which date to the past. There are real events at the base of the panic, but their number is systematically distorted.

Even without the benefit of modern sociology, Goebbels responded to the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 with a textbook case of how to create moral panic.

As always in moral panics, the facts are not totally invented. Prior to the encyclical there were some cases in Germany of abuse of minors. Mariaux himself considered a religious in the school of Bad Reichenall guilty, as well as a lay teacher, a gardener and a janitor, who were condemned in 1936, although he believed the sanction imposed by the Ministry of Public Instruction in Bavaria – revoking the authorization to run scholastic institutes of four religious orders – to be entirely disproportionate, and he linked it to the desire of the regime to undercut Catholic schools.

Also in the case of the Franciscans of Waldbreitbach, in Rhineland, Mariaux was open to the hypothesis that the accused were guilty, although later historians have not excluded the possibility that they were framed by the Nazis.

The cases, which were few, but real, produced a very strong reaction from the episcopate. On June 2, 1936, the Bishop of Münster – Blessed Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946), who was the soul of Catholic resistance to Nazism, and who was beatified in 2005 by Benedict XVI – had a declaration read at all the Sunday Masses in which he expressed “pain and sadness” for these “abominable crimes” that “cover our Holy Church with ignominy.”

On August 20, 1936, after the events at Waldbreitbach, the German episcopate published a joint pastoral letter in which they “several condemned” those responsible and underlined the cooperation of the Church with the tribunals of the state.

By the end of 1936, the severe measures taken by the German bishops in reaction to these very few cases, some of which were doubtful, seemed to have resolved the real problems. Quietly, the bishops also pointed out that among teachers in the state schools and in the very youth organization of the regime, the Hitler Youth, the cases of condemnations for sexual abuses were much more numerous than among the Catholic clergy.

It was the anti-Nazi encyclical of Pius XI that led to the great campaign of 1937. Mariaux proved it, publishing highly detailed instructions sent by Goebbels to the Gestapo, the political police of the Third Reich, and above all to journalists, just a few days after the publication of Mit brennender Sorge, inviting them to “reopen” the cases from 1936 and also older cases, constantly recalling them to public opinion.

Goebbels also ordered the Gestapo to find witnesses willing to accuse a certain number of priests, threatening them with immediate arrest if they didn’t collaborate, even if they were children.

The proverbial phrase “there’s a judge in Berlin,” which in German tradition indicates trust in the independence of the court system from the political power of the moment, applied – within certain limits – even in the Third Reich.

Of the 325 priests and religious arrested after the encyclical, only 21 were condemned, and it’s all but certain that among them some were falsely accused. Virtually all of them ended up in extermination camps, where many died.

The effort to discredit the Catholic Church on an international scale through accusations of immorality and pedophilia among priests, however, did not succeed.

Thanks to the courage of Canaris and his friends, and to the persistence of the Jesuit detective Mariaux, the truth was already out during the war. The perfidy of the campaign of Goebbels aroused more indignation than the eventual guilt of some religious. The father of all moral panics in the area of pedophile priests blew up in the hands of the Nazi propagandists who had tried to organize it.





Perhaps what is truly frightening about the current 'moral panic' engineered by MSM is that it did not require a Goebbels to decree that it should be 'launched'. It was a spontaneous and opportunistic exploitation by the MSM of the climate created by the Irish government reports on cases mostly decades old, followed by the disclosure of dozens of previously unreported old cases - also decades old - in German Catholic schools.

What makes the current moral panic more alarming and vicious than Goebbels could have dreamed of is that the campaign is now aimed primarily at the Pope himself!

In Germany, Der Spiegel and Sueddeutsche Zeitung took the lead in seeking to pin personal culpability on Joseph Ratzinger in his former capacity as Archbishop of Munich - a cause soon taken up with gloating vengeance by the far more influential (in terms of worldwide impact) New York Times, and especially, the Associated Press, on which most media in the Western world and its sphere of influence on all the continents depend for their international news coverage. Except that with the latter, everything Joseph Ratzinger ever did became unfair game - even actions he carried out rightly and rightfully as CDF prefect have come to be presented as suspicious if not culpable.

In this effort, both AP and the Times obtained their supposed 'smoking gun' documents from the lawyer Jeffrey Anderson who has already made tens of millions of dollars from his share of damages paid by Catholic dioceses in the USA for verdicts obtained against abusive priests.

For years, this lawyer has been seeking to sue the Holy See itself and Benedict XVI - both as former CDF Prefect and as Pope - as having 'criminally masterminded' the cover-up of abusive priests by some bishops and therefore equally responsible for the crimes committed because priests and bishops, he contends, are 'employees' of the Vatican.

Now that the smoking guns put forward 'in evidence' by the Times and the AP have so obviously fizzled out - even they cannot sustain their fiction on the Murphy and Kiesle cases, so quickly exposed as forced manipulation of fact - they are left with Jeffrey Anderson, whose nuisance lawsuits have been their staple in marketing the 'scandal' for at least two weeks now.

The willingness of AP and the Times to be handservants in promoting a lawyer's private vested lucrative interests should demolish any illusions that they are motivated only by the public good (as in "The horror, oh the horror! Those poor victims, this heartless Church, this enabling Pope, his shameless bishops and his evil priests!" which is their storyline]...


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Thanks to Father Z, finally, the text of the splendid homily delivered by the Bishop of Tulsa, Mons. Edward Slattery, at the Pontifical Solemn Mass in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Paulus Institute to mark the fifth anniversary of Benedict XVI's Pontificate. It is very much a Benedict-ian homily.

ON THE HOLY FATHER'S FIFTH ANNIVERSARY:
The mystery of suffering

by Mons. EDWARD SLATTERY
Bishop of Tulsa, Oklahoma
April 24, 2010




We have much to discuss – you and I - much to speak of on this glorious occasion when we gather together in the glare of the world’s scrutiny to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the ascension of Joseph Ratzinger to the throne of Peter.

We must come to understand how it is that suffering can reveal the mercy of God and make manifest among us the consoling presence of Jesus Christ, crucified and now risen from the dead.

We must speak of this mystery today, first of all because it is one of the great mysteries of revelation, spoken of in the New Testament and attested to by every saint in the Church’s long history, by the martyrs with their blood, by the confessors with their constancy, by the virgins with their purity and by the lay faithful of Christ’s body by their resolute courage under fire.

But we must also speak clearly of this mystery because of the enormous suffering which is all around us and which does so much to determine the culture of our modern age.

From the enormous suffering of His Holiness these past months to the suffering of the Church’s most recent martyrs in India and Africa, welling up from the suffering of the poor and the dispossessed and the undocumented, and gathering tears from the victims of abuse and neglect, from women who have been deceived into believing that abortion was a simple medical procedure and thus have lost part of their soul to the greed of the abortionist, and now flowing with the heartache of those who suffer from cancer, diabetes, AIDS, or the emotional diseases of our age, it is the sufferings of our people that defines the culture of our modern secular age.

This enormous suffering which can take on so many varied physical, mental, and emotional forms will reduce us to fear and trembling – if we do not remember that Christ – our Pasch – has been raised from the dead. Our pain and anguish could dehumanize us, for it has the power to close us in upon ourselves such that we would live always in chaos and confusion – if we do not remember that Christ – our hope – has been raised for our sakes. Jesus is our Pasch, our hope and our light.

He makes himself most present in the suffering of his people and this is the mystery of which we must speak today, for when we speak of His saving presence and proclaim His infinite love in the midst of our suffering, when we seek His light and refuse to surrender to the darkness, we receive that light which is the life of men; that light which, as Saint John reminds us in the prologue to his Gospel, can never be overcome by the darkness, no matter how thick, no matter how choking.

Our suffering is thus transformed by His presence. It no longer has the power to alienate or isolate us. Neither can it dehumanize us nor destroy us. Suffering, however long and terrible it may be, has only the power to reveal Christ among us, and He is the mercy and the forgiveness of God.

The mystery then, of which we speak, is the light that shines in the darkness, Christ Our Lord, Who reveals Himself most wondrously to those who suffer so that suffering and death can do nothing more than bring us to the mercy of the Father.

But the point which we must clarify is that Christ reveals Himself to those who suffer in Christ, to those who humbly accept their pain as a personal sharing in His Passion and who are thus obedient to Christ’s command that we take up our cross and follow Him. Suffering by itself is simply the promise that death will claim these mortal bodies of ours, but suffering in Christ is the promise that we will be raised with Christ, when our mortality will be remade in his immortality and all that in our lives which is broken because it is perishable and finite will be made imperishable and incorrupt.

This is the meaning of Peter’s claim that he is a witness to the sufferings of Christ and thus one who has a share in the glory yet to be revealed. Once Peter grasped the overwhelming truth of this mystery, his life was changed. The world held nothing for Peter. For him, there was only Christ.

This is, as you know, quite a dramatic shift for the man who three times denied Our Lord, the man to whom Jesus said, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Christ’s declaration to Peter that he would be the rock, the impregnable foundation, the mountain of Zion upon which the new Jerusalem would be constructed, follows in Matthew’s Gospel Saint Peter’s dramatic profession of faith, when the Lord asks the Twelve, “Who do people say that I am?” and Peter, impulsive as always, responds “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

Only later – much later – would Peter come to understand the full implication of this first Profession of Faith. Peter would still have to learn that to follow Christ, to truly be His disciple, one must let go of everything which the world considers valuable and necessary, and become powerless.

This is the mystery which confounds independent Peter. It is the mystery which still confounds us: to follow Christ, one must surrender everything and become obedient with the obedience of Christ, for no one gains access to the Kingdom of the Father, unless he enter through the humility and the obedience of Jesus.

Peter had no idea that eventually he would find himself fully accepting this obedience, joyfully accepting his share in the Passion and Death of Christ. But Peter loved Our Lord and love was the way by which Peter learned how to obey.

“Lord, you know that I love thee,” Peter affirms three times with tears; and three times Christ commands him to tend to the flock that gathers at the foot of Calvary – and that is where we are now.

Peter knew that Jesus was the true Shepherd, the one Master and the only teacher; the rest of us are learners and the lesson we must learn is obedience, obedience unto death. Nothing less than this, for only when we are willing to be obedient with the very obedience of Christ will we come to recognize Christ’s presence among us.

Obedience is thus the heart of the life of the disciple and the key to suffering in Christ and with Christ. This obedience, is must be said, is quite different from obedience the way it is spoken of and dismissed in the world.

For those in the world, obedience is a burden and an imposition. It is the way by which the powerful force the powerless to do obeisance. Simply juridical and always external, obedience is the bending that breaks, but a breaking which is still less painful than the punishment meted out for disobedience.

Thus for those in the world obedience is a punishment which must be avoided; but for Christians, obedience is always personal, because it is centered on Christ. It is a surrender to Jesus Whom we love.

For those whose lives are centered in Christ, obedience is that movement which the heart makes when it leaps in joy having once discovered the truth.

Let us consider, then, that Christ has given us both the image of his obedience and the action by which we are made obedient.

The image of Christ’s obedience is His Sacred Heart. That Heart, exposed and wounded must give us pause, for man’s heart it generally hidden and secret. In the silence of his own heart, each of us discovers the truth of who we are, the truth of why we are silent when we should speak, or bothersome and quarrelsome when we should be silent. In our hidden recesses of the heart, we come to know the impulses behind our deeds and the reasons why we act so often as cowards and fools.

But while man’s heart is generally silent and secret, the Heart of the God-Man is fully visible and accessible. It too reveals the motives behind our Lord’s self-surrender. It was obedience to the Father’s will that mankind be reconciled and our many sins forgiven us.

“Son though he was,” the Apostle reminds us, “Jesus learned obedience through what He sufferered.” Obedient unto death, death on a cross, Jesus asks his Father to forgive us that God might reveal the full depth of his mercy and love. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “for they know not what they do.”

Christ’s Sacred Heart is the image of the obedience which Christ showed by his sacrificial love on Calvary. The Sacrifice of Calvary is also for us the means by which we are made obedient and this is a point which you must never forget: at Mass, we offer ourselves to the Father in union with Christ, who offers Himself in perfect obedience to the Father.

We make this offering in obedience to Christ who commanded us to “Do this in memory of me” and our obediential offering is perfected in the love with which the Father receives the gift of His Son.

Do not be surprised then that here at Mass, our bloodless offering of the bloody sacrifice of Calvary is a triple act of obedience.

First, Christ is obedient to the Father, and offers Himself as a sacrifice of reconciliation.

Secondly, we are obedient to Christ and offer ourselves to the Father with Jesus the Son; and

Thirdly, in sharing Christ’s obedience to the Father, we are made obedient to a new order of reality, in which love is supreme and life reigns eternal, in which suffering and death have been defeated by becoming for us the means by which Christ’s final victory, his future coming, is made manifest and real today.

Suffering then, yours, mine, the Pontiffs, is at the heart of personal holiness, because it is our sharing in the obedience of Jesus which reveals his glory. It is the means by which we are made witnesses of his suffering and sharers in the glory to come.

Do not be dismayed that there are many in the Church who have not yet grasped this point, and fewer yet still in the world will even dare to consider it. But you – you know this to be true – and it is enough. For ten men who whisper the truth speak louder than a hundred million who lie.


If, then, someone asks of what we spoke today, tell them we spoke only of the truth. If someone asks why it is you came here to Mass, say that it was so that you could be obedient with Christ. If someone asks about the homily, tell them it was about a mystery.

And if someone asks what I said to the present situation, tell them only that we must – all of us – become saints through what we suffer.




A few more photos of the Mass:


Above, Mons. Slattery and his acolytes join Washington's emeritus Archbishop, William Cardinal Baum, who attended the Mass. The current Archbishop, Mons. Donald Wuerl, did not.


A Catholic blogger provides the following information on Mons. Slattery:

Some background on Mons. Slattery

April 26, 2010

You may be interested in some background on His Excellency. I am told that his first response to the sex-abuse scandal was to order a Holy Hour of Reparation in front of the Blessed Sacrament, at the same time in all parishes and Catholic institutions within the diocese. The people of Tulsa, led by their bishop, went to their knees together.

One might ask, why should those who have not abused children do time on their knees for those who did? The answer is simple: Imitation of Christ who suffered immensely not for sins He committed, but for our sins. Further, we bear some responsibility if we have not prayed for our priests and bishops. Many Catholics today are unfamiliar with the term reparation, but it is beginning to get taught at various levels.

I am also told that Bishop Slattery also created a confraternity for those who suffer in various ways, from cancer and diabetes, and other long-term illnesses that directs their suffering for the purpose of healing in those who have been abused by the Church's sacred ministers. This is a form of redemptive suffering (Col 1:24).

These things were initiated some eight years ago, and continue today.


It is the very spirit in which the Holy Father recommended acts of reparation to be offered by the bishops, priests and faithful of Ireland, in a part of his Pastoral Letter that was hardly ever reported in the MSM.


4/26/10
P.S. Finally, a report on the Mass from CNS, two days later:


High Mass in extraordinary form
honors Pope's fifth anniversary

By Richard Szczepanowski



WASHINGTON, April 26 (CNS) -- More than 3,500 people crowded into the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception April 24 to attend the first traditional Latin Mass in decades to be celebrated at the high altar there.

Sponsored by the Paulus Institute for the Propagation of Sacred Liturgy, the Mass in the extraordinary form was celebrated by Bishop Edward J. Slattery of Tulsa, Okla., in honor of the fifth anniversary of the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.

Close to 100 priests and seminarians assisted at the nearly two-and-a-half-hour pontifical solemn high Mass that was sung entirely in Latin. Cardinal William W. Baum, a retired archbishop of Washington, also attended the Mass, which was celebrated with ancient chants and with pomp, splendor and majesty.

During the Mass, the faithful prayed that God would "look mercifully upon thy servant, Benedict" and asked that "by his word and example he may edify those over whom he hath charge, so that together with the flock committed to him, may he attain everlasting life."

Although the Maryland-based Paulus Institute has been planning the Mass for three years to honor Pope Benedict, it generated negative publicity in the week leading up to the celebration. The originally scheduled celebrant, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, was criticized for writing a letter in 2001 as the head of the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy, praising a French bishop for not reporting an abusive priest to authorities. In response to the controversy, the Vatican emphasized that bishops are expected to comply with all civil laws that mandate reporting of sex abuse allegations and to cooperate in civil investigations.

The Paulus Institute announced April 21 that in consultation with Cardinal Castrillon, it decided to seek another celebrant for the Mass.

Members of the Chicago-based Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests had planned to protest Cardinal Castrillon outside the shrine but did not do so after the choice of Bishop Slattery was announced.

In his homily, delivered in English, Bishop Slattery did not speak directly about the controversy or recent criticism of the Pope, but he did not ignore it.

[The story then quootes from Mons. Slattery's homily.]

The April 24 Mass was celebrated following the last version of the Roman Missal used before and during the Second Vatican Council. It is different from the missal published in 1970.

Among the differences between the extraordinary form of the Mass and the Masses commonly celebrated in this country are that the entire liturgy is sung in Latin, the priest faces the altar with his back to the congregation, he wears gloves for parts of the liturgy, and a blessing and additional reading of the Gospel are offered after the dismissal. [Not an 'additional' Gospel reading: it's the Prologue to the Gospel of John, which closes the traditional Mass.]

During the distribution of Communion, the faithful came to the altar rail, where they knelt and received the Eucharist on the tongue. Many women at the Mass wore veils.


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/04/2010 04:04]
26/04/2010 19:53
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I watched the Mass. It was wonderful. I was most impressed by the Bishop's homily. I'll have to make sure we'll attend a Latin Masse when we're in Rome.

I also had a nice experience at my Parish yesterday. Our young Priest showed some passion and fighting spirit and encouraged us to stand up for our faith.
He was also featured in our local paper (the reporter was obviously fishing for some dismayed, crushed statements), saying that he wears his vestments with pride; and that people shouldn't be fooled by the one-sided reporting of the media.
Acc. to him, he regards his Parish as his family, where he receives love and consultation; and his non-sexual life style doesn't bother him in the least bit.
We're very lucky to have him. I'm very happy to send my youngest son as an Altar Server to a nice, young, dedicated Priest.

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Not that an outrageous Foreign Office memorandum mocking the Pope and Church teachings could have meant cancelling the Pope's visit to the UK at all, but it's still news that the Vatican spokesman has said it won't!


Pope's visit to Britain will go ahead
despite offensive memo, says Vatican


April 26, 2010


The Pope's visit to Britain will not be affected by the disclosure of a Foreign Office document mocking the Catholic Church, the Vatican said.

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi has noted a Foreign Office apology and said the paper will have ''absolutely'' no impact on the Pope's visit in September, an official confirmed.

The document, leaked to the Sunday Telegraph, suggested Britain should mark the visit by asking the Pope to open an abortion clinic, bless a gay marriage and launch a range of Benedict-branded condoms.

It also suggested Benedict XVI could show his hard line on the sensitive issue of child abuse allegations against Roman Catholic priests by ''sacking dodgy bishops'' and launching a helpline for abused children.

The memo was circulated by Steven Mulvain, a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, to Downing Street and three Whitehall departments together with a covering letter in which he warned recipients that the contents “should not be shared externally” because they included “even the most far-fetched of ideas”.

Mr Mulvain has escaped punishment because he was given authorisation to send the memo by a more senior civil servant, who has now been “transferred to other duties”.

The Foreign Office issued an apology for the memo, describing the suggestions as ''ill-judged, naive and disrespectful''.

Sources in the Vatican had earlier indicated that the Pope could cancel his planned visit to Britain because of the memo [What rot! It was sheer speculation by some in the media themselves, self-projecting as usual!] but on Monday an official insisted that it would not lead to the trip being abandoned.

Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, who is leading the preparations for the visit, also described the suggestions as ''absolutely despicable'' and ''vile''.

The ideas were included in a paper titled ''The ideal visit would see...'' which was distributed to officials in Whitehall and Downing Street preparing for the historic visit.

A cover note said the paper stemmed from a brainstorming session and accepted that some of the ideas were ''far-fetched''.

Many of the proposals appeared to mock the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on issues such as abortion, homosexuality and contraception and the difficulties it is experiencing over cases of child abuse.

The Foreign Office apologised for what it described as a ''foolish'' document and said the individual responsible had been transferred to other duties.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, was said to have been ''appalled'' to hear of the paper, and Britain's ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, met senior officials of the Holy See to express the Government's regret.

The Foreign Office confirmed that the memo was drawn up by a small group of three or four junior staff in a team working on the papal visit. The document was withdrawn after it was circulated to more senior staff.

The memo also suggested that the Pope could apologise for the Spanish Armada or sing a song with the Queen for charity.

The paper was attached as one of three ''background documents'' to a memo dated March 5 inviting officials to attend a meeting to discuss themes for the papal visit.

In a note, the official responsible for sending out the memo - a junior civil servant in his 20s - said: ''Please protect; these should not be shared externally. The 'ideal visit' paper in particular was the product of a brainstorm which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas.''

An investigation was launched after some recipients of the memo objected to the disrespectful tone of the paper.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: ''This is clearly a foolish document that does not in any way reflect UK Government or Foreign Office policy or views. Many of the ideas in the document are clearly ill-judged, naive and disrespectful.

''The text was not cleared or shown to ministers or senior officials before circulation. As soon as senior officials became aware of the document, it was withdrawn from circulation.

''The individual responsible has been transferred to other duties. He has been told orally and in writing that this was a serious error of judgment and has accepted this view.

''The Foreign Office very much regrets this incident and is deeply sorry for the offence which it has caused. We strongly value the close and productive relationship between the UK Government and the Holy See and look forward to deepening this further with the visit of Pope Benedict to the UK later this year.''

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in England and Wales said: ''It doesn't reflect the discussions we have had with Government officials in our collaborative planning of the papal visit.

''This has no place in the serious planning for this important visit.

The Bishop of Nottingham, the Rt Rev Malcolm McMahon, told BBC News it reflected “appalling manners”.

He said: “I think it’s a lot worse that we invite someone into our country – a person like the Pope – and then he’s treated in this way.

“I think it’s appalling manners more than anything else.”


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