Finally, I found time to translate Peter Seewald's essay for kath.net:
An appeal to the media for
objectivity, moderation
and a sense of proportion
by PETER SEEWALD
MUNICH, March 15 (Translated from kath.net) – Many are dumbfounded. Dumbfounded with shame for hundreds of victims. Dumbfounded with sorrow that offenses against them have not been propitiated. Dumbfounded, too, because of the criminals, while praying for them. It is also Lent, time for penance - not a time for screaming.
However, the damage that the priest offenders have done not just to their victims, but to the Church and all of society is unimaginably great. But once again, it is part of Christian self-understanding that offenders are not to be simply shut out.
The appalling cases of sexual abuse constitute a worst possible scenario of super dimensions. Comparable to the devastation that a stock market crash can mean for the global economy.
Whoever considers the Church as the mystical Body of Christ must be horrified how this Body itself has been so maltreated. How far from the origins and message of the Gospel have part of the Church – priests and bishops – strayed, in which sexual offenses are simply a part of the extensive betrayal of the message of Jesus.
The Church itself - those who represent her - has often committed offenses which the mass media have rightly reported. We need the media. The work of journalists is indispensable. But whoever thinks that media reporting of abuses in the Church is not also part of a campaign against the Church is playing blind.
Saturday (March 6) in Germany:
Sueddeutche Zeitung (SZ) had a new headline topic:
“Ratzinger’s diocese appoints pedophile pastor” . The crude title formulation demonstrates the attempt to try and ‘reach the heart with the left hand laid across the knee’.
[Sorry- I can't get the sense of the expression that I have translated literally.]
Only in the small print does the reader learn that the former Archbishop of Munich [Cardinal Ratzinger) had simply agreed in 1980 to allow a priest from the Diocese of Essen to come to Munich in order to undergo therapy
[But it is not clear from the subsequent statement of the Archdiocese if the Cardinal knew when he approved accepting the priest why the priest needed therapy].
Spiegel-Online promptly concluded:
"Sexual abuse uncovered in Ratzinger’s archdiocese" – illustrating the story with a sinister-looking image of the Pope cloaked in a mantle
[the humerus] ‘hiding’ behind a monstrance.
[Obviously, a picture of the Pope elevating the Blessed Sacrament].
In fact, the case had been reported in the media in 1986 when the priest in question was given a suspended sentence with probation. In the evening, the TV news programs turned up the screws. For the program Heute-Journal [Today Journal], the sex abuse scandal had ‘now reached the Vatican’. With no reference to the fact that when the priest was convicted, Ratzinger had by then been in Rome for four years.
Instead, the next image was the inevitable representative from an anti-Church sectarian group that styles itself “We are Church’/ Cameras and microphones had been on standby all afternoon in front of his house. And he played to the media, explaining the ‘basis’ that his group had very little to do with the Church itself, as did Heiner Geissler with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
[I don’t understand the allusion – Wiki says Geissler was federal minister for youth , family and health in 1982-1985.]
There’s more. For weeks now, the Pope had repeatedly expressed his position on sexual misdeeds by priests, But in the case involving his former archdiocese, he let the archdiocese make the statements
[as is only proper, because they are in a position to check all the records, and the current archbishop has the jurisdiction and responsibility to for any disclosures made at this time].
But at the Angelus prayers the next day, the Pope made no reference to the Munich case – which was enough for Spiegel-online to use the headline:
“Pope silent on the latest abuse charges”. This judgment was immediately picked up by other media:
"Pope silent on abuse caess" spread through all the media portals, or a variation thereof, like
“Pope cloaks himself in silence”.
[Also, an obvious allusion to the 'silence of Pius XII' polemic. as a way of saying indirectly that Benedict XVI's silence in this case is a form of moral cowardice!]
Others who came late to the news, followed with
“More silence from the Pope”. And on Monday, SZ proclaimed in giant letters on Page 1,
“Benedict XVI is silent”, and its lead sentence was “Pope Benedict XVI has kept silent on the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church”.
It can be argued that crisis management in the Vatican and in the German dioceses can certainly be much better. Perhaps the Church should state its case more frequently and much louder in a noisy world that has become hard of hearing.
But reporting that the Pope is ‘keeping silent’ despite all his statements in the preceding weeks is just outright false. And what remains is the image of a Church that is a ‘black hole’, which the SZ sees as a fundamental ‘Catholic stigma'.
This was exactly like the Pope-bashing by the media last year over the Williamson case. It worked. In the end, no matter how many clarifications the Pontiff had made, most newspaper readers were left with the impression that he is a clandestine anti-Semite and Holocaust denier himself.
Differentiation
[I think in the sense of 'discernment'] and accuracy are especially worthy virtues in times like these. But too many in the media think that they no longer need to exercise them. The campaign-style nature of reporting these days is based on the mechanisms and dynamics of the media world itself.
Not all topics lend themselves to be a rallying point, but every newsroom will seek, when something explosive is in play, to overplay any such topic. It could be the swine flu sending the whole nation into panic, or the Kunduz affair
[controversy over a German-ordered air attack in Afghanistan that reportedly killed many civilians] .
But when you have sex-and-Church cocktail, that is like hitting the jackpot for some editors. To be fueled, to pound on, to stir up. No one can come too late when the hunting call is sounded. And once they start the hype, then all hell breaks loose.
“What did the Pope know?” asks the
Frankfuerter Rundschau.
“The Pope should take a stand on Odenwald”, said the
Aufklaerer, forgetting in its frenzy that Odenwald is not a Catholic school at all but a showcase project for ‘pedagogical reform’ of public schools!
But woe to anyone who would diffidently raise his hand and question whether everything that is reported is correct, because the mighty steamroller of journalistic righteousness will bear down on them. The empire strikes back, and the objector will be flattened – guilty of the crime of media-bashing!
Because just as the ladies and gentlemen of the media are ever ready to throw punches, just so are they shrinking violets when they themselves are criticized.
But this time, what an opportunity this was for them to cry out, replete with crocodile tears: Cover-up! Deviancy! Bunker mentality!
Many journalists do a good job. But it is unpardonable when the religious departments of newspapers hire reporters who do not know the difference between ‘Ministrant’ (altar boy) and ‘Minister’ (the priest himself), and who consider the Pope as a sort of dictator like Idi Amin. Many believe that he is an enemy against whom they must do righteous battle because he is even more dangerous than Osama Bin laden.
So when journalism goes from disclosure of information to character assassination, then it is time to take a stand against it.
Dear colleagues: Stop and think! Stop the instrumentalization. Stop the cheap analysis and kitchen psychology which do nothing to resolve the problem.
Stop being so smug. Stop printing news that presents false conclusions. Be objective, sober, with a sense of proportion. Go back to the kind of journalism that was once an honorable profession.
Sexual abuses by monstrous offenders cry out to heaven. They are not, however, cases for lawyers to get into the picture, but for state prosecutors, who can investigate objectively and seriously to evaluate a complaint, clarify it with courage, and file charges strictly.
As Christians and Catholics, we ought to be ashamed for such abuses. We also get angry over wrong decisions and false stories. But that should not hinder us from looking at things accurately, from differentiating, from using our reason and not accepting any manipulation by the opinion-makers.
The truth must remain the truth. It is a responsibility to the whole. And no one should rejoice when an institution is shamed that a society fundamentally cannot do without.
Over 220 million children annually, according to UNICEF, are forced into sex around the world. That does not take place in the ‘black hole’ of the Church!
[And no one has launched campaigns against these, adn they are hardly written about in the media!]
The child molestation ring of Belgium, which for years has caused scandal, is not composed of priests and religious but of politicians and managers.
Daily, hundreds of thousands of pornographic child pictures are downloaded from the Internet by Germans.
These offenders do not lead celibate lives. And the pornographization of the whole society necessarily affects schoolchildren as well as aging adults, not as a consequence of the Church’s sexual morality
[to begin with, only 30% of Germans consider themselves Catholic, and many of those who do oppose Church morality!] but because of the easy availability of pornographic material.
Should not society consider what kind of culture we are developing, what it is doing to our children, that it is making them increasingly twisted, incapable of having genuine relationships?
The collapse of confidence in the Church, precipitated by sinful and sick priests and religious, cannot be ignored in the order of the day. It is a time of passion, and what is not built on rock will collapse.
But every catharsis is also an opportunity. The Pope himself, at the start of his Pontificate, spoke of a cleansing that is indispensable for the Church. Such housecleaning must be done from top to bottom. No room must be left out, and it must be as basic as the elimination of leavened bread before Passover.
Perhaps Seewald has chosen only the mildest headlines from the German media. He should see the truly vicious headlines and articles by the Church-and-Pope haters in the Anglophone press! There's even a long article in one of the British newspapers suggesting it is time for the Pope to resign! The Benedict haters are giddy with misplaced Schadenfreude that has made them more woolly-brained than they usually are!
Il Sussidiario today (3/16/10) - which carried the guest editorial by Jose luis Restan translated in the preceding page - also carried a lengthy interview with Sandro Magister, who starts out with a weird take on the driving force behind the current assault.
How and why the new scandals
are being used to attack
the Church and the Pope
An interview with Sandro Magister
by FEDERICO FERRAU
Translated from
March 16, 2010
The scandal over pedophile priests is placing the Church in new difficulties. It seemed to peak with the
admission of the Bishop of Regensburg that the diocese has information on sexual abuses that took place in the environment of the boarding school for the city's world-famous boys' choir, the Regensburger Domspatzen, once directed by the Pope's brother.
[The word 'admission' implies that the disclosure was forced on the bishop when, in fact, the diocese investigated the cases and announced the results of the investigations on its own initiative. And Sussidiario, like most of the media, implies in this lead paragraph that the cases brought by the Bishop all had to do with the Domspatzen, and by not mentioning the total number of cases - six - disclosed by the bishop, it gives the impression that the cases could well number in the dozens!]
Accusations against the Church and blaming sex offenses by priests on the celibacy rule have become widespread.
"This issue," says Sandro Magister, Vaticanista of
L'Espresso, "has triggered a worldwide phenomenon that is exploiting it for a specific purpose: a frontal attack against the Catholic Church, and in particular, against the Pope."
The Church is now involved once again in pedophilia scandals. What do you think of recent developments?
I think what is happening is based on uncontestable facts, in
numerically important dimensions.
[Here, Magister loses a sense of proportion by not placing the figures in context, as other sober pro-Church journalists have done, almost by reflex. Context always brings a sense of proportion. To omit it is prejudicial to the Church, in this case.]] And it is more serious since the crimes are committed by men publicly deputized to be the bearers of high moral values.
But these facts have also triggered a phenomenon on the global level of the explotation of these facts with precise aim: a frontal attack against the Catholic Church, and against the Pope, in particular.
[If they are, it is an opportunistic and derivative phenomenon, not the initial one.]
In an interview yesterday, Mons. Fisichella said 'zero tolerance' for sex offenses by priests is not just an option, but a moral obligation...
I think Mons. Fisichella used an expression that has great communicative effect. But I don't believe it corresponds exactly to the original profile of the Church itself, which is centered on the relationship of God to sinners, which is forgiveness 'in return for' penance. Moreover, I am convinced that we are witnessing a general attack in which the media circuit is an essential element of the war.
Who wants to attack the Church? [Is he kidding??? 'Who does not want to attack the Church' is more like it!]
For a few years now we have been witnessing a repetition of practically identical formulas, first used in the United States in the early years of the decade, and now being applied to Europe. With this singular feature: Elements within the Church itself are leading the charge, not a secular opposition that is external to the Church.
Please explain...
This is not a battle in which the Church is attacked by the world that identifies itself with the post-modern culture of the West, but by important components of the Church, utilizing this moment of crisis, playing it up, for purposes that have nothing to do with the real reasons for this crisis, but rather to revive the well-known elements on the agenda of Catholic dissidents.
[I beg to disagree. The dissidents are osimply pportunistic, quick to take advantage of facts that have been blown out of proportion by the media - which is the external world, whose post-modern agenda is to crush the Church, or at least weaken it. Unless one thinks that the media establishment is largely Catholic, there is no way dissident Catholics could have been responsible for starting this fire - not now, and not in 2001 in the United States.]
Is it true that the pedophile scandal - beyond the justice that is owed the victims and the reforms that it should produce - also revives the issue of priestly celibacy and the proper interpretation of Vatican II?
Certainly not. The glaring revelation that this is an intra-Catholic offensive was the article by Alberto Melloni last week in
Corriere della Sera. After deploring the horror of the facts, he showed his cards: the true response to the pedophilia crisis is to convoke Vatican III!
[One swallow does not a summer make, even if we limit ourselves to Italy alone! It's true the sexual-abuse broadside against the Church 'establishment' is giving a second wind to the progressives who had experienced considerable setbacks in the five years so far of the Ratzinger Pontificate. However, they can propose Vatican III all they want, but that's all they can do. That's not going to pressure the Pope in any way into calling Vatican III, when he's still busy trying to set the Church straight about Vatican II!]
Melloni recalled the address made by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini to the Bishops' Synod in 1999, which was some sort of agenda focused on married clergy and promotion of women in the Church as a way of renewing the Church. The classic topics in the panoply of Catholic progressive dissent.
What difference do you see between the 2001-2003 scandals in the USA and this scandal which is centered in Ireland and Bavaria, the Pope's own native land? [And how is it centered in Bavaria, when the three places in Bavaria named so far - Regensburg with 6, Ettal with 8, and Munich with 1 - account for only 15 of the 170 'new' cases referred to these days? It's truly a bleak situation when even supposedly sympathetic journalists have apparently been brainwashed by the media reporting so far as to ignore the facts and wing it on sheer impression!]
Look well at the dates of when most of tehe reported abuses took place. They are not recent, except for a few that are said to have continued up to the present. The greatest incidence seems to have taken place in the 1970s. And that is because the culture of the time - even within the Church, and even among its hierarchy - regarded sexual relations between adults and minors very differently from today.
What do you mean?
Those were years of extremely widespread moral laxity. Just think of Vladimir BNabokov's
Lolita. No one even dreamed of incriminating the hero of that novel for his abominable obsession. It is just an example but I find it indicative. The idea was that sex with a minor was, all told, not all that perverse - the idea was given 'full citizenship' in a culture that considered sexual liberation and the battle against any inhibitory controls as a moral impeerative and a sign of culture!
In those countries that were most exposed, this cultural contagion influenced the attitude taken by the Church hierarchy when faced with the problem.
[Not to mention the offending priests themselves - although one might imagine that offenders were already predisposed to sexual deviance, and that the new sexual permissiveness simply 'activated' that predisposition.]
You mean, they were too soft on offenders?
Yes. Like some excess committed within a family - something that could and should be essentially hushed, rather than stopped inexorably. That is why there was widespread tolerance for these incidents.
[Still, it is appalling to think that evidently, all these tolerant, enabling bishops and other superiors failed to think of the victims at all, nor of the repulsive nature of the offenses! How can someone, for instance, like Cardinal Law - who is certainly no moron - act as he did? In many ways, the enablers are even more reprehensible because there is no way they could possibly justify the offenses to themselves and to God!]
What do you think this scandal means for the Church today?
A trial of purification. Joseph Ratzinger, as a cardinal and now as Pope, has always had a clear view of the essential element about these sins and how they should be confronted. He called this the 'filth' in the Church - which is worse when embodied in those who received holy orders and who should be 'in persona Christi', namely, living images of Christ. And the response to filth is cleansing and purification.
So Benedict XVI has not been caught unprepared?
No! This Pope has shown for some time a decisive attitude against this sort of behavior by priests, urging a penitential approach by men of the Church wherever this scandal has taken place. He has been carrying out energetic work in stirring up the national bishops' conferences to make them fully aware and fully responsible for the gravity of these offenses, that are actions done by individuals but which cast a dark shadow on the entire Church.
What did you think of the Pope's recent address to the participants of the theological convention on the priesthood?
That the Pope used the occasion to underscore the importance of celibacy for priests. In this connection, allow me to point out a curious fact: those who have even the least interest or concern about pedophilia all agree that celibacy has nothing to do with it. And that in fact, the great majority of pedophile offenses are committed by married men, or at any rate, those who can freely have sexual relations with women.
But everytime these cases come up, it becomes the occasion for advocates to urge abolition of the celibacy rule...
It is a mantra that comes with the progressivist agenda for reforming the Church. They keep saying that celibacy is not a dogma, but of course, Pope Benedict knows that. It may not be dogma, but neither was it plucked from thin air. It is something deeply rooted in the Church from apostolic times, and which became articulated in the course of Church history into a form that has absolute continuity. As the Pope recently said, celibacy is an 'authentic prophecy of the Kingdom'. It gains in significance in times when the Church must mobilize great spiritual resources.
You mean like the present phase of profound de-Christianization?
Yes. Benedict XVI, and before him, John Paul II, understood perfectly the dramatic import of the present era, and shared the absolute certainty that the world needs spiritual pastors who have celibacy as a specific and special charism.
Barbara Spinelli, in an editorial for La Stampa entitled "The Vatican: hidden evil" has atrributed the scandal to the "lack of ambition and burnt-out energies of the part that is considered good". She adds that in the Church today, everything is discussed except Christ himself, and that basically, this is what the Church has to do - for which "she needs nothing more than the Scriptures". [What planet does the woman live on? Benedict XVI talks of nothing else but Christ as the face of God and the Scriptures as the Word of God!]
Personally, I share nothing of what she says. It is the representation, almost out of a handbook, of a neo=modernist spirit for whom the only real Church that counts is spiritual. And she cites the 'Gospel' according to Melloni and Ruggieri
[leading advocates of the Bologna school of Vatican-II as rupture]. They are the contemporary heirs of Joachim of Fiore, dreaming of a new age of the spirit, in which everything must be dumped into the sea - institutions, traditions, the structure of the Church itself. They see the Church as a vessel imprisoning a spirit that waits to be liberated.
Should the Church wash its own dirty laundry or should it leave it to the judicial system? [What a silly question!]
In any case, the Church should wash its own dirty laundry! But this does not consist merely in purifiying itself of sexual sins: the Church is the place for God's forgiveness, and her mission is to wash away all the sins of the world. But the forgiveness of God comes to those who, in some way, place ashes on their head.
The Church pardons sinners, but at the same time, Caesar must do his part. Victims of sexual abuse can and should denounce the offenders to the Church but also to civil authorities. The Church does not object to this.
{More than that, she now encourages it!]
Catholic League president
takes on the New York Times
March 15, 2010
The Catholic League released this statement by its president Bill Donohue;
On March 10, the New York Times ran an article on sex abuse in the Catholic Church stating that in Austria a priest abused a boy 40 years ago. Yesterday, readers learned of a German case where a man says he was abused in 1979. But when Rabbi Baruch Lebovits was found guilty last week on eight counts of sexually abusing a Brooklyn boy, the Times failed to report it. This is not an accident — it is deliberate.
Worse, on Saturday, the Times ran a front-page story saying that in 2002, when the sex abuse scandal in Boston hit, the ope — then Cardinal Ratzinger — "made statements that minimized the problem." No quotes or evidence of any kind were given.
"Minimize the problem." Interesting phrase. In 2005, the Times reported that in 2002, Ratzinger believed that "less than 1 percent of priests are guilty" of sex abuse (it was later found that 4 percent was a more accurate figure).
What the Times could have said over the weekend was that on January 9, 2002, three days after the Boston Globe broke the story on sex abuse, it ran a story reporting that Ratzinger had sent a letter to the bishops worldwide saying that "even a hint" of the sexual abuse of minors merited an investigation. But The Times could not have cited that without compromising the conclusion it sought to reach.
If the Times were truly interested in eradicating sex abuse, it not only would report on cases like Rabbi Lebovits, it would not seek to protect the public school establishment. But it does.
Here's the proof. Last year, there were two bills being debated in Albany on the subject of sex abuse: one targeted only private institutions like the Catholic Church, giving the public schools a pass; the other covered both private and public. The Times endorsed the former.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/03/2010 02:53]