Thanks again to Lella for calling attention to this book release in Spain. Googling material about it made me realize all over how 'rich' the Web is with Spanish Catholic sites. I found quite a reviews of the new book to translate, abut I will start with the most basic one from '21', a monthly magazine whose tagline is "the Christian space for today', is run by priests of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (SS.CC., from the Spanish 'Sagradas Corazones')...
First book in Spanish on
Benedict XVI and the pedophile issue
by Fr. Fernando Cordero, SS.CC.
Translated from the online edition of
October 23, 2010
Juan Antonio Rubio, priest
[a diocesan priest in the city of Jaen] and writer, and editor of the weekly Catholic magazine
Vida Nueva, has just published his latest book, in a year when his literary activity appears to be boundless.
From his watchpost as a Catholic editor and with his numerous journalistic ties, Juan is able to document and analyze in depth the subjects that he writes about, in this case,
Tolerancia cero. La Cruzada de Benedicto XVI contra la pederastia en la Iglesia (Zero tolerance: Benedict XVI's crusade against pederasty in the Church).
It is a well-documented exposition - with a geography of the cases in Australia, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Spain and the USA - on the challenge that the Church faces in combatting this lacerating evil, which is both sin and crime, and in which Benedict XVI - far from what a hostile media paints him to be - is not part of the problem but the key to a solution that is also a renewal.
Juan says in his Preface:
Benedict XVI has shown that he is with his brother priests in their dark night; that he is not, as he has been unjustly accused, responsible for the complicit silence in the face of the sins and crimes of some priests who betrayed the grace received at ordination by committing horrible crimes against the innocence of children and minors.
The whole world saw how several years back, Pope John Paul II, his face marked by the ravages of a painful illness, begged forgiveness for the sins of the Church [not of the Church, of some of its clergy and hierarchy], humiliating himself even for deeds in the most obscure pages of history, and yet there were still those who thought he had not beaten his breast enough.
He apologized for the Crusades, for dictatorships, for schisms, for heresies, for the neglect of women, for anti-Jewish behavior, for Galileo, for Calvin, for the the treatment of native Americans, for injustices, for the Inquisition, for integralism, for Islam, for the Mafia, for racism, for Ruanda, for slavery. Certainly, there are many more sins and offenses to apologize for.
Now it is the turn of Benedict XVI to apologize for the sexual abuse of minors by priests and religious: "We too seek forgiveness from God and the persons affected".
He has made the apologies and he has been working so that justice and truth will shine forth in the Church as an act of penance.
Benedict XVI is not the obstacle for the Church to confront the thorny, delicate and lacerating problem of pedophilia. He is a very important part of the solution. He himself has had to seek the solution from his daily work, from constant prayer, from spiritual closeness to the victims.
He got to know the extent of it reading the reports that came across his desk every day [at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], and in those Friday mornings that he called 'his Fridays of penance', when since 2001, he had to read, review and decide on cases forwarded to him that showed all the failings and vilenesses of his brother priests. Day after day, year after year, since John Paul II gave him the responsibility.
The book also discusses Benedict XVI's apostolic trips, the media and their attempts to implicate the Pope in the scandal, as well as the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel as a paradigm of the issue.
He brings a psychological and pastoral approach to the problem of pedophilia, and ends with a very informative appendix and his acknowledgments.
This is a rigorous work that provides an overview of one of the major problems that the Church is facing and that must be answered with the formulation expressed in the title and thesis of Rubio's book: zero tolerance.
Some specific citations in the following review of the book give me second thoughts about the author's objectivity, not to mention whether he did 'due diligence' in his research. It appears he wrote the book to support a few hypotheses - widely shared by many in MSM - that became the premise for it. A couple of the hypotheses are troubling because they depend more on the author's subjective impression than on objective fact. And in doing so, he unfortunately perpetrates these impressions as 'fact'!
Rubio's book:
'The great error by the Church was
its complicit silence on priest offenders'
by Jose Manuel Vidal
Oct. 27, 2010
Fr. Juan Rubio, editor of
Vida Nueva, enjoys challenges. Perhaps because of that, he has decided to tackle one of the most sensitive issued in the Church's agenda.
With his book
Tolerancia cero: La cruzada de Benedicto XVI contra la pederastia en la Iglesia, published just now by Desclèe, he aims to show that Benedict XVI is "the start of the solution to the problem" despite "the difficulties that he still encounters in the Roman Curia itself".
Rubio's book, the first attempt in Spanish to deal with this 'great wound' in the Church which the Pope himself has called an internal persecution from within the Church itself, notes, to begin with, that
Benedict XVI himself underwent a 'conversion' on this issue.
He cites a statement made by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in Murcia in which
he referred to sex offenses by the clergy as something invented by newsmen and pure lies.
[I hope Vidal is not quoting directly from Rubio's book because that is a gross distortion of what Cardinal Ratzinger said at the time. To set things straight, here is what ZENIT reported in two parts on Dec. 2-3, 2002 of an interview given by Cardinal Ratzinger in Murcia.
www.zenit.org/article-5961?l=english
www.zenit.org/article-5979?l=english
The question about priest offenders comes in the middle of a wide-ranging interview about the state of the Church and its problems.
ZENIT conveniently used it to start Part 2 of the post. There was no follow-up question. The next question was about the debate over the failure to include God and Europe's Christian roots in the proposed preamble for the European Constitution. I have checked the Spanish version to compare it with ZENIT's English account:
CARDINAL RATZINGER SEES A MEDIA CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHURCH
Sees Agenda Behind the Reporting in U.S.
MURCIA, Spain, DEC. 3, 2002 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger suggests that a campaign is under way against the Catholic Church, judging by the way scandals involving priests have been reported in the United States.
The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith shared these views when he met last weekend with a group of journalists, including a ZENIT correspondent. The occasion was the congress "Christ: Way, Truth and Life," over which the cardinal presided, at the Catholic University of St. Anthony....
This past year has been difficult for Catholics, given the space dedicated by the media to scandals attributed to priests. There is talk of a campaign against the Church. What do you think?
Cardinal Ratzinger: In the Church, priests are also sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower.
In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1% of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts. Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated, that there is a desire to discredit the Church. It is a logical and well-founded conclusion.
The questioner himself suggested 'the campaign against the Church'. And the cardinal's response was specifically about the situation then in the United States. It must be remembered that John Paul II gave the CDF the jurisdiction for dealing with these complaints in April 2001, after the US media began to train their spotlight on the problem. So by December 2002, Cardinal Ratzinger would already have had a 'feel' for the extent of the problem in the United States. If the cardinal erred at all in his response, it was in not being politically correct by bucking dominant but misinformed public opinion, thus giving the impression that he was dismissive of the issue.
As it turns out, his estimate of the percentage of guilty priests in the US was quite realistic: The study commissioned in 2002 by the USCCB from the John Jay College of Criminal Studies in New York later reported that between 1950-2002, about 4% of US priests and religious (4,392 out of 102,000) were named in abuse complaints, which were subsequently investigated by the police, of which only 384 were charged (representing 0.37% of all priests and religious in the US who served in that period), and 252 were convicted (0.25%). It is outrageous that journalists - even the best-intentioned such as Mr. Rubio - hardly ever cite these hard figures. The Irish statistics are even more striking, but those too are hardly ever cited in these stories, in which the MSM deliberately want to give the impression that the problem is an affliction of epidemic proportions in the Church!
A few months later [after the Murcia interview], and in the face of the flood of cases that started to arrive at the CDF, he changed his attitude and became the leading ecclesiastic whip against this wound.
What was clear, for Juan Rubio, is that "John Paul II did not focus on the problem", perhaps because when he was a priest and bishop in Poland, he saw enough 'false accusations' of the kind
[used by the Communists to undermine the clergy]. But "he entrusted the task to Ratzinger, so he could do something about it".
In fact, on November 27, 2004, when the obviously ailing and aged Papa Wojtyla presided at a celebration of the Legionaries of Christ and called their founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel 'an example for the youth', on that very day, Cardinal Ratzinger signed the order to proceed with the investigation of Maciel for complaints of sexual abuses presented to the CDF against him. Rubio sees this as a 'paradigm' for the way in which the then CDF Prefect pursued such complaints.
For Rubio,
since his 'conversion'*, Benedict XVI made the fight against pedophile offenses by priests one of his priorities, defining it as 'purification of the clergy'.
But he has met with many difficulties. First of all, by "obstacles placed by the Curia, especially Cardinal Sodano", then Papa Wojtyla's number-2 man as Secretary of State.
[I hope Rubio has more than just the anecdotal information we know from previous MSM reports and Cardinal Schoenborn. Other than unsubstantiated charges against Cardinal Sodano and now-Cardinal Dsiwisz, nobody else in the Curia, under Wojtyla or at present, has been named as 'obstructing' the investigation of offending priests. Names please, and credible charges.]
The second obstacle for the future Pope in his clean-up was 'complicit silence' among the clergy and bishops themselves - a silence that Rubio calls 'a great sin'.
The third was that bishops failed to apply the Church's own juridical system, canon law, which has specific provisions for dealing with sex offenses by priests. Among other reasons, because "bishops chose to act more as fathers to their priests rather than judges".
But this dynamic started to change as soon as the responsibility for dealing with cases of sexual abuse by priests was taken on by the CDF.
Rubio does not believe 'there was an organized campaign' on this issue to discredit the Catholic Church. He does not think there was 'a crusade' to this effect, even if
he claims there was pressure from 'the Jewish lobby' and that "Bush wanted to avenge John Paul II's opposition to the war in the Gulf".[These are really highly questionable assertions. 1) Of course, there was no organized campaign - but there can be no doubt of the alacrity and dogged insistence with which MSM seized on the problem as a way to paint the entire Church and her leaders in the worst light possible. Their unspoken alliance in this respect has been equivalent to an organized campaign, because once they had committed to their blanket judgment on the Church, there was - and has been - no turning back for them. 2) No one in the Anglophone world has ever raised the specter of supposed Jewish pressure in all this. 3) Which Bush and which Gulf War? And what influence did any of the two Presidents Bush ever have on what the media chose to report???? This is ABSURD!]
Nonetheless, he acknowledges that there is a 'before' and 'after' on the pedophile issue in the Church, such that "the next Conclave will be influenced by this topic and will be decisive in the profile of whoever gets elected".
In any case, he says "priestly pedophilia will not be the coup de grace for the Church, which has gone through much worst. Moreover, the faithful know perfectly well who is on God's side and who is on the devil's, and Spanish Catholics know better than to be baited by the issue".
He also thinks that the issue could have consequences for the process of John Paul II's beatification in that "the Church must surely think twice about cases of 'santo subito'" in its process of beatification.
[No one is rushing, Mr. Rubio, despite the waiver of the 5-year waiting period for Mother Teresa and John Paul II. The process of verification remains as painstaking as ever, and the pedophile question was considered in the investigation of John Paul II's record. Cardinal Levada submitted an attestation that he never intervened in any of the cases submitted to the CDF.]
To explain why, so far at least, Spain ha had few cases of child-abusing priests, Rubio points out a few reasons.
First, because Spanish courts do not pay very much in damages.
[That might be a reason for victims not having much incentive to file complaints, but it has no bearing on why any priest so minded would not commit the offense, to begin with.]
Second, because in the Mediterranean countries, "Catholic sentiment still prevails, whereas in the Anglophone countries, every effort is made to rub salt into Catholic wounds".
[Again, this argument has nothing to with whether and why priestly pedophilia occurs. It might explain less media emphasis on the problem, but in highly secular Spain and Portugal, the secular media would be just as relentless if there were cases to report!]
The author also believes that "at this time, the Spanish bishops are complying with Rome's orders" and that therefore, "are not buying the silence of any victims", and in fact, advocate 'ending the culture of silence once and for all".
He also claims "there is no relation between pedophilia and celibacy" or homosexuality, for that matter, even if he thinks it is is not bad "if the subject of priestly celibacy in the Catholic Church is debated", and that, in fact, he thinks "the day is not far when some married men will be qualified to be priests" and that "a homosexual can be a good priest".
[No one has questioned that - provided the homosexual priest becomes 'asexual' and celibate like all Catholic priests are supposed to be.]
As the editor of a religious magazine, Rubio believes "The Church in Spain is not ready to face the communications challenge", because, among other things, "it does not possess the structure nor the discipline required for communications".
[Judging by the success of the Spanish bishops' conference and the Archdiocese of Madrid in organizing million-member marches in support of life every year - more than the Italian bishops have ever mobilized in Rome - I would think that the Church in Spain is doing quite well in its communications. During the years of the increasingly secular Zapatero government, they have also been very prompt in responding with a formal statement and with mibilization of the faithful against every new legislation prejudicial to the Church and her doctrine.]]
He therefore proposes "a unified team with the proper standards to face the communications challenge with truth and justice".
[I certainly hope he, as a priest and an editor, can pass on any concrete suggestions he has to the Spanish bishops conference, and maybe sit down with them if he has a communications strategy to propose.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/11/2010 21:55]