BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

See preceding page for earlier entries today, 3/27/10.






The Church enters Holy Week
with prayers for children
and those in charge of them
Translated from
the Italian service of

March 27, 2010


"For children and young people and for those who are working to educate and protect them". This will be one of the prayer intentions offered at the Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square tomorrow to be presided over by Pope Benedict XVI.

The prayer condenses the sentiment in the Church today during a difficult period when the scourge of pedophile priests is very much on the minds of everyone.

On the question of abuse of minors by members of thr clergy, let us listen to Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican press director and director of Vatican Radio and CTV:

---

The question of sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy continues to receive great attention in the media of many countries, particularly in Europe and in North America, especially in the past week after the publication of the Holy Father's letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

It is not surprising. The subject is something that in and by itself draws media attention. But the way in which the Church faces the problem itself is crucial for her moral credibility.

In fact, the cases presented to public attention these days generally took place some time ago - even decades back. But to acknowledge them and and try to make amends with the victims is the price for re-establshing justice and of that 'purification of the memory' which can allow the Church to face the future with a new commitment, as well as with humility and confidence.

Numerous positive signals from the various episcopal conferences, bishops and Catholic institutions from nations in five continents contribute to this confidence - such as the instructions for the correct management and prevention of abuse cases have been reaffirmed, updated and/or renewed in Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada, etc.

Particularly good news is the seventh annual report on the appplication in the United States of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.

Without indulging in inappropriate complacency, one cannot fail to acknowledge the extraordinary preventive efforts taken by the Church in the United States in terms of courses of formation and training not just for the young, but for all the pastoral and educational workers in the parishes.

One must take note that the number of accusations of sexual abuse in the United States decreased in 2009 by 30% compared to the previous year - and most of these complaints were for incidents that took place more than 30 years ago.

Without going into detail, it must be acknowledged that the decisive measures that have been taken and continue to be in force have proven to be effective. The Church in the United States is on a significant course of self-renewal.

This seems to us important news in the light of recent media attacks against the Church which have undoubtedly caused damage to the image of the Church.

But a non-superficial observation will not miss the fact that the authority of the Pope and the intense and consistent commitment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are far from weakened by these attacks, but more determined than ever to sustain and orient the bishops and the national churches in fighting this scourge and eliminate it wherever it is manifested.

The recent letter of the Holy Father to the Church in Ireland is an intense testimonial that can contribute to prepare the future through a path of 'healing, renewal and reparation'.

With humility and confidence, in a spirit of penance and of hope, the Church enters Holy Week tomorrow, asking for mercy and grace from the Lord who suffers and rises again for all of us.

---

The moment I saw the title of the following Op-Ed piece by John Allen for the New York Times, my blood pressure shot up and stayed stratospheric as I read through the piece. It awakens - and typifies - all the bitter objections I have to his hopelessly equivocal treatment of Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict really has no one to stand up for him fair and square in the New York Times, which depends on John Allen and David Gibson as risible pretexts to counteract or at least neutralize their pure anti-Benedict venom. Both are too invested in projecting an image of objectivity to their liberal buddies but making sure it is just an image while they ultimately promote the liberal bias.

Compare this pusillanimous piece by Allen with the firm certainty of Vittorio Messori about Benedict XVI's integrity in his article for Corriere della Sera today (see preceding page), or the articles and blogs written by Andrea Tornielli and Paolo Rodari, to name two writers in the secular Italian press who have always been unwavering in the faith they repose in Benedict XVI, and always unequivocal in their support for him. No ifs, buts and maybes. It is possible to be objective and take a moral position, not sit on the fence and call that being objective, as Allen does.

BTW, most of the Italian Vaticanistas, bless them, are not buying any of the New York Times crap from Wisconsin and Munich. John Allen, on the other hand, is not just a satisfied customer but also a willing door-to-door peddler for the crap, whose stink of malice and untruth unfortunately overpowers the sweeteners he tries to serve it with! Sweetened crap - the very thought is revolting - is still crap!


A papal conversion
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
From the Op-Ed page

March 27, 2010


DENVER - IN light of recent revelations, Pope Benedict XVI now seems to symbolize the tremendous failure by the Catholic Church to crack down on the sexual abuse of children.

Both the Pope’s brief stint as a bishop in Germany 30 years ago and his quarter-century as a top Vatican official are being scoured for records of abusive priests whom he failed to stop, and each case seems to strengthen the indictment.

For example, considerable skepticism surrounds the Vatican’s insistence that in 1980 the Pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, was unaware of a decision to transfer a known pedophile priest to his diocese and give him duties in a parish.

In some ways, the question of what he knew at the time is almost secondary, since it happened on his watch and ultimately he has to bear the responsibility.

So in the first four paragraphs alone, Allen loads up all the negatives in his view, that also serve to reinforce the WRONG WRONG WRONG impressions already generated by the media about the Pope. Forgive the length of this comment on the above, because all these negatives have to be rebutted:
1. Now, Benedict symbolizes the failure of the Church to deal with the problem???? Right off the bat, Allen states the fallacious premise of his presentation.
2. 'Each case seems to strengthen the indictment'??? Because Allen uses the hedge-verb 'seems', he thinks that gives him an out? No, it's his way of signalling to the reader, 'I'm really on your side - look, I'm stating your conclusions for you!"
3. a) 'Considerable skepticism' by who? Allen's recent articles indicate he is with the rest of the media in displaying this skepticism - you can almost see him rolling his eyes - as to what Archbishop Ratzinger knew about the Hullerman case.
b) 'Unaware of a decision to transfer a known pedophile priest to his diocese' - That is a blatant falsehood, and Allen should be ashamed to misrepresent a simple and obvious fact. From the start, the Archdiocese said that the Archbishop approved giving parish lodgings to a priest whom the Diocese of Essen sent to Munich for therapy. What he did not approve, order, or know about, according to the Archdiocese, was the priest's assignment to pastoral duties.

Whether he learned about it afterwards is what cannot be established at this point, given the facts as we have been told so far. And I reiterate here that regardless of what was the culture of the day and its consequent SOP in Church practice in 1980, I do not think that Joseph Ratzinger would have knowingly approved of a sex offender taking on parish duties that necesarily involve contact with children.

4. What happened 'on his watch' for which 'he has to bear the responsibility?' That his Vicar made an assignment he did not approve of and did not know about? That's been conceded. But even so, strictly 'on his watch', if Allen will be technical about it - i.e. from February 1980 when the priest came to Munich, to February 1982, when Joseph Ratzinger left Munich for Rome, the priest apparently committed no offense, so nothing bad happened 'on his watch'.

Sure, the priest could potentially have sinned again, but the fact is, he apparently did not, as of February 15, 1982 - or we would have heard about it already from the New York Times 'investigators'. Apparently, however, Allen would hold Cardinal Ratzinger responsible also for the fact that in 1986, the priest did sin again and was caught out and convicted, and then continued carrying out pastoral duties after that till one week ago? None of that was any longer 'under his watch'!

However, all the criticism is obscuring something equally important: For anyone who knows the Vatican’s history on this issue, Benedict XVI isn’t just part of the problem. He’s also a major chapter in the solution. [OK, he's done for a while playing the bad cop. Now, he's good cop! Let's see how 'good'...]

To understand that, it’s necessary to wind the clock back a decade. Before then, no Vatican office had clear responsibility for cases of priests accused of sexual abuse, which instead were usually handled — and often ignored — at the diocesan level.

In 2001, however, Pope John Paul II assigned responsibility to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s all-important doctrinal office, which was headed by Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal.

As a result, bishops were required to send their case files to Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. By all accounts, he studied them with care, making him one of the few churchmen anywhere in the world to have read the documentation on virtually every Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse. The experience gave him a familiarity with the pervasiveness of the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic Church can claim.

And driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as “filth” in the church, Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have undergone a transformation. From that point forward, he and his staff were determined to get something done.

One crucial issue Cardinal Ratzinger had to resolve was how to handle the Church’s internal disciplinary procedures for abusive priests. Early on, reformers worried that Rome would insist on full trials in Church courts before a priest could be removed from ministry or defrocked. Those trials were widely seen as slow, cumbersome and uncertain, yet many in the Vatican thought they were needed to protect the due process rights of the accused.

In the end, Cardinal Ratzinger and his team approved direct administrative action in roughly 60 percent of the cases. Having sorted through the evidence, they concluded that in most cases swift action was more important than preserving the church’s legal formalities.

Among Vatican insiders, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith became the primary force pushing for a tough response to the crisis. Other departments sometimes regarded the “zero tolerance” policy as an over-reaction, not to mention a distortion of the Church’s centuries-long legal tradition, in which punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and in which bishops and other superiors have great leeway in meting out discipline.

After being elected Pope, Benedict made the abuse cases a priority. One of his first acts was to discipline two high-profile clerics against whom sex abuse allegations had been hanging around for decades, but had previously been protected at the highest levels [Italian priest Gino Burresi and Legionaries founder Marcial Maciel, a Mexican.]

He is also the first Pope ever to meet with victims of abuse, which he did in the United States and Australia in 2008. He spoke openly about the crisis some five times during his 2008 visit to the United States. And he became the first Pope to devote an entire document to the sex-abuse crisis, his pastoral letter to Ireland.

What we are left with are two distinct views of the scandal. The outside world is outraged, rightly, at the Church’s decades of ignoring the problem.

[Again, re-stating the 'outside world's conclusion and thereby amplifying it! And what has any other institution done, pray tell, to deal with the problem which is much more frequent in other sectors of society, including other religions, than among Catholic clergy????

Why do the media - and consequently, public opinion which is shaped so much by the all-pervasive media - only see the mote in the Church's eye? Any objective presentation of this crisis in the Church should point out the beam in other's eyes as well. A good researcher can easily come up with the pertinent comparative figures.]

But those who understand the glacial pace at which change occurs in the Vatican understand that Benedict, admittedly late in the game but more than any other high-ranking official, saw the gravity of the situation and tried to steer a new course.

Be that as it may, Benedict now faces a difficult situation inside the Church. From the beginning, the sexual abuse crisis has been composed of two interlocking but distinct scandals: the priests who abused, and the bishops who failed to clean it up.

The impact of Benedict’s post-2001 conversion has been felt mostly at that first level, and he hasn’t done nearly as much to enforce new accountability measures for bishops.

That, in turn, is what makes revelations about his past so potentially explosive. Can Benedict credibly ride herd on other bishops if his own record, at least before 2001, is no better? The Church’s legitimacy rests in large part on that question.

OK, having played the good cop, Allen winds up as stern prosecutor, and like all prosecutors, he presumes his 'suspect' guilty until proven innocent.
1) Post-2001 conversion? Does he mean that before 2001, Joseph Ratzinger didn't care a rat's tail about sexual abuses by priests, and then suddenly had an epiphany in 2001 that "Oh my God! they are committing mortal sins!" 2001 was not Ratzinger's 'conversion' but that of the institutional Church with respect to treating sexual offenses by priests.

2. "If his own record, before 2001, is no better?" What record are we talking about here? Two cases, so far, both of which have very peculiar, almost unique, circumstances with respect to Joseph Ratzinger's direct involvement that they do not fall into the usual categories of 'faults' associated with these cases.

In more than a month now of no-expenses-spared spadework by investigative teams doing the moral equivalent of mucking about in septic tanks and teasing out the least spot of mildew on any toilet grouting, in the hope of uncovering something really damaging to Joseph Ratzinger - or at least, something they can spin to seem damaging - all they have come up with is
a) Fr. Hullerman, and the tenuous speculation that the Archbishop may have known he was being given pastoral duties although he was a known sex offender; and
b) Fr. Murphy in Wisconsin, about whose case the worse they can say, as substantiated fact, is that the CDF - read Ratzinger via Bertone - decided not to defrock 1) a dying man 2) who had apparently not committed any sex offense during 3) 24 years of retirement living in his mother's house - and 4) who did die a few months after the CDF recommended that restrictive sanctions be imposed, rather than a canonical trial 35 years after the events he was charged with, which the police had failed to prove when they investigated then!

The circumstances are definitely justifiable, or at least extenuating, for the CDF. Which, of course, does not make Murphy any less guilty because he admitted many of the offenses he was charged with. And the impression is that he left the diocese holding the bag for paying off some of his victims.

But, a slight digression: Does anyone not find it strange that the Bishop of Milwaukee - who a few years later would admit to having carried on a homosexual affair with a man he tried to pay off using church funds - would reopen a case closed in 1974 with no charges filed by the police and the priest sent into retirement twenty years later? Did the Diocese of Milwaukee have no other problems to think about?

Yet to paint Benedict XVI as uniquely villainous doesn’t do justice to his record. The Pope may still have much ground to cover, but he deserves credit for how far he’s come. [Gee, thanks for the condescension! You can only condescend if you think you are much better, or you think the other party bears some guilt. Obviously, Allen does, if we go by the prosecutorial parts of his exercise in trying to 'seem fair'.]