July 18, 2017
PewSitter
Canon212.com
July 19, 2017
I saw the reports on the 'Domspatzen' scandal (referred to in two links from Canon 2i12.com above] too late to post about it.
For the basis of the following commentary by Steve Skojec, look up the AP account published in CRUX of what many people might now
be calling 'the Georg Ratzinger sex abuse scandal' which broke anew yesterday.
cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/07/18/hundreds-boys-abused-choir-run-georg-ra...
For the Pope Emeritus,
a strange sort of coincidence
by Steve Skojec
ONEPETERFIVE
July 18, 2017
Despite what some folks might say, we’re not in the business of trafficking in conspiracy theories... Nevertheless, let me line up some dots for you and see if a picture emerges.
On Saturday, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had a message read to those gathered at the funeral of the late Cardinal Meisner. In it, he said something that drew a great deal of attention:
What particularly impressed me from my last conversations with the now passed Cardinal was the relaxed cheerfulness, the inner joy and the confidence at which he had arrived.
We know that this passionate shepherd and pastor found it difficult to leave his post, especially at a time in which the Church stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age and who live and think the faith with determination.
However, what moved me all the more was that, in this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even if [sometimes] the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.
Some German speakers have since pointed out that the last sentence was slightly more conditional than our translation read. That the word “sometimes” should appear before “the boat”, as I’ve placed it in brackets above. But I find this to be a distinction without a difference. Like many, many others, I had the distinct impression when reading this that the former pope was blinking a message in Morse Code — perhaps subconsciously, perhaps intentionally, but a message nonetheless.
When I read it, my first thought was,
“He’s speaking about himself here. That he views himself, too, as a “passionate shepherd and pastor who found it difficult to leave his post” but who “learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church”.
Even if the boat looks like it’s about to go under.
Whether this is a self-assessment or really just a reflection on his departed friend from Germany,
it is more difficult not to read into this a critique of how the Church is being run today than it is to see it as exactly that. This notion takes on a deeper meaning when we recall that he told the five newest cardinals just weeks ago — rather cryptically — that “The Lord wins in the end.”
It is of course no surprise that everyone is talking about these comments. And it is also not a surprise, therefore, that the former pope’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, has now gone out of his way to deny that there is any such meaning in Benedict’s words [translation by Google with some polishing from me]:
“Nonsense,” said Monsignor Georg Gänswein, “the pope emeritus was deliberately manipulated; with that sentence he was not referring to anything specific, but spoke of the situation of the Church today as in the past as a boat that does not sail in calm waters. Francis also says this. I understand that this may give rise to allusions or false impressions, but behind those words there is no attack. “
Gänswein also dismissed claims, found in some of the sillier quarters of the Internet, that the pope emeritus did not write his own words. He “wrote the message alone,” said Gänswein, from the “first to the last letter in his own hand, and no one helped him.”
[Forgive the necessary digression, but… It is clearly a measure of the mindless malice of Joseph Ratzinger's critics like Melloni and Faggioli (sounds like an item from an ala carte Italian menu), and all the rest who mindlessly echo them, that Gaenswein's last statements even had to be made about a man who had written - before he even became pope - enough to fill 16 volumes averaging about 800 pages each, one who was known from the start of his career as a German professor in his 20s as 'Goldmund' ('golden mouth', which is 'chrysostom' in Greek) for the amazing excellence of his lectures which, delivered spontaneously though certainly from notes, even then were described as 'print ready', and whose homilies and catecheses as Pope brought comparisons to St. Pope Leo the Great...
As for Gaenswein's protestations about what Benedict XVI meant or didn't mean, it doesn't really matter. Joseph Ratzinger is a veteran wizard with words, and knows exactly what he wants to say and how to say it in order to convey what he means. We don't need Gaenswein to tell us what to think about what Benedict XVI says or writes.]
But clearly, the impression his statement gave was nearly universal. Many, many Catholics saw the comments as a shot across the bow. As a man forced into a compromise position who was desperate to convey that things in the Church are not as good, in his view, as he has given the public impression he believes.
Which is, perhaps, why I find it exceedingly odd that just today — three days after the former pope’s comments began their viral circulation of the Internet — a new report has come out concerning alleged abuse of members of the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir in Germany, of which Georg Ratzinger, the 93-year-old older brother of the former pope, served as head for 30 years (1964-1994). The report that was issued in 2016 alleged 231 victims; the new story claims at least 547 victims. The initial abuse allegations surfaced in 2010.
[i.e., precisely at the peak of the avowed and overt campaign by the world's media giants to uncover anything that might directly tie Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI to a case of sexual abuse or of covering up for priests who committed sexual abuse, and thereby force him to resign as Pope. In the course of which the Domspatzen scandal came to light, implicating his brother instead! About which Georg Ratzinger promptly answered saying he had never heard of sexual abuses, but yes, he did know of physical abuses, such as slapping the boys, which he candidly said he himself did sometimes, as it was routine discipline in Germany until it became illegal to do that… I have more observations to make about this below.*]
Now of course, it’s likely just a coincidence. Clearly, the investigation has been ongoing for the better part of a decade. Perhaps this new report had been scheduled to come out this week all along. But the timing certainly is interesting — a former pope speaks up in a way the world interprets as a criticism of a pontificate known for its autocratic and controlling style, led by a pope a pope known as one who keeps and settles scores, and within 3 days an international news story implicating his elderly brother in a sex abuse scandal is making headlines around the globe.
If nobody is using this as leverage to pressure the former pope into silence, then the odds are simply fascinating. Make of it what you will.
*
The new report on the Domspatzen, concluded after seven years of investigation, uncovered 500 cases of physical injury abuses and 67 sexual abuses, committed by 49 perpetrators, in the 47 years from 1945-1992. That comes to an average of 11 physical abuses and 1.43 sexual abuses a year. Moreover, the sexual abuses make up less than 12 percent of the total 567 cases reported.
Needless to say, one abuse alone is already one too many, but this new report recalls the outcome of one of the official investigations by the Irish government into the sexual abuses said to have been prevalent in Irish Catholic schools and institutions from the 1920s onward – in which, similarly, the complaints of physical and emotional abuse far outnumbered the complaints of sexual abuse.
These days, however, when the media say 'abuse' in connection with the Church, they don't even bother to qualify it because they consider – quite rightly – that everyone will simply think it refers 'yet again' to sexual crimes by priests.
The Domspatzen cases date back 19 years from when Georg Ratzinger took on his position as Choir Master of the Regensburg Cathedral (Domkapellmeister was his official title, 'dom' being German for cathedral)) and do cover 28 of the 30 years he served in that position. But the headlines have been typical of the AP's "Hundreds of boys abused in choir once run by Georg Ratzinger". Having achieved beyond-maximum innuendo impact by such a headline, what the reports carefully omit to make clear is that the abuses took part in the two boarding schools which the Domspatzen boys attended, i.e., in their daily schoolday life, in which Georg Ratzinger had no part (he was employed by the Cathedral, not by the boarding schools), and not, say, at choir practice with him in the Cathedral. One imagines some reporter already feverishly interviewing ex-Domspatzen from the Ratzinger years to find out if the choir director had ever misbehaved with them, how and how often, during the many concert tours they gave abroad!
Of course, the point of all these stories is not about any objective facts uncovered – which cannot be undone or denied - but to lay down innuendoes thick enough to be mythified into factoids, especially if the reports are about sexual abuse by priests. Anything to soil the Church – or in this case, anyone named Ratzinger - with any muck that can be raked up!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/07/2017 04:19]