BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

When the Vatican Radio commentator for EWTN said this morning just before the Mass began that Cardinal Sodano was going to say some words at the beginning, I suspected immediately that it would be a messgae of support for the Pope - and I thanked God that the cardinals had decided to do something concrete like this. Sodano's words were very touching, but the best part was the Holy Father's reaction, in the way he rose right afterwards to wait for Sodano to approach him, and in the fraternal hug they shared!


Pope hailed as 'unfailing' leader at Easter Mass,
Pontiff remains silent on abuse cover-up allegations
by FRANCES D'EMILIO



VATICAN CITY, April 4 (AP) -- A senior cardinal staunchly defended Pope Benedict XVI from "petty gossip" on Sunday as the Pontiff maintained his silence on mounting sex abuse cover-up accusations during his Easter message.



The ringing tribute by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, at the start of Mass attended by tens of thousands of faithful in St. Peter's Square, marked an unusual departure from the Vatican's Easter rituals.

Sodano's defense of the Pope's "unfailing" leadership and courage, as well as of the work of priests worldwide with children entrusted to their care, built on a vigorous Vatican campaign to defend Benedict's moral authority. [NO! If there is anything to defend at all, it is against an unfair and often unfounded media assault on the person of the Pope as a way to attack the Church itself! The Pope's moral authority - in his function as Vicar of Christ, and in his own private person - does not need to be defended to the faithful.]

The Pontiff and other Church leaders have been assailed by accusations from victims of clergy sexual abuse that he helped shape and perpetuate a climate of cover-up toward the crimes against children in parishes, schools, orphanages and other church-run institutions.

Dressed in gold robes and shielded from a cool drizzle by a canopy, Benedict looked weary as he listened to Sodano's speech at the start of Mass in the cobblestone square bedecked with daffodils, tulips and azaleas.

In early evening, the Pope, who turns 83 later this month, was to fly by helicopter to the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside retreat in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome, where he will greet pilgrims from the palace courtyard balcony on Monday.

Easter Sunday Mass was the highlight of a heavy schedule of public appearances by the Pope before the thousands of faithful who have poured into Rome for Holy Week services.

"With this spirit today we rally close around you, successor to (St.) Peter, bishop of Rome, the unfailing rock of the holy Church," Sodano said. "Holy Father, on your side are the people of God, who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials which sometimes buffet the community of believers."




At the end of the two-hour long ceremony, Benedict delivered the papacy's traditional Easter "Urbi et Orbi" message -- Latin for "to the city and to the world" -- which analyzes humanity's failings and hopes.

Benedict singled out the "trials and sufferings" of Christians in Iraq and Pakistan, noting that these believers have risked persecution and death for their faith. He urged hope for the people of Haiti and Chile, devastated by earthquakes. He said Easter could "signal the victory of peaceful coexistence and respect" in crime-ravaged areas of Latin American countries plagued by drug trafficking and said he would pray for peace in the Middle East.

But, despite repeated appeals by victims of clerical sexual abuse that he take responsibility for his role in the handling of pedophile priests, he stayed silent on that issue. The victims contend there were decades of systematic cover-up by bishops in many countries, including the United States, Ireland and Benedict's native Germany. [Why must he take responsibility for his role, which he has always carried out in an exemplary way? When the US scandals broke out in 2001-2002, did they ask John Paul II to take responsibility? He was not responsible for bishops deciding to cover up for offending priests, much less for the individual offenders, and neither is Benedict XVI.

Fr. Cantalamessa's Jewish friend hit it right on the button when he pointed out "the use of stereotypes, the passage from personal responsibility and culpability to make it collective" that is glaringly obvious in media reporting of this cause-du-jour, one they have handpicked because it is easy for them to exploit and instrumentalize shamelessly. Simply because the secular world at large - and even some liberal Catholics - has always been ready not just to find fault with the Church, but to behave as though the Church were the only institution on earth that has fallible members!]

They want him to demand the resignations of bishops complicit in any conspiracy to shield pedophile priests by shuffling them from parish to parish instead of kicking them out of the priesthood.

The accusations against the Pope stem from his leadership as archbishop of Munich before he came to the Vatican three decades ago [ONE CASE! ONE CASE! that is tenuous at best, as well as his long tenure in Rome leading the Holy See's office dealing with a growing pile of dossiers about pedophile priests. [Look how shameless D'Emilio is! As one of AP's most veteran Vaticanistas, she knows full well that he took charge only in 2001, and that the record of the CDF since that time - and by all previous accounts, even in the media - has been excellent, especially in comparison to the typical pace of the Vatican bureaucracy! How can this woman - and all her fellow deliberately dissimulating journalists - face themselves in the mirror?]

Sunday's edition of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano denounced the accusations against the Pope as a "vile defamation operation."

Benedict hasn't made any explicit reference to the sex abuse scandals since he released a letter to the Irish faithful concerning the abuse crisis in that country on March 20. [The implication being that he hasn't done so because he has no answer! The Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth - does silly D'Emilio really believe he - or any Pope - would stoop to answer petty charges directed against him personally? Any Pope who did that would be unworthy of being Vicar of Christ!] these petty charges against him that are being made to appear even worse than the sexual abuses committed by the priest offenders?]

Sodano defended the Church's priests as well as the Pontiff.

"Especially with you in these days are those 400,000 priests who generously serve the people of God, in parishes, recreation centers, schools, hospitals and many other places, as well as in the missions in the most remote parts of the world," the cardinal said.

In rushing to Benedict's defense [And why shouldn't it 'rush to his defense?' when he is defamed right and left by every two-bit tyrant in the media????], the Vatican has angered abuse victims and their advocates. [Like the Jews about the Holocuast, they will carry their unrelenting anger with them to their graves, so what's new with that??? The Church and the faithful can only invoke the Holy Spirit on them.

Jewish leaders also fumed after the papal preacher in a Good Friday sermon told the Pope that the accusations against him were akin to the campaign of anti-Semitic violence that culminated in the Holocaust.

The preacher, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, told Corriere della Sera daily in an interview Sunday that he had no intention "of hurting the sensibilities of the Jews and of the victims of pedophilia."

"I have sincerely regretted and I ask forgiveness, reaffirming my solidarity with both" lobbies, he was quoted as saying.



Please do not under-estimate the nature of the poison AP is sowing and instilling! It is the largest news agency in the world, meaning that majority of the world's media outlets - newspapers, radio and TV - pay AP an annual fee for the right to use their news reports, since obviously the overwhelmingly majority of media outlets caanot afford to field reporters of their own to cover what's happening around the world.

Therefore, far more than the New York Times (whose news service very few outlets subscribe to - though those outlets will recycle what the New York Times says, each in their own way, and not have to pay them any fee), what the Associated Press chooses to disseminate shapes opinion around the world. To a lesser degree, the same is true of Reuters and AFP, the other two major news agencies.

That is why I foam at the mouth and stomp my feet - I wish they were elephant hooves - at all their built-in bias, inaccuracies adn distortions of fact!]


Apparently, the two other AP Vaticanistas filed an earlier story in which they load all their condescending conclusions in a double-decker headline for an item that is 90 percent speculation... But you can see that its purple index is expectedly higher than usual even for AP.

Small coterie advises Pope,
but decisions are his own
The Pontiff's gaffes often cause the church spokesman grief.
By Nicole Winfield and Victor L. Simpson
The Associated Press

Vatican City, April 3 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI has surrounded himself with a small group of men he believes he can trust, but he acts very much on his own.

That isolation and shunning of advice have frequently created problems and are increasingly under scrutiny as the clerical sex scandal inches closer to him. ['Inches closer to him'? The last I looked, everyone was saying it had already reached him because of Fr. Hullermann in Munich and Fr. Murphy in Wisconsin!]

Early on in his 5-year-old papacy, Benedict provoked a furious reaction from Muslims when he linked the Prophet Muhammad to violence in a speech Vatican officials said he wrote himself. [They make it sound as if the 'Vatican officials' said, "Hey, don't blame us for anything. He wrote it himself!" as if Benedict XVI would let anyone else take responsibility for something he himself wrote! He never passed on the responsibility for Regensburg to anyone. To begin with, no culpability was involved.]

Then he enraged Jews for the "unforeseen mishap" of being unaware that a bishop whose excommunication he lifted was a Holocaust-denier.

The Pope similarly is unlikely to have known that his personal preacher, during a solemn Good Friday sermon, would compare the uproar over the church's sex abuse scandal to persecution of Jews. [NO AND NO AND NO! Factually wrong on both counts of their premise - The statement was not Fr. Cantalamessa's, to begin with; and the comparison made by his Jewish friend was not at all between the attacks against the Church because of the sex abuses and persecution of Jews, but between the manner of the attacks and analogous aspects of anti-Semitism. But they mis-state everything to fit their narrative of "Yet another PR catastrophe by the 'Pope's preacher'" (and by extension, the Pope himself). If they did quote what Cantalamessa's Jewish friend wrote, then not even they - nor the Jews - could dispute its validity!]

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi -- who has frequently had to put out these fires [So now we are supposed to sympathize with 'poor Fr. Lombardi', because he has to 'pick up' after a boss who is either an arsonist recidivist or a truculent hardheaded schoolboy who will not stop playing with fire!] -- said Saturday that such a comparison was not the line of the Vatican, the Catholic Church or even the intent of the preacher himself, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa.

That the Vatican has had a communications problem during Benedict's papacy is fairly well-established. Amid a swirling scandal at the Pope's feet, Lombardi recently said he hadn't spoken to the Pontiff about his letter to Irish Catholics, and that his information on Benedict's views on it was second hand.

While part of the problem is Benedict's reserved personality, perhaps more to blame is a culture of secrecy at the Vatican, rooted in Church history for centuries, and its tendency to shun being held accountable to the secular world. [But what a non-sequitur! What does that have to do with a communications problem? In none of the 'gaffes' the MSM love to harp on was the question of secrecy ever the issue! Not even with this latest and worst of the MSM-fabricated 'scandals' - because Benedict XVI has always been open about the sex abuse problem. Even in that one statement he gave in answer to an ambush news conference question in 2002 - it was a news confernece about a theological seminar on Christology - about the sex abuse problem in the United States, he did not deny the existence of abuse cases. He commented that the media is playing it up because of a campaign against the Church, true then and true now, as I once pointed out, and that the offenders make up a tiny percentage of all the priests in the United States, true then and now, and not just in the USA but everywhere else.]

The Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who has testified in U.S. court cases about Vatican secrecy and sex abuse, has written about the medieval-era canonical concept of the "privilege of the forum" — whereby clerics accused of crimes were tried by church courts, not civil courts.

"Although this privilege is anachronistic in contemporary society, the attitude or mentality, which holds clerics accountable only to the institutional church authorities is still active," he wrote in a recent article.

"There is a cult of secrecy in the Catholic Church. It's a paranoid culture," Doyle, who worked as a canon lawyer in the Vatican's U.S. nunciature in the 1980s, said in an interview Saturday. [The man is talking about what it was in the 1980s! To suggest in any way that the US scandals did not change the Church bureaucracy for the better is completely irresponsible!]

Against that backdrop sits Benedict's inner circle. It is formed principally by the Vatican's No. 2 official, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict's trusted deputy during his long years as a Vatican official; and Benedict's private secretary, fellow German Monsignor Georg Ganswein.

The Pope also is known to still consult his former personal secretary, Monsignor Josef Clemens, now the No. 2 at the Vatican office for the laity.

Benedict's closest friend is his older brother, Georg, a retired priest who often visits from Germany but who himself has been drawn into the scandal stemming from his years leading a pre-eminent German choir. [Implying that he is part of the scandal, without explaining that he was not even in Regensburg when the cases happened.]

"The Pope listens to his collaborators, but then he's very autonomous in his decisions — above all on questions of doctrinal and theological nature," noted Ignazio Ingrao, the Vatican columnist for Italy's Panorama newsweekly. [DUH! If you were Joseph Ratzinger and Pope, would you make others make a doctrinal and/or theological decision for you????]

The top adviser is Bertone, a 75-year-old soccer aficionado who used to give play-by-play commentary on local television when he was archbishop of Genoa. [As though that were Bertone's primary qualification! I am not very happy with how namby-pamby Bertone has been about standing up for the Pope when push comes to shove - he has not once done that yet - but his credentials and record, ecclesiastical as well as academic, are substantial and generally excellent.

The Pope trusts him deeply, and shows a real affection for him. But Bertone has also been accused of not shielding the Pope enough from pitfalls.

Ganswein, a former ski instructor often satirized because of his good looks, is extremely solicitous and protective of the 82-year-old Pope. [Again, they make it appear as if 'ski instructor' were GG's primary qualification. He holds a doctorate in canon law from the same university Joseph Ratzinger attended, and he was a professor of canon law at the Opus Dei pontifical University in Rome when he was fradated into Curial work.]

But Vatican insiders say he lacks the political savvy of his predecessor as papal secretary, the Polish Stanislaw Dziwisz, now cardinal-archbishop of Krakow, Poland. [GG must be mortified to learn he is considered a 'papal adviser'. And please God, keep him free from 'political savvy' if that means all sorts of curial maneuvering pro or con certain proteges!]

"John Paul met a huge variety of people from all walks at his breakfasts and lunches," said Marco Politi, a biographer of the late pope. The future Pope Benedict would stay for dinner after their regular Friday afternoon meetings.

As Pope, Benedict is known to eat alone. [Not alone. From all accounts, he always eats with his household - his family now! And is it supposed to be a demerit because he chooses not to socialize as John Paul II did? He has a different personality. And what does the outside world know of the guests he asks to dinner or lunch - his personal friends from Regensburg and Munich, to begin with? It comes out when they talk later about their experiences with him after he became Pope.]

"In reality Benedict doesn't have an inner circle. He has collaborators, not advisers," said Politi. [And what is wrong with that? No one can possibly come close to the level of authority and decision-making that a Pope has, so no one can possibly qualify as a real 'adviser' to a Pope.

Would Politi say that John Paul II had any advisers - other than Joseph Ratzinger, whom, he consulted to provide the theological rationale for many of his decisions - including the 2000 string of apologies - as everyone in the Vatican acknowledges then and now. But we also know now, if we had not already inferred much earlier, that John Paul II did not always take Cardinal Ratzinger's position on the sexual abuse problem!

The absurd thing is that by ending their article with Politi's statement, Winfield and Simpson have negated the whole premise of their article. Benedict XVI has no advisers, merely collaborators - in simpler words, co-workers, who give him their expertise and let him make the decisions.]]