BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Wednesday, March 24

ST. CATERINA DA GENOVA [Catherine of Genoa] (Italy, 1447-1510), Mystic
Born to one of the most historic families of Genoa, Caterina wanted to be a nun at age 13 but she was too young.
However, she married a fellow noble youth at age 16. her husband turned out to be unfaithful and a wastrel, so
she herself turned to a life of pleasure. When she was 26, a mystic vision during confession converted her. She
became an example to her husband who eventually became a lay Franciscan. But he had brought them to financial
ruin, and they now dedicated themselves to charitable work at Genoa's largest hospital. When her husband died,
Caterina became manager of the hospital. For 25 years, she resisted having a spiritual adviser but 12 years
before her death, she found one who would later publish Caterina's memoirs of her mystic experiences. From
this, a Dialog of the Soul and the Body and a Treatise on Purgatory became popular spiritual works after her
death, inspiring both St. Robert Bellarmine and St. Francis de Sales. She was canonized in 1737.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/nab/readings/032410.shtml


OR today.

No papal stories in this issue, except a brief item to report that German Chancellor Angela Merkel
and Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi had both welcomed the Holy Father's Pastoral Letter to the
Catholics of Ireland. The major Vatican story is that the priceless manuscripts in the Vatican Archives
will now be digitized - approximately 40 million pages to occupy 45 petabytes (45 million gigabytes).
A test run of about 7,500 pages is currently underway. Other Page 1 news: Israeli PM Netanyahu
rejects US bid to stop new construction in east Jerusalem; Obama administration now targetting
a reform of the US financial system.


THE POPE'S DAY
General Audience - The Holy Father continued his cycle on the Christian culture of the Middle Ages
with a catechesis on St. Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus), whose breadth of learning anticipated
what would later be called a 'Renaissance man'.


The Vatican also released the text of the Holy Father's message to the X International Youth Forum
under way this week in Rocca di Papa under the sponsorship of the Congregation for the Laity.

Pope accepts resignation
of Bishop of Cloyne

Wednesday, 24 March 2010 12:11


Pope Benedict XVI has accepted the resignation of Bishop of Cloyne John Magee.

The Vatican made the announcement at 11am.

Bishop Magee stood aside last March over his mishandling of abuse allegations in his diocese.



The cleric, from Newry, Co Down, faced scathing criticism after the Church's own watchdog found he took minimal action on accusations against two of his priests and branded his child protection inadequate and dangerous.

He apologised when the watchdog's report was first published before Christmas 2008 but he refused to resign.

Although Pope Benedict did not specify why he was accepting the bishop's resignation, it is understood that the findings of the Independent Board for the Protection of Children in the Catholic Church precipitated the decision.

The Diocese of Cloyne is currently under investigation by the Murphy Commission, which reported last year on the cover-ups of clerical child abuse in the Dublin diocese over half a century.

In a statement today Bishop Magee said he wanted to sincerely apologise to victims of abuse in Cloyne.

'To those whom I have failed in any way, or through any omission of mine have made suffer, I beg forgiveness and pardon,' he said.

He said he takes full responsibility for child protection failures and pledged to continue working with Judge Yvonne Murphy's inquiry into the handling of abuse allegations in the diocese.

'I also sincerely hope that the work and the findings of the Commission of Investigation will be of some help towards healing for those who have been abused,' he said.

'I welcome the fact that my offer of resignation has been accepted, and I thank the priests, religious and faithful of the diocese for their support during my time as Bishop of Cloyne, and assure them of a place in my prayers always.'

The 73-year-old once served in Rome as personal secretary to Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I and Pope John Paul II.

His daily duties were taken over by Dermot Clifford, Archbishop of neighbouring Cashel and Emly, in March last year.

[Pope Benedict XVI named Mons. Clifford the Apostolic Administrator after Mons. Magee said he would take a leave in order to make himself fully available for to the investigation.]







Retired Cardinal Wetter takes
responsibility for Father H's
reassignment to pastoral duties
starting in December 1982



MUNICH, March 24 (Translated from ANSA) - Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, who succeeded Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1982, has taken responsibility for the pastoral assignments given to Fr. Peter Hullermann even after he was convicted for sexual offenses against minors in 1998.

A Munich newspaper TZ reported a statement released yesterday by the cardinal, who retired in 2007.

"The violation of children and young people through sexual abuses is wrong. And I have a most serious responsibility" for which he addressed the victims and their families with "every form of apology possible".

"I over-estimated the capacity of a human being to change his character and I undervalued the difficulty of therapeutic treatment for pedophilia", said part of the statement.

Wetter, referring to the Munich archdiocese's annals which are online, points out that he took office as Archbishop of Munich on Dec. 12, 1982, three months after Hullerman had been transferred to the commune of Grafing, where, according to the first diocesan report to the media on Fr. H, he helped in pastoral care from Sept. 1982 to the start of 1985.

Archbishop Ratzinger left Munich on February 15, 1982 to take up his position as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The annals show that the prelate in charge of the archdiocese between the time Archbishop Ratzinger left and Cardinal Wetter's assumption in December was the then auxiliary bishop Ernest Tewes.

[NB: It will be recalled that Archbishop Ratzinger approved provision of parish lodgings for Father H when he was sent to Munich from the Diocese of Essen in January 1980. His vicar at the time, Mons. Gruber, has since taken responsibility for giving Father H pastoral duties at that time without informing his archbishop. Grafing was H's second pastoral assignment in the archdiocese.]

In the same statement, the cardinal denied that he had received 'concrete indications' of pedophile abuses committed by a member of the diocesan curia, Heinz Maritz, as indicated in "an anonymous letter sent to various newspapers'.

I will check the original sources for this story... and the following story comes from Ecumenical News International, not from the regular news agency services.


German Protestant church
admits cases of sexual abuse

March 24, 2010


The Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, the second biggest Protestant Church in Germany, is the latest to apologise to victims of sexual abuse in their institutions, reports Ecumenical News International.

The vice-president of the church, the Rev. Petra Bosse-Huber, said on 22 March in Duesseldorf, "We are ashamed and upset that such infringements apparently also happened in our church and in our social welfare department. We ask the victims for forgiveness."

Her apology came just days after Pope Benedict XVI apologised for abuses that had been carried out in Roman Catholic institutions in Ireland and kept under wraps for decades.

[And what about the Rhineland abuses? how many were there and over what time period?]

GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY
Catechesis on St. Albertus Magnus






At the General Audience today in St. Peter's Square, the Holy Father spoke on St. Albertus Magnus. This is how the Holy Father synthesized the catechesis in English:

---

In our catechesis on the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, we now turn to Saint Albert, better known as Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great.

A universal genius whose interests ranged from the natural sciences to philosophy and theology, Albert entered the Dominicans and, after studies in Paris, taught in Cologne. Elected provincial of the Teutonic province, he served as bishop of Regensburg for four years and then returned to teaching and writing.

He played an important part in the Council of Lyons, and he worked to clarify and defend the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas, his most brilliant student.

Albert was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI, and Pope Pius XII named him the patron of the natural sciences.

Saint Albert shows us that faith is not opposed to reason, and that the created world can be seen as a "book" written by God and capable of being "read" in its own way by the various sciences.

His study of Aristotle also brought out the difference between the sciences of philosophy and theology, while insisting that both cooperate in enabling us to discover our vocation to truth and happiness, a vocation which finds its fulfilment in eternal life.

---

Here is a full translation of the catechesis:

---

Dear brothers and sisters,

One of the greatest masters of medieval theology was St. Albertus Magnus. The title 'Magnus' (great) with which he passed into history indicates the vastness and profundity of his teaching that was associated with the sanctity of his life.

Already his contemporaries did not hesitate to attribute the highest of titles to him. One of his disciples, Ulrich of Strasbourg, called him "the wonder and miracle of our time".

Born in Germany at the start of the 13th century, he was very young when he went to Padua in Italy, site of one of the most famous of medieval universities. He dedicated himself to the study of the 'liberal arts': grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music - thus, culture in general, manifesting interest in the natural sciences which were soon to be his preferred field of specialization.

While in Padua, he attended the church of the Dominicans, whom he eventually joined when he professed his religious vows. Hagiographical sources indicate that Albert matured this decision gradually.

An intense relationship with God, the examples of holiness from the Dominican friars, listening to the sermons of Blessed Jordan of Saxony, who succeeded St. Dominic as head of the Order of Preachers, were decisive factors that helped Albert to overcome every doubt, and even resistance from his family.

Often, in the years of our youth, God speaks to us to indicate our plan for life. For Albert, as for each of us, personal prayer, nourished by the Word of the Lord, frequent use of the Sacraments, and the spiritual guidance of enlightened men are means to discover and follow the voice of God.

Albert received the Dominican habit from Blessed Jordan himself. After his ordination to the priesthood, Albert's superiors assigned him to teach in various centers of theological studies annexed to Dominican convents. Because of his brilliant intellectual qualities, he was sent to perfect his theology studies at the most famous university of the day, Paris. Starting then, Albert undertook his extraordinary activity as a writer which he would pursue for the rest of his life.

He was given prestigious assignments. In 1248, he was charged with opening a theological study center in Cologne, one of the most important of German capitals, where he would return to live many times, and which became his adopted city.

From Paris, he brought with him to Cologne an exceptional student, Thomas Aquinas. The fact alone that he was the teacher of St. Thomas would merit profound admiration for St. Albert. Between them, they had a relationship of reciprocal esteem and friendship, human attitudes that are very helpful in the development of knowledge.

In 1254, Albert was elected Provincial of the 'Provincia Teutoniae' - the German province - of the Dominican friars, which included communities spread over a vast territory in central and northern Europe.

He distinguished himself by his zeal in exercising this ministry, visiting the various communities and constantly exhorting his brothers to be faithful to the teachings and example of St. Dominic.

His gifts did not escape the attention of the Pope at the time, Alexander IV, who wanted Albert to be with him for a time in Anagni, where the Popes often went, in Rome itself, and in Viterbo, in order to avail of his theological advice.

The same Pontiff named him Bishop of Regensburg, a great and famous diocese that was then having difficulties. Albert carried out this ministry from 1260 to 1262 with tireless dedication, succeeding to restore peace and concord to the city, to reorganize parishes and convents, and to give a new impetus to charitable activities.

In 1263-1264, Albert preached in Germany and in Bohemia, at the behest of Pope Urban IV, and then returned to Cologne to resume his mission as a professor, scholar and writer.

As a man of prayer, of knowledge and of charity, he enjoyed great authoritativeness in his interventions in various events of the Church and of society in his time. Above all, he was a man of reconciliation and peace in Cologne, where the Archbishop was in bitter dispute with the city's institutions.

He gave all he could during the Second Council of Lyons which was called in 1274 by Pope Gregory X to promote a re-unification of the Latin Church and the Greek Church, after their separation in the Great Schism of 1054. He clarified for them the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, which had been the target of objections and even condemnations which were totally unjustified.

He died in his cell in the convent of the Holy Cross in Cologne in 1280 and was immediately venerated by his brothers. The Church proposed his cult to the faithful with his beatification in 1622, and his canonization in 1931 when Pope Puss XI proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church. [It took three centuries to canonize him!]

It was an appropriate recognition for this great man of God who was an illustrious scholar not only of the truth of the faith, but of many other fields of knowledge. In fact, by looking at the titles of his numerous works, one realizes that his culture was prodigious, and that his encyclopedic interests led him to be occupied not only with philosophy and theology, like his contemporaries, but also with other known disciplines - physics and chemistry, astronomy and mineralogy, botany and zoology.

For this reason, Pope Pius XII also named him Patron of the natural sciences. He is also referred to as 'Doctor universalis' because of the vastness of his interests and knowledge.

Of course, the scientific methods adopted by Albertus Magnus were not those that would be developed centuries later. His method consisted simply of observation, and the description and classification of the phenomena that he studied, but he opened the way for future scientific work.

He continues to have much to teach us. Above all, St. Albert shows that there is no opposition between faith and science, despite some episodes of incomprehension that have been recorded in history.

A man of faith and prayer, as Albertus Magnus was, can calmly cultivate the study of natural sciences and progress in his knowledge of the microcosmos as well as the macrocosmos, discovering the laws of matter, because all this contributes to nourish the thirst and love of God.

The Bible speaks to us of creation as the first language through which God - who is the supreme intelligence, the Logos - reveals something of himself. The Book of Wisdom, for instance, affirms that the phenomena of nature, endowed with grandeur and beauty, are like the work of an artist through which, by analogy, we are able to know the Author of creation (cfr Wis 13,5).

With a classic metaphor from the Middle Ages adn the Renaissance, the natural world can be likened to a book written by God, which we read on the basis of the different approaches to science (cfr Address to the participants of the Plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Oct. 31, 2008).

How many scientists, in fact, following the example of Albertus Magnus, have carried forward their studies inspired by wonder and gratitude in the face of a world which, in their eyes as scholars and as believers, appeared and appears like the good work of a wise and loving Creator!

Scientific study is thus transformed into a hymn of praise. A great astrophysicist of our time, Enrico Medi, who has been proposed for beatification, wrote: "Oh, you mysterious galaxies... I see you, I calculate, I understand, I study, and thus I discover you, I penetrate you, and I grasp you. From you, I take light and make it science, I take motion and make it wisdom, I take the sparkle of colors and make it poetry. I take you stars into my hands, and trembling in the unity of my being with you, I raise you far above yourselves, and in prayer lift you up to the Creator, whom only through me, you stars can adore" (Medi, The works: Hymn to creation).

St. Albertus Magnus reminds us that there is friendship between science and faith, and that men of science can also follow, through their vocation for the study of nature, an authentic and exciting path of holiness.

The saint's extraordinary openness of mind was also revealed in a cultural project that he undertook successfully, namely, the acceptance and valorization of the thought of Aristotle.

In St. Albert's time, knowledge of the numerous works of the great Greek philosopher, who lived in the fourth century before Christ, was starting to spread, especially his ethics and metaphysics. His works demonstrated the power of reason, explained with lucidity the sense and the structure of reality, its intelligibility, its value, and the goals of human activity.

St. Albert opened the door for the complete acceptance of Aristotle's philosophy into medieval philosophy and theology, a reception that was later conclusively elaborated by St. Thomas. This acceptance of a philosophy that we might call pagan and pre-Christian was an authentic cultural revolution at that time.

And yet, many Christian thinkers feared Aristotle's philosophy - a non-Christian philosophy - above all because, as presented by his Arabic commentators, it was interpreted as seeming to be, at least in some points, totally irreconcilable with the Christian faith. Thus, the dilemma: are faith and reason in opposition to each other or not?

One of the great merits of St. Albert lies herein: with scientific rigor, he studied the works of Aristotle, convinced that it was all rational and compatible with the faith revealed in Sacred Scriptures.

In other words, St. Albertus Magnus contributed to the formation of an autonomous philosophy, distinct from theology but united with it through the unity of truth. Thus was born, in the 13th century, a clear distinction between these two sciences - philosophy and theology - which, in dialog between them, cooperate harmoniously in the discovery of the authentic vocation of man who thirsts for truth and happiness.

Above all, it is theology, which St. Albert described as 'affective science', that indicates to man his calling to eternal joy, a joy that flows from full adherence to the truth.

St. Albertus Magnus was capable of communicating these concepts in a simple and understandable way. Authentic son of St. Dominic, he preached gladly to the People of God, whom he conquered by his words and by the example of his life.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us pray to the Lord so that the holy Church may never lack for learned, pious and wise theologians like St. Albertus Magnus, and help each of us to make ours the 'formula for holiness' that he followed all his life: "That all I want may be for the glory of God, as everything that God wants is for his glory" - that is, to conform ourselves always to the will of God in order to want and do everythin,g only and always for his glory.

---

The right Pope
at the right time
by BRUNO MASTROIANNI
Translated from

March 24, 2010


In the face of the nth media storm during his Pontificate, Benedict XVI is showing that he is the right Pope at the right time.

Not so much for his 'zero tolerance' policy on pedophile crimes by priests, or his battle against 'the filth in the Church', as even the media keep citing.

But the way in which Papa Ratzinger has been dealing with the pedophile issue is an example of calm and lucidity in facing controversial questions.

Massimo Introvigne was right when he recently wrote that the pedophilia crisis is substantially a phenomenon of 'moral panic'.

The presentation by the media is very disproportionate to the actual number of cases. This is not to minimize the crime committed by some priests but one must ask for objectivity and balance. [And a sense of proportion with respect to the general context of all pedophile crimes committed in all sectors, not just in the Catholic Church!]

Of what use are screaming headlines - often ambiguous [mostly misleading and deliberately so!], the prurient reports aimed at hitting the reader in the gut, the inaccuracies and omissions to force-fit the report into a pre-cast judgment?

Other than splattering mud on the Pope and leaving both believers and non-believers confused, how does this kind of media reporting contribute to help the victims or to resolve the problem?

And that is the question that Benedict XVI poses, with his gentle but firm management, full of faith but concrete.

All it takes is to read his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland "with an open heart" - as he requested at the General Audience last week - to recognize that in confronting the painful scourge of pedophilia, the letter focuses on what truly matters: what is good for all concerned.

And that is what we lose along the way when we are caught up in the twists and turns of media reports and their climate of suspicion.



As if right on cue, the following report by the AP's Victor Simpson exhibits all the hallmarks of the typical MSM report skewed in almost every sentence to paint as negative a picture as it can about Benedict XVI. This is the kind of news report that literally drives any sane person apoplectic! Note the use of the key word 'silence' which the MSM are deliberately hammering home in an obvious attempt to associate it with the 'silence of Pius XII'.

Mr. Simpson and all the malicious morons out there, please read your own reports about Mons. Zollitsch's news conference at the Vatican two weeks ago, right after he met with the Pope. Did Mons. Zollitsch say the Pope said nothing about the event? Their entire meeting was about it! And other than his news conference, Zollitsch reported it on the German bishops news site right away.

But Simpson does not even refer to it at all, nor to what the German bishops conference is doing! It's unfair to the German bishops, but Simpson will throw them under the bus if it means he can imply that the Pope has done and said exactly zero about the revelations in Germany.



Pope Benedict XVI's silence on German abuse
scandal begins to rile his native country
by VICTOR SIMPSON



VATICAN CITY, March 24 (AP) - Germans are asking just when Pope Benedict XVI might say something about the clerical abuse scandal rocking the Catholic church in his native country.

As the scandal has intensified in recent weeks, he chose not to say anything Wednesday during his weekly public audience, an occasion when he offers greetings and issues pronouncements in nine languages.

He took advantage of St. Patrick's Day on March 17 to send his greetings to the Irish, and expressing his regrets over a decades-old scandal in that country and announce he was signing a special letter on clerical abuse addressed to Irish faithful.

German Catholics believed he might make an allusion to them in the Irish letter, but he didn't.

More than 300 former students in German Catholic schools and choirs have come forward since January with abuse claims. The country's government announced Wednesday it will form an expert 40-member committee to investigate.

The allegations have come almost daily, including Wednesday, when the Munich archdiocese confirmed that another person claims to have been molested as a youth in 1998 by a priest who was previously convicted of abuse, the Rev. Peter Hullermann.

The Church's management of Hullermann's case overlaps with the time that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, served as Munich archbishop from 1977 to 1982. [That is such a deliberately misleading statement, for which alone, Simpson should burn in purgatory till Judgment Day! The overlap was only in the last 13 months of Cardinal Ratzinger's tenure in Munich, from January 1980 to February 15, 1982. Hullermann has stayed on in Bavaria to this day and served the diocese for a total of 30 years - under two other archbishops, Wetter from Dec 1982-November 2007, and then Marx, from then to the present.]

A spokeswoman for a prominent German Catholic activist group criticized the pope Wednesday for his silence.

"It is almost painful to see how this topic is being excluded," Sigrid Grabmeier from "We Are The Church" told The Associated Press.

The Vatican operates on its own agenda, regardless of calls from public opinion and the news media.

On Wednesday, Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee — an aide to three popes before assignment in Ireland — who has been accused of endangering children by failing to follow the Irish church's own rules on reporting suspected pedophile priests to police.

[Magee's case deserved at least a one-sentence explanation, if only because of what he was, and also because it can be stated simply and easily. But Simpson chooses not to, because to limit himself to the statement he wrote leaves the reader free to imagine the worst about Magee - and therefore, the Church, and therefore, the Pope!]

The announcement of the resignation was issued without prior notice or particular attention: it garnered two lines in the Vatican's daily bulletin along with the nomination of a new bishop in Gurue, Mozambique.

[But when has the Vatican ever treated a resignation in any other way? Simpson, who has covered the Vatican for two decades, should know that, and is just misleading readers in the most detestable way! RINUNCE E NOMINE is the regular rubric one looks up on the Vatican site every day after 12 noon, Rome time, to find out who has resigned and who has been nominated. The same rubric is the only truly official section of L'Osservatore Romano which prints it in the next day's issue. Even the nomination of the highest-ranking Curia official -the Pope's Secretary of State - is officially registered in the same way]

At the Vatican, keep your eyes on little things.

Last Friday, the Vatican offered a concert for the Pope on his name day (St. Joseph). In a show of solidarity the Pope invited his older brother, Georg, who has been touched by the abuse scandal.

Monsignor Georg Ratzinger admitted he slapped children years ago when he led a renowned choir in Regensburg, Germany.

The Pope made brief remarks on faith and the beauty of music, but again without referring to developments in Germany.

[Does anyone really expect the Pope to speak about pedophilia after a concert of Haydn's 'Seven last words of Christ' offered on his name day? And what is wrong with having his brother with him at the concert? The Pope does not need to 'show solidarity' with his brother - they have shared that solidarity solidly and without anyone doubting it for close to 83 years now!]

Benedict appears to have an uneasy relationship with his homeland. In five years as Pope he has yet to make an official visit to Germany, meaning a stop in Berlin and meetings with political leaders, as he does on most of his foreign travel. He has been in Germany twice, to celebrate World Youth Day in Cologne and to visit his native Bavaria.

[That is so mulishly petty, Simpson! - Anything, even outright lies, to add to your litany of criticisms, eh??? Both were official visits! The Pope did not need to go to Berlin to meet political leaders. When he travelled to Cologne, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder came to meet him at the airport and met with him later, as did President Horst Koehler, who was his official host. Both Koehler and Chancellor Merkel came to Munich to meet him when he went to Bavaria. A visit to Berlin was discussed for this year, but that has not gone through. Initial reports said the intention was for the Pope to be able to visit a diocese or two in what used to be east Germany, where the faith virtually died out during the Communist years.]

On Wednesday, a new poll in Germany found that confidence in the Catholic Church has dropped dramatically in reaction to the scandal.

Only 17 percent of Germans polled said they still trust the Catholic church, compared to 29 percent in late January, just before the first abuse cases were made public, according to the Stern magazine poll.

Many Germans also have lost confidence in the Pope, the poll showed. Only 24 percent still trust him, while six weeks ago 38 percent said they did.

Some 1,508 persons were interviewed for the poll last week. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.5 percent.


[BIG DEAL! As though the majority of Germans who are not Catholic, along with all the liberal Catholics and 'We are Church' types, were not just waiting for a good chance to dump on the Pope!

A word needs to be said about how the Pope has been handling the German case:
The German bishops have always been among the haughtiest of the national bishops' conferences with respect to the Pope. Their attitude has always been that they know better than anybody what the situation in the German Church is, and consequently, no one can know better than they what should be done to deal with any problem.

Zollitsch himself sort of underscored this when he reported that "the Pope approves of the plan we have drawn up and encourages us to proceed". Benedict XVI is simply giving the German bishops the 'respect' they have always demanded from the Vatican, which is also a gesture of confidence by the Pope in their ability to deal with the problem.

It's different altogether from the Irish case where two government reports documented the failure by omission and commission of many Irish bishops to confront the pedophilia problem of their priests.

And I must repeat, it's not as if the Germans - at least those represented by the people polled in this report, all flaming holier-than-thou hypocrites, I believe - were going to give any importance at all to what the Pope would say. Or that any of them can say they were 'sincerely shocked' to learn that sexual abuses have taken place in Catholic institutions.

All one has to do is look at tabloids like BILD daily (or read back to accounts of perversion in the Third Reich) to realize that all kinds of sexual perversion are common news in Germany. Or in any other country touched by the sexual revolution for that matter. Or at any time in human history, as even the Bible tells us, just that there was no 'mass media' before the 20th century to obsess on the darkest of human failings.

Perhaps it was no accident that Freud, Jung, Kraft-Ebbing [of Psycopathia sexualis fame) and many of the pioneering researchers of human sexuality and its perversions emerged from Germanic culture.

So spare us the drama of feigning 'shock' today.

And hey, if it makes you feel any better, only 300 cases have emerged so far going back to the 1950s - 300 cases in 60 years averages to 20 a year. Nowhere near the 35,000 cases uncovered in Irish charity schools and institutions from the 1930s to the 1960s. So you see, as terrible as even one case alone is, it could have been so much worse.

If Germans have ignored what Mons. Zollitsch said about the Pope's strong feelings about what has been revealed in Germany lately, they will also ignore what he says directly, or use it as an occasion to further disparage him or to mock him.

And what has made Victor Simpson such a hateful and shameful example of a professional journalist? The fact that 80 percent of his 'news' report was 'purple prose' for our purposes is a visual indication of his index of bias.

Ey now... I'm offended!!! You left Nietzsche out!! And Kant and Marx! And a bunch of other maniacs! Not to mention the wonderful Frankfurter Schule.

But!!! You need to mention Hildegard von Bingen, Hegel, Albertus Magnus (!!), Einstein (born in Ulm) and, last but not least, our very own Joseph Ratzinger, who will hopefully NEVER set his foot onto German soil ever again! As much as it might tear his heart out (and mine). Germany does NOT deserve this wonderful, humble man!

German philosophy - it's not all bad. But when it's bad, it's really bad!!! We don't do things half way in this country!! Also in terms of inventing most efficient weaponry. Great engineering goes many different ways.
I've spent years trying to figure out what makes this Nation so different, so horrible and so strange, and so wonderful and beautiful and great at the same time. Forget it. Impossible.
A big problem is that people tend to take themselves waaayyy too serious!





Ehem! Excuse me if I offended in any way. I only referred to the scholars of sexuality, including the perverse, in the context of all this 'faux shock' that sexual abuse took place in German schools - so the other illustrious Germans in history do not come into the picture at all!

Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse are among my favorite novelists, and Freud, though he was Austrian, is one of my personal cultural heroes, not because of his science, of which much is valid and good, even if many premises of his psychotherapy are flawed if not now discredited, but because of his life itself and his writing (I always thought that, like Winston Churchill for his History of World War II, Freud too deserved a Nobel Prize for Literature - and that was before I read him in German).

And what would music be without the great composers of the Germanic lands? What would my life be without Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler and Richard Wagner???? (whose anti-Semitic views had nothing do with the sheer unparalleled genius if his music)... You see, as a Germanophile in many ways, I was pre-destined to be a follower of Joseph Ratzinger! Speaking of whom, my perhaps impossible dream is for him to win the Nobel Prize in Literature!(But not while the Oslo juries are dominated by those 'nekulturny' blockheads)...

'Way too serious' is right... Where is that sharp (as in good cheese) and often delicious sense of irony that characterizes the outstanding German writers, including our own beloved Papa B????

TERESA

President of Malta shares
hopes for papal visit:
Interview with President Abela
By Silvia Gattas



VALLETTA, Malta, MARCH 24, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's April 17-18 visit to the Mediterranean island of Malta is inspiring many hopes in its people, says the President of that country, George Abela.

Abela spoke with ZENIT about his hopes for the forthcoming Papal trip, on the 1950th anniversary of St. Paul's shipwreck.

In this interview, he discussed the Christian roots of Malta and Europe in general, the problem of immigration, the court ruling on crucifixes in schools, and other issues his Catholic-majority country has faced.


Pope Benedict XVI will visit Malta for the first time. What hopes and expectations does your country place in this visit?
The great majority of Maltese identify themselves as Catholic and many are still practicing Catholics as evidenced by statistics on church attendance.

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, therefore, as the head of the Catholic Church and Vicar of Christ, is considered as our spiritual pastor.

The Pope's visit is expected to contribute to a spiritual renewal among the faithful and to afford an opportunity to Maltese youth to meet him in person and to get to know him better.

It is hoped that the Pontiff's inspired teachings, such as those contained in his three encyclicals, will become more widespread among the population as a result of this visit.

We consider these teachings relevant not to Catholics only. The values the Pope represents transcend space and time.

What do you think of Malta's Christian roots? Do you think they can be regenerated by the Pope's visit, on the anniversary of St Paul's shipwreck?
Malta has been Christian and its culture has been European for many centuries. Our faith, our traditions and our mores have been molded around Christian beliefs.

In the past, daily life -- birth, marriage and even the rituals associated with the end of life -- all centered around the Church and religious faith.

Although this is less so today, the vestiges of the past still permeate our modern way of life. Although the tree may have changed its leaves, the roots are still the same.

While the Maltese State is secular, many of our laws still reflect Christian values. A secular State does not mean that there cannot be cooperation with the Church where this is for the common good. Cooperation in the expansion of Church schools is one aspect which springs to mind.

We are confident that the Pope's visit will contribute to an awareness that the faith which St. Paul brought to our islands is still relevant today not only in the life of the spirit but also for the universal and timeless values which may enhance our temporal lives.

What is Malta's role in the European Union?
Malta is part of Europe not only geographically but also culturally. There is now widespread consensus that Malta's place is within the European Union. Its main role is like that of any other Member State of the Union.

We do feel, however, that we may have some special roles. One of these is that of doing our best to foster peace and dialogue among the nations and cultures of the Mediterranean Region and to work to enhance the European Union's good relations with the Arab world in all sectors.

Our national policies reflect this role. We feel that our geo-strategic location at the center of this historic sea as well as our contacts with the States and cultures of the southern littoral provide us with a measure of insight that qualifies us for this role.

If Malta may also be instrumental in engendering a more positive approach to certain cardinal values such as the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life, then we would gladly embrace that role as well.

Immigrant landings and their being turned back is a contentious issue for many States. What is your opinion on this matter? Do you think the Pope can contribute to a solution?
Immigration has now reached proportions that were unforeseen and have become unsustainable in their present shape. There is a need for immigration to become a planned and structured phenomenon if Europe feels that its future economic requirements entail a measure of arrivals from other countries.

Haphazard immigration has sometimes resulted in unsatisfactory living conditions for the immigrants themselves and disillusion as to what this "promised land" was expected to offer.

It is imperative that the countries of origin of the migrants cooperate with Europe to ensure that immigration takes place in a planned manner that ensures not only that the European countries are prepared to receive these migrants according to Europe's prevailing economic and social needs but also that the dignity of these migrants is fully respected.

As the situation is today, most of the migrants are victims of unscrupulous criminal organizations whose motive is not the welfare of the migrants but their exploitation.

Malta is presently shouldering a burden totally out of proportion to its size and material resources. We believe that, as a temporary solution, our burden should be shared with our European partners, for this problem is not Malta's alone but Europe's.

The more permanent solution is to assist the migrants' countries of origin to achieve a higher economic development and a resolution of internal conflict that would make these countries more attractive to their own people and remove their urge to migrate.

I feel that the problem of immigration being a political in as much as it is a social and human drama intrigues His Holiness the Pope.

The Pope, however, has the role of teaching about the value of the human person and that everyone should be treated with the dignity which all humans deserve.

The Church, in fact, makes a very important contribution in many countries from where migrants originate by running schools and hospitals that contribute to the welfare of the population and help in the development of these countries.

What do you think of the European ruling on the removal of the crucifixes? Do you thing that a court can rule on such matters, so entwined with human rights, like religious freedom?
The ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that crucifixes displayed in schools are a breach of human rights was an unfortunate one, in my view.

A court does not exist in a vacuum. In my opinion, if the court in Strasbourg considered itself competent to decide on this matter, which in my view is not, then it had to look at all the circumstances, foremost amongst which are European religious sensibilities, history, culture and the very identity of our continent itself.

A large section of European peoples still identify themselves as Christian even if they do not all practice their religion. Apart from the fundamental religious significance of the crucifix, European history and culture are inextricably bound with the history of Christianity of which the crucifix is the most sublime symbol.

European culture has its roots in Christianity: some of the most edifying works of literature and art were inspired by Christian beliefs and values.

The crucifix is not only a fundamental sign of the importance of religious values in European history and culture but it is also a symbol of unity and solidarity with all of humanity, a symbol of tolerance, not of exclusion or denial of rights to non-Christians or atheists.

The figure of the crucified Christ embodies compassion with all fellow human beings and inspires selfless concern with those who suffer. The dignity and inviolability of the human person from the moment of conception to the natural end of life and the concept of the inestimable value of human life are all symbolized in the crucifix as the unmistakable badge of Christianity.

How all this could be found offensive or as breaching human rights is beyond my comprehension. The government of Malta, reflecting the sentiments of the great majority of our people, categorically disagrees with the decision and has asked the European Court of Human Rights to intervene in the appeal lodged by Italy to signal its support.

Benedict XVI's liturgical reform:
Between innovation and tradition
Interview with Liturgist Fr. Nicola Bux
By Antonio Gaspari



ROME, MARCH 24, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is becoming known as a great reformer of the liturgy, but according to author Father Nicola Bux, the reform under way hardly started with the current Pope.
[Hardly an appropriate opening line to introduce a book called 'La Riforma di Benedetto XVI'!!!]

Father Bux, an expert in Eastern liturgy and a consultor for the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, looked at the Holy Father's efforts at reform in a book entitled La Riforma de Benedetto XVI. La Liturgia tra Innovazione e Tradizione, with a prologue by Vittorio Messori.

In this volume, Fr. Bux characterizes the Pope's reform as a looking forward while recovering the most beautiful elements that Tradition offers the Church today.

He says the Holy Father's patient reform effort is designed to renew Christian life, restoring in the liturgy a wise balance between innovation and tradition, appropriate to a pilgrim Church that is able to reflect on herself and to value her age-old treasures.


How is Benedict XVI reforming and why has he sparked so many reactions?
The reform of the liturgy, a term to be understood - according to the liturgical constitution of the Second Vatican Council - as instauratio, namely, as a re-establishment of the correct place in ecclesial life, did not begin with Benedict XVI but with the very history of the Church, from the Apostles to the age of the martyrs, from Pope Damasus to Gregory the Great, from Pius V and Pius X to Pius XII and Paul VI.

The instauratio is continuous, because the risk always exists that the Church 'decays' as the source of Christian life. Decadence comes when divine worship is subjected to the personal sentimentalism and activism of clerics and laity who thereby transform it into mere human activity and even spectacular entertainment.

An example of that is applause in the church, which punctuates indiscriminately the baptism of a newborn or the departure of a coffin in a funeral. Sp does not a liturgy that has become entertainment need reform?

This is what Benedict XVI is doing: the emblem of his reforming work is the re-establishment of the Cross in the center of the altar, to make it understood that the liturgy is addressed to the Lord and not to man, least of all to the priest.

What is the difference between innovators and traditionalists?
These two terms must first be clarified. If to innovate means to favor the instauratio of which I spoke, it is precisely what is needed, but so is traditio, in order to guard the deposit of faith as it is 'sedimented' in the liturgy.

If, instead, to innovate means to transform the liturgy from the work of God into human activity - oscillating between an archaic taste that wishes to preserve only the aspects it likes, and whatever conformism is in vogue at the moment, we are on the wrong road. Likewise, is wrong to preserve human traditions that have superimposed themselves on liturgy like incrustation on a painting, no longer allowing the harmony of the whole to be perceived.

In reality, the two opposites end up by coinciding, revealing their contradiction. An example: the innovators hold that Mass was formerly celebrated addressed to the people. Studies demonstrate the contrary: the orientation ad Deum, ad Orientem, is proper to man's worship of God. Think of Judaism. Even today, all Eastern liturgies keep it. So how is it possible that the innovators, who claim to restore early Christian elements in the post-conciliar liturgy, have not kept it?

What meaning does tradition have in Christian history and faith?
Tradition is one of the sources of Revelation: the liturgy, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (1124), is its constitutive element. In the book Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict XVI reminds us that revelation has become liturgy.

Then there are the traditions of faith, of culture, of piety that have entered the liturgy, so that we now have several forms of rites in the East and in the West. Hence everyone understands why the constitution on the liturgy, in No. 22, paragraph 3 affirms urgently: "Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority."

Do you think it possible to return today to Mass in Latin?
The Roman Missal as renewed by Paul VI is in Latin and constitutes the so-called typical edition, because reference must be made to it by the various language editions languages prepared by national and territorial episcopal conferences, then approved by the Holy See. Hence, the new Ordo can be celebrated in Latin, even if it is rarely done. [Most of Benedict XVI's Masses in the past two years have been celebrated in Latin, except for the Readings. This is one of the changes by example that he has introduced into his own liturgical celebrations, but which few commentators have noted enough.]

This has contributed to the near-impossibility - in an assembly made up of languages and nations - of participating in a Mass celebrated in the universal sacred language of the Latin Church. It has been replaced bye the so-called international Masses, celebrated so that the parts of the Mass are recited or sung in many languages: in which each group understands only its own!

It had been maintained that no one understood Latin. Now, if the Mass is celebrated in four languages for those present, each group only understands a quarter of it. As the Synod of 2005 on the Eucharist recommended, there should be a return to the Mass in Latin in, at least, one Sunday Mass in cathedrals and parishes.

In the present multi-cultural society, so-called, this could help to recover Catholic participation when congregating with other peoples and nations in the one Church. Oriental Christians, though making room for their national languages, have kept ecclesiastic Greek and Slavic in the most important parts of the liturgy, such as the anaphora and processions with antiphons for the Gospel and the Offertory.

Contributing enormously to establish all this is the old Ordo of the previous Roman Missal [1963 edition by John XXIII), re-established by Benedict XVI with the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum: actually, this traditional Mass said in Latin is the Mass of Gregory the Great since its basic structure dates back to his time, and has remained intact despite the additions and simplifications of Pius V and the other Pontiffs up to John XXIII. The Fathers of Vatican II celebrated it daily without perceiving any opposition to the 'modernization' they were carrying out.

Pope Benedict XVI has posed the problem of liturgical abuses. What is this about?
In fact, the first to lament manipulations in the liturgy was Paul VI, a few years after the publication of his Roman Missal, expressing his concern at the general audience of Aug. 22, 1973. Nevertheless, he was convinced that the liturgical reform carried out after the council had truly carried out the indications of the liturgical constitution (Address to the Sacred College of Cardinals, June 22, 1973).

But the arbitrary experimentation continued and, paradoxically, exacerbated nostalgia for the old rite. In the consistory of June 27, 1977, the Pope admonished the "rebels" for improvisations, banalities, frivolities and profanations, calling on them severely to follow the established norms so as not to compromise the regula fidei, dogma, ecclesiastical discipline, lex credendi and lex orandi.

In 1975, Paul VI observed in the bull Apostolorum Limina convoking the Holy Year, in regard to the liturgical renewal: "We deem it extremely opportune that this work be re-examined and receive new evolutions, so that, based on what has been firmly confirmed by the authority of the Church, one will be able to observe everywhere those that are truly valid and legitimate, and continue their application with even greater zeal, according to the norms and methods counseled by pastoral prudence and by true piety."

Not to mention the denunciations of 'abuses and shadows in the liturgy' by John Paul II on many occasions, in particular in the Letter Vicesimus Quintus Annus, about what had come to pass since the liturgical reform of 1969-1970.

Benedict XVI, therefore, intended to re-examine the question and give new impulse to the liturgy precisely, by opening a window with the motu proprio, so that little by little the air would change and properly put back on track all those elements that had gone beyond the intention and the letter of Vatican II, back into continuity with the whole tradition of the Church.

You have many times affirmed that in a correct liturgy it is necessary to 'respect the rights of God'. Can you explain that?
Liturgy - a term that in Greek indicates the ritual action of a people that celebrates, for example, its feasts, as happened in Athens or as still happens today with the opening of the Olympics or other civil manifestations - is evidently produced by man.

But sacred liturgy cannot be in our image, that is, created by our hands, because then worship would be idolatrous. Sacred liturgy is made by God himself. In the Old Testament, he indicated to Moses and Aaron how to predispose even the least details of how to worship the one true God. In the New Testament, Jesus did the same thing, defending authentic worship by chasing out the merchants from the Temple and giving the Apostles the dispositions for the Paschal meal.
The apostolic tradition received and transmitted the mandate of Jesus Christ.

That is why the liturgy is sacred, as the West says, and divine, as the Eastern churches say, because it was instituted by God. St. Benedict called it opus Dei, the work of God, and nothing must come before it.

It is precisely the mediating function between God and man of Christ's supreme priesthood - exercised in and with the liturgy celebrated by the priest as minister of the Church - attests that liturgy comes down to us from heaven, as Byzantine liturgy has it, from the imagery of the Apocalypse.

It is God himself who established it and who tells us how we must 'worship him in spirit and in truth', namely, in Jesus his Son and in the Holy Spirit. He has the right to be adored as he wants to be.

All this requires profound reflection, because it is forgetting this that is at the root of the abuses and profanations described egregiously in the 2004 Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum
of the Congregation for Divine Worship.

The recovery of the Ius divinum, divine law, in the liturgy, contributes a great deal to respecting it as a sacred thing, as the rubrics prescribe. But even the new features [of the Novus Ordo] must be followed with a spirit of devotion and obedience on the part of the sacred ministers for the edification of the faithful and to aid so many who are seeking God to meet him truly alive in the divine worship of the Church.

Bishops, priests and seminarians should learn once more to execute the sacred rites in that spirit, and thus contribute to the true reform intended by Vatican II, and above all, to revive the faith which, as the Holy Father said in his letter last year to the bishops of the world, is in danger of being extinguished in many parts of the world.

This appeal comes from the website of the Cardinal Van Thuan Observatory established in honor of Vietnamese Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan to promote the social doctrine of the Church on the international level. Cardinal Van Thuan was president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 1994 until he died of cancer in 2002. On the fith anniversary of his death in 2007, the cause for his beatification formally began in Rome.

Van Thuan was Archbishop of Saigon when the former Vietnamese capital fell to the Communists. they captured him and kept him for 13 years - 9 of them in solitary - in an indoctrination camp. He was released in 1988 but kept under house arrest. In 1991 he was allowed to go to Rome but not to return to Vietnam. AFter working for the International Catholic Commission in Geneva, John Paul II named him to head the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and made him a cardinal in 2001. Benedict XVI cited the cardinal's prison experience as an example of Christian hope in the encyclical Spe salvi.


LET US FOLLOW THE POPE
AND PRAY FOR HIM


The opposition to Benedict XVI:
Anti-Popes and a parallel Magisterium
by Mons. Giampaolo Crepaldi
Archbishop of Trieste
March 2010

Archbishop Crepaldi is the president of the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory for the Social Doctrine of the Church.


The effort on the part of the mass media to involve Benedict XVI in the pedophile issue is only the most recent sign of the aversion so many people harbor towards the Holy Father.

We must ask ourselves why this Pope, despite his evangelical meekness and honesty, the clarity of his words and the depth of his thinking and teaching, generates in some circles feelings of rancor and anti-clericalism that one had thought belonged to the past.

Moreover - and this must be said - the astonishment and pain are even greater when those against the Pope, denouncing his presumed errors, are men of the Church, whether theologians, priests or laypersons.

The outlandish and blatantly twisted accusations launched by the theologian Hans Küng against the person of Joseph Ratzinger, theologian, bishop, Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith and now Pontiff, for, in his opinion, having been the direct cause of pedophilia in some priests because of his theology and his teaching, leave us in a state of profound grief.

Perhaps never before has the Church been attacked as it is today. The persecution suffered by the many Christians crucified in the literal sense, and the countless efforts to uproot Christianity in once Christian societies with devastating violence, perpetrated in the areas of lawmaking, education and mores, that ordinary common sense is unable to explain, have now been accompanied for some time by an apparent wave of rage against this Pope, whose providential greatness is there for all to see.

These attacks are amplified by Catholics who do not listen to the Pope, including prelates, priests, theology professors in seminaries, and dissident laypersons.

There are those who may not openly accuse the Holy Father, but muffle his teachings, do not read the documents of his Magisterium, write and speak out in support of exactly the opposite of what he says, launch pastoral and cultural endeavors, for example in the areas of bioethics or ecumenical dialogue, in public opposition to what he teaches. This phenomenon is most serious as well as widespread.

Benedict XVI's teachings on Vatican II are opposed by many Catholics who foster forms of counter-information and a systematic parallel Magisterium led by ‘anti-Popes’.

He teaches “non-negotiable values” that many Catholics minimize or re-interpret, including theologians and renowned commentators who publish articles disputing these values in both the Catholic and the secular press.

He teaches the primacy of the apostolic faith in reading events wisely, while his opponents just keep advocating the primacy of situations, or praxis.

In the face of his teachings on conscience and relativism, his opponents invoke democracy or the Constitution well before the Gospel.

For many it is almost as if he had never written Dominus Iesus, his 2002 Note regarding Catholics in politics, the 2006 Regensburg lecture, and Caritas in Veritate had never been written.

The situation is grave indeed, because this abyss between the faithful who heed the Pope and those who lend him no ear seems to be growing everywhere, even in the diocesan weeklies and institutes of religious sciences.

This results in two very different pastoral approaches, which by now no longer comprehend one another, almost as if they were the expression of two different Churches. And all this gives rise to uncertainty and a sense of bewilderment in many faithful.

In very difficult moments like this, our Observatory wishes to express its filial closeness to Benedict XVI.

Let us pray for the Holy Father and continue to follow him in all fidelity.



And for direct support of the Holy Father, from the same folks that organized the online support campaign last year during the post-Williamson to-do, as Gloria reminded us all in a post earlier today,
sign up at
www.soutienabenoitxvi.com/index.php?lang=uk
Click on 'Formulaire' at the bottom right corner of the letter to access the form.

The New York Times has now unearthed a US case in which they claim Cardinal Ratzinger failed to act against a priest who molested more than 200 boys. Cardinal Bertone is also implicated. This story screams GOTCHA! all over... BTW, Fr.Lombardi was shown the 'charge sheets', in effect, and he had reasonably valid procedural answers, but you won't find him until towards the end of the article.



Warned about abuse,
Vatican failed to defrock priest
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: March 24, 2010


Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the Church, according to Church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit. [According to this story, only one archbishop wrote the Vatican, and that three archbishops pursued no action against the priest for 24 years.]

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope, shows that while Church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the Church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked. [Over decades? The CDF only became the office to deal with such complaints only since 2001!]

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the Church’s own statute of limitations. [If that was the case, then technically there was reason not to proceed with the trial.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. [And is the Church to blame because the police would not listen to the victims?}

Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Milwaukee Archbishop William E. Cousins to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Even as the Pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation.

At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.”

But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.

Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.

As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.

The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office.

[NOT BECAUSE OF INACTION but because triage showed that some charges were not sustainable! Compare the 20% of 3,000 that went to Church trials from the CDF, to the 9.1% that ended up being charged among 4,392 priests denounced to the US police and investigated between 1950-2002.]

An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.

To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1960 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.

Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.

“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”

Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral.

Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”

In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After three days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.

However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the Church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at the doctrinal office.

With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger [Cardinal Bertone's response in 1996 ordering a canonical trial for Murphy was the response!], Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office [What Vatican office?] in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and “true scandal in the future seems very possible.”

Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.

But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.

In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to convince Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy.

(In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.) [Great! An archbishop who was secretly carrying on a homosexual affair/affairs was trying to move heaven and earth to defrock a pedophile priest!]

Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.”

Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.

“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the Church.”



I believe this time, Cardinal Bertone will finally have to come out of that bunker to which he conveniently beats a retreat everytime the Pope is besieged, in order to straighten out these allegations since they involve him personally! THE SOONER THE BETTER, PLEASE!!!


BTW, the Times ran an accompanying editorial shot through as usual with false information and arrant prejudice. I've posted in TOXIC WASTE....Meanwhile, the Times muckrakers are still exercising their snouts in Munich where they dumped a load today on Fr. H, but seem not to have uncovered anything 'new' that they an pin Joseph Ratzinger.



Prosecutors may charge priest in sex abuse
New York Times News Service
March 24, 2010

MUNICH — The fallout from the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church settled across Europe on Wednesday, as prosecutors said they were weighing criminal charges against a priest suspected of molesting children in Germany, and Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of a bishop accused of mishandling allegations of abuse in Ireland.

The possibility of criminal charges emerged from new accusations against a priest at the center of the child-molesting scandal rocking the church in Germany.

On Wednesday, church officials in Munich said the priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann — whose transfer in 1980 to an archdiocese led at the time by Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, has drawn the Pope himself into the nation's child abuse controversy — had been accused of molesting a minor as recently as 1998.

The latest revelation comes as Church officials in northern Germany say they have "credible evidence" of at least two other cases of sexual abuse committed by Hullermann in the 1970s, adding to a trail of accusations that suggest a pattern of abuse over two decades.

During that time, Church officials repeatedly transferred Hullermann to new parishes and allowed him to work with children, even after a 1986 conviction for sexually abusing boys.

Hullermann has not returned repeated calls to his cell phone and hung up without comment when reached briefly on Wednesday.

In Ireland, Bishop John Magee, whose resignation was accepted by the pope on Wednesday, issued a statement of apology. In December 2008, an investigation by a church panel into allegations in Cloyne, in southern Ireland, found that Magee had failed to respond to accusations of abuse and that policies to protect children were severely lacking, setting off calls for his resignation.

"As I depart, I want to offer once again my sincere apologies," said Magee, who had served as private secretary to three popes. He added, "To those whom I have failed in any way, or through any omission of mine have made suffer, I beg forgiveness and pardon."

Magee's was the first resignation the Pope accepted since issuing a long-awaited letter to Irish Catholics last weekend apologizing to victims of sexual abuse and expressing "shame and remorse."

Yet Benedict's letter did not call for any Church leaders to be disciplined, feeding a growing sense of anger in Ireland. Many Catholics there are demanding that the leader of the Irish church, Cardinal Sean Brady, resign over his role as a young priest in the 1970s in urging two children to sign secrecy agreements and not to report abuse.

Benedict's letter followed two scathing Irish government reports last year, revealing decades of sexual abuse of hundreds of thousands of Irish children [How did 35,000 (victims in charity schools and institutions, Ryan Report) plus 400 (victims of diocesan priests, Murphhy Report) add up to hundreds of thousands????] and a widespread cover-up of the problem. The findings have shaken the Irish cCurch to its core; some fear it has lost a generation to the crisis.

Magee's resignation was accompanied a steady drumbeat for more Church leaders to step down. Beyond Magee, four other Irish bishops implicated in the government reports for failing to protect children have offered to resign, but Benedict has accepted only one's offer.

Nor has Benedict addressed the German scandal directly. So far, no cases have emerged from the two-year period [It wasn't two years, it was 13 months!] when Hullermann worked at St. John the Baptist Church in Munich while Benedict was archbishop.

But accusations have now surfaced at every other stop between Hullermann's ordination in 1973 and his criminal conviction in 1986, and during a later assignment in 1998. [Meaning they're still hoping accusations will turn up during those 13 months when Cardinal Ratzinger was Archbishop.]



Today, March 25, is the fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Via Crucis in 2005 for which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote the Meditations and Prayers, in which he famously said:

"How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him!"

This is from a column in the conservative Spanish daily newspaper ABC, written by Gabriel Albiac (born 1950), a Spanish philosopher and essayist who has also worked for most of Spain's largest newspapers. He called himself a heterodox Marxist who thinks that real socialism is simply a cover for totalitarianism. He crusades against globalization and is a staunch supporter of Israel and admirer of Jewish culture, believing that anti-Zionism is the modern face of anti-Semitism.



Ratzinger faces the monsters
by GABRIEL ALBIAC
Translated from

March 24, 2010


"We have rejected everything that the beast wanted from us". Andre Malraux said on human grandeur, of the animal who knows he is just an inch away from being a monster and desperately battles himself in order not to become one.

Malraux came to mind as I was reading the latest text of one of the great European intellectuals today and one of its few wise men: Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope, but who was no less great as a theologian since his years as a professor in the 1950s.

It is not necessary to believe in anything, except in intelligence, in order to appreciate the conceptual elegance of Benedict XVI's thought. One could even say it was simpler.

The pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland on March 19 is a treatise on monsters. Replete with wisdom. And mercy. They are one and the same.

Who does not remember the suffering of Frankenstein's monster in James Whales's wondrous film: "I am bad because I suffer". I am a monster because I suffer, or am I a monster because I am human?

Monsters are the sign of what is most hidden in the human heart: Malraux called the soul "the monster of dreams". A sign of what is most obscure. And also, of that which horrifies us most because we know it is part of the human which no can bear to see.

And before which we say we are shocked, because it is too difficult to confront the shame in wait for all those who refuse to do battle with it.

Sexual abuse of minors - which is the subject of Ratzinger's sorrowful letter to the Irish - is one of the most universal of the horrors that nest within the human unconscious. We have known, since Freud, the extent to which that nightmare - as threat or as reality - accompanies childhood terrors.

Also since Freud, we have known how difficult it is to separate nightmare from the waking state for them. And the incurable amputations it leaves in the soul of the adult, whether the adult is conscious of it or not.

The old master Lous Althusser described elegiacally almost half a century ago, that cureless pain of the adult, 'survivor of the only war that has no memories nor memorials', who only lives off the wounds that for better or worse, he managed to resist.

Benedict ZVI, who as Pope, writes to the flock entrusted to him, writes with all the knowledge of Ratzinger. He does not hide the worst: that the rupture of the soul that aggression towards children imposes never heals when they become adults. And that spiritual consolation does not exempt from justice.

"You have betrayed," he tells the priest violators, "the trust that was placed in you by innocent young people and their parents, and you must answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals."

God pardons, the Vicar of Christ must necessarily say. But the law of men does not. That is how it ought to be. Those are the rules of the game that distinguish the divine from the human. To transgress them is to make the crime worse.

"There was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations", the Pontiff says. "But now the law must prevail. And the Church must pay the price for not having been more vigilant over its pastors.

It is hard to accept that fault. And admirable that a Pope dares to say so: "We have all been suffering the consequences of the sins of our brothers who betrayed a sacred obligation or failed denunciations of abuse in a correct and responsible way".

And in assuming that collective blame, Benedict XVI perseveres in the theological rigor of Ratzinger. Admirable. Even for the non-believer. Rather, for him, above all.

Thursday, March 25
FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION

The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, 1437; Botticelli, 1489; Raphael, 1501
'FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA!...ET VERBUM CARO FACTUS EST'


OR today.

Illustration: The Annunciation, from a 13th-cent. Syriac Evangelarium.
Speaking of Albertus Magnus at the General Audience, the Pope reiterates
that there is no opposition between science and faith:
'Nature is a book written by God'
The other papal story in this issue is the Pope's message to the X International Youth Forum meeting in Rocca di Papa this week. Featured essay is on the Annunciation in the Syro-Occidental tradition. Other Page 1 stories: Obama-Netanyahu meeting inconclusive - Israel will not stop construction in east Jerusalem; the UK expels the Mossad country chief for his role in the operation that led to the killing of a Hamas leader in Dubai, in which Israeli agents used fake British passports to enter Dubai; India plans a trillion dollars in public spending in 2012-2017 to step up its growth rate, projected at 8.6% this year. In the inside pages, a story on a symposium this week marking 40 years of the Novus Ordo and 440 years of the Pius V Mass (the original 'Tridentine' Mass).



THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met today with

- Card. Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, of the Schönstatt Fathers, Archbishop of Santiago (Chile), with
Mons. Alejandro Goić Karmelić, Bishop of Rancagua, and President of the Bishops' Conference of Chile

- Bishops of Norway and Sweden on ad-limina visit
Mons. Markus Bernt Eidsvig, C.R.S.A., Bishop of Oslo (Norway) and Apostolic Administrator of Trondheim
territorial prelature, on ad limina visit. Later, he addressed all visiting Scandinavian bishops as a group.
Address in English.

The Vatican adds that yesterday, the Pope met with

- Cardinal Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice


MEETING WITH THE YOUTH
OF ROME AND LAZIO

At 8:30 this evening, the Holy Father Benedict XVI will me meeting the youth of Rome and Lazio at St. Peter's Square in preparation for World Youth Day to be celebrated next Sunday, Palm Sunday, on the diocesan level.

The Pope's arrival will be preceded by a program of celebration and reflection starting at 7 p.m. under the auspices of the diocesan service for the pastoral ministry to young people.


Today, the Vatican also released:

- The official schedule for the Pope's visit to Portugal in May.

- The Pope's Message for the 84th World Missions Day on Oct. 24



Vatican Archive documents on Pius XII
and World War II now online



Texts that until now have only been available in hard copy in libraries are now accessible at the Official Site of the Holy See www.vatican.va, in the "Resource Library" section.

Entire collections of the Actae Sanctae Sedis (A.S.S.) and of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (A.A.S.) - i.e., the official Acts of the Holy See from 1865 to 2007 - are available in pdf format, as is the twelve-volume collection of the Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, published by order of Paul VI starting in 1965, and edited by a specialised group of four Jesuit historians.

These texts represent a documentary resource of inestimable value that is now at the disposal of scholars and all interested persons, free of charge. It is a great contribution to research and information on the history and activities of the Holy See.

This project was made possible through the US-based Pave the Way Foundation headed by Gary Krupp, an American Jew.

Magister's title for the following piece is 'Genesis of a crime", but I think that is wrong and misleading and have modified it accordingly. It is the crisis resulting from the crime that the 1960s counterculture helped bring about in no small measure, not the crime itself which is as old as human history.

Similarly, I think equal emphasis should be given to the concurrent phenomenon represented by the progressivists' misinterpretation of Vatican II as parallel and analogous to the secular counterculture that dominated from the 1960s on.

In his otherwise excellent reception of the Pope's Letter to the Irish, Marco Politi, who is an outspoken advocate of the progressivist view of Vatican II, contested the Pope's citation of it (article translated and posted on this thread in the preceding page.


Genesis of a crisis:
The 1960s 'cultural revolution'

Pedophilia has always been there, but its incidence among priests
was magnified by the counterculture's sexual revolution.
Benedict XVI cites this in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland.
Two cardinals and a sociologist comment.



ROME, March 25, 2010 – Law and grace. Where earthly justice does not reach, the hand of God can. With his letter dated March 19, Benedict XVI has given the Catholics of Ireland an order never before given by a Pope of the modern era to an entire national Church.

He told them not only to bring the guilty before the canonical and civil courts, but to put themselves collectively in a state of penance and purification. And not in the privacy of their consciences, but in a public form, before the eyes of all, even of their most implacable and mocking adversaries.

Fasting, prayer, reading the Bible, and works of charity on all the Fridays from now until Easter of next year. Frequent sacramental confession. Continual adoration of Jesus – " himself a victim of injustice and sin" – present in the sacred host, exposed on the altars of the churches.

And for all the bishops, priests, and religious, without exception, a special period of "mission," a long and strict course of spiritual exercises for a radical review of life.

It's a daring step by Pope Benedict. Because not even the prophet Jonah believed any longer that God would forgive Nineveh its sins, in spite of the penitential ashes and sackcloth worn by all, from the king to the lowliest beast of burden. [Ah, but that was before the Son of God came to man and preached his Gospel of love and forgiveness!]

And today as well, many conclude that the Church remains irremediably under condemnation, even after the letter in which the Pope himself expresses shame and remorse for the abomination committed against children by some priests, with the culpable negligence of some bishops.

And yet God's forgiveness descended even upon Nineveh, and the skeptical Jonah had to face this fact, and Michelangelo painted this very prophet at the top of the wall behind the altar in the Sistine Chapel, to show that God's forgiveness is the key to everything, from the creation of the world to the last judgment.

On Sunday, March 21, while his letter was being read in the churches of Ireland, Benedict XVI commented to the faithful, at the Angelus in St. Peter's Square, on Jesus' forgiveness of the adulterous woman: "He knows what is in the heart of every man, he wants to condemn sin, but to save the sinner and unmask hypocrisy." The hypocrisy of those who wanted to stone the woman, even though they were the first to sin.

Ruthless with sin, "beginning with our own," and merciful towards persons: This is the lesson that Joseph Ratzinger wants to apply to the case of Ireland, and, by extension, to the entire Church.

On the one hand, the rigors of the law. The price of justice must be paid to the last penny. The dioceses, the seminaries, the religious congregations in which the abuse was allowed to run free have been warned: Apostolic visitors will come from the Vatican to uncover what they have done, and even where there is nothing that can be prosecuted under civil law, canonical discipline will punish the negligent.

But at the same time, the Pope is kindling the light of grace. He points to the door of God's forgiveness even to those guilty of the worst abominations, if they sincerely repent.

As for the foremost accusers, those most armed with stones to throw at the Church, none of them is without sin. It is a stretch for those who exalt sexuality as a pure instinct, free from any constraint, to object when it is abused.

The tragedy of some priests and religious, Benedict XVI wrote in the letter, was in part that they gave in to these widespread "ways of thinking," to the point of justifying the unjustifiable.

A lapse that certainly cannot be attributed to Ratzinger as bishop and Pope, not even by his staunchest adversaries, if they are sincere.
_______________

The commentary reproduced above is published in L'espresso no. 13, 2010, on newsstands March 26.

At the end, the commentary makes reference to Section 4 of Benedict XVI's letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

It is the section in which the Pope looks at the factors that fostered, in the 1960's, the expansion of sexual abuse among the clergy, and above all the incomprehension of its gravity.

---

BENEDICT XVI:
From the PASTORAL LETTER TO THE CATHOLICS OF IRELAND

4. In recent decades, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society.

Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected.

Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel.

The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it.

In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations.

It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings.

Only by examining carefully the many elements that gave rise to the present crisis can a clear-sighted diagnosis of its causes be undertaken and effective remedies be found.

Certainly, among the contributing factors we can include:
- inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life;
- insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates;
- a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures; and
- a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties and to safeguard the dignity of every person.

Urgent action is needed to address these factors, which have had such tragic consequences in the lives of victims and their families, and have obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing."

---

Independently of the Pope's letter, two cardinals and a sociologist of religion commented earlier on the contributory effect of cultural factors to the pedophilia 'boom'.

THE COMMENTARY OF CARDINAL BAGNASCO

The first of the two cardinals is Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa and president of the Italian bishops' conference.

On Monday, March 22, in the opening address with which he introduced the work of the permanent council of the CEI, Bagnasco concluded as follows the passage dedicated to the Pope's letter to the Catholics of Ireland:

---

From various sides, and not only Catholic, it is being revealed how for some time the phenomenon of pedophilia appears to have been tragically widespread in different environments and among various categories of persons: but this, far from being evoked here in order to diminish or relativize the precise gravity of the actions disclosed in the ecclesiastical sphere, is rather a warning to grasp the objective scope of the tragedy.

At the very moment in which she feels humiliation, the Church learns from the Pope not to be afraid of the truth, even when this is painful and detestable, not to silence it or to cover it up. This, however, does not mean enduring any strategies to bring general discredit on the Church.

In reality, we must all question ourselves, without any more alibis, about a culture that in our time reigns pampered and uncontested, and tends progressively to fray the connective tissue of society as a whole, perhaps even mocking those who resist and try to oppose it: the attitude, that is, of those who cultivate absolute autonomy from the criteria of moral judgment and convey as good and alluring behaviors that are designed according to individual desires and even unbridled instincts.

But the exaggeration of sexuality disconnected from its anthropological significance, all-encompassing hedonism, and a relativism that does not admit limits or exceptions, do great harm, because they are specious and sometimes so pervasive as to escape notice.

It is fitting, then, that we should all return to calling things by their names always and everywhere, to identifying evil in its progressive gravity and in the multiplicity of its manifestations, in order to avoid finding ourselves in time facing the claim of an aberration defended on the level of principle.

---

NB: This thread a pretty good story by AGI's Salvatore Izzo on the preceding page, reporting Cardinal Bagnasco's treatment of the subject in his opening address to the CEI Permanent Council meeting.

THE COMMENTARY OF CARDINAL RUINI

The second cardinal is Camillo Ruini, president of the committee for the cultural project of the Italian Church, Bagnasco's predecessor as president of the CEI, and the Pope's vicar for the diocese of Rome from 1991 to 2008.

In an interview with the newspaper Il Foglio on March 16, a few days before the Pope published his letter, Ruini said among other things:

---

In my view, the defamation campaign against the Catholic Church and the {ope deployed by the media is part of a strategy that has been under way for centuries, and which Friedrich Nietzsche elaborated with his flair for detail.

According to Nietzsche, the decisive attack on Christianity cannot be brought on the level of truth, but on that of Christian ethics, which he saw as the enemy of the joy of living.

And so I would like to ask those who decry scandals of pedophilia mostly when they involve the Catholic Church, perhaps bringing into question priestly celibacy: would it not be more honest and realistic to recognize that certainly these and other deviations related to sexuality accompany the entire history of the human race, but also that in our time these deviations are further stimulated by the much ballyhooed 'sexual liberation'?...

When the exaltation of sexuality pervades every part of life and when autonomy from any moral criterion is claimed for the sexual instinct, it becomes difficult to explain that certain abuses are absolutely to be condemned.

In reality, human sexuality from the start is not simply instinctual, it is not the same as that of the other animals. It is, like all of man, a sexuality 'mixed' with reason and morality, which can be lived humanly, and truly bring happiness, only if it is lived in this way.

---

NB: The Foglio article on Cardinal Ruini was translated in full and posted on this thread on March 17.


THE COMMENTARY OF PROFESSOR INTROVIGNE

The sociologist is Professor Massimo Introvigne, president of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religion. In a commentary that appeared on March 22 in the Italian edition of the international agency "Zenit," Introvigne wrote among other things:

---

What the English and the Americans call 'the Sixties', and the Italians, concentrating on the emblematic year of 1968, "il Sessantotto', increasingly appears as a time of profound disturbance of customs, with crucial and lasting effects on religion.

There was, moreover, a Sessantotto in society and also a Sessantotto in the Church: 1968 is itself the year of public dissent against the encyclical Humanae Vitae of Paul VI, a dispute that according to a valuable and influential study by the recently deceased American philosopher Ralph McInerny, What Went Wrong with Vatican II, represents a point of no return in the crisis of the principle of authority in the Catholic Church. [...]

But why the 1960's? On this topic, in 2007 Hugh McLeod published an important volume with Oxford University Press, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, which takes stock of the discussions in progress.

Two theses are pitted against each other: that of Alan Gilbert, according to whom the revolution of the 1960's was the economic boom, which spread consumerism and drove people away from the churches, and that of Callum Brown, according to whom the decisive factor was the emancipation of women after the spread of feminist ideology, of divorce, of the birth control pill, and of abortion.

McLeod thinks, correctly in my opinion, that a single factor cannot explain a revolution of this magnitude. The economic boom and feminism play a part, but also more strictly cultural aspects both outside the Churches and Christian communities (the encounter between psychoanalysis and Marxism) and inside them (the 'new theologies').

Without entering into the more technical elements of this discussion, Benedict XVI in his letter shows that he is aware of the fact that there was in the 1960's an authentic revolution – no less important than the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution – that was 'fast-paced' and dealt a tremendous blow to 'traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values'. [...]

In the Catholic Church, there was not at once a sufficient awareness of the scope of this revolution. On the contrary, it infected – Benedict XVI maintains today – 'also priests and religious', created misunderstandings in the interpretation of the Council, and caused 'insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates'.

In this climate, certainly not all priests who were insufficiently formed or infected by the climate following the 1960's, and not even a significant percentage of them, became pedophiles: we know from the statistics that the real number of priest pedophiles is much lower than the ones presented by certain media outlets.

And yet this number is not equal to zero – as we would all want – and justifies the extremely severe words of the Pope. But the study of the revolution of the 1960's, and of 1968, is crucial to understanding what happened afterward, including pedophilia. And to finding real remedies.

If this revolution, unlike those before it, is moral and spiritual and touches the interiority of man, it is only from the restoration of morality, of the spiritual life and of comprehensive truth about the human person that the remedies can ultimately come.

But for this reason the sociologists, as always, are not enough: there is a need for fathers and masters, teachers and saints. And we all have a great need for the Pope: for this Pope, who once again – to borrow the title of his latest encyclical – speaks the truth in charity and practices charity in truth.

---

I did mention in previous days I have been unable to translate a couple of contributions by Prof. Introvigne. Two of them were specifically on the fallacy of a cause-and-effect relationship between priestly celibacy and pedophilia in priests.

I decided to push this post down from where it was originally (before the 3/25/10 'almanac' entry), because there are running developments on it...


Apparently, the New York Times was far from being fair in its 'presentation' of the response from Fr. Lombardi to their March 24 story, because the Vatican has released the full statement that he gave them in reply to their Milwaukee 'bombshell', much of which they failed to use in their story! How differently the story reads with the dates and facts as stated from the part of the CDF!

VATICAN STATEMENT ON
NEW YORK TIMES ALLEGATIONS

March 25, 2010

---

The following is the full text of the statement given to the New York Times on March 24, 2010:

The tragic case of Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, involved particularly vulnerable victims who suffered terribly from what he did. By sexually abusing children who were hearing-impaired, Father Murphy violated the law and, more importantly, the sacred trust that his victims had placed in him.

During the mid-1970s, some of Father Murphy’s victims reported his abuse to civil authorities, who investigated him at that time; however, according to news reports, that investigation was dropped. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not informed of the matter until some twenty years later. [1996]

It has been suggested that a relationship exists between the application of Crimen sollicitationis and the non-reporting of child abuse to civil authorities in this case. In fact, there is no such relationship. Indeed, contrary to some statements that have circulated in the press, neither Crimen nor the Code of Canon Law ever prohibited the reporting of child abuse to law enforcement authorities.

In the late 1990s, after over two decades had passed since the abuse had been reported to diocesan officials and the police, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was presented for the first time with the question of how to treat the Murphy case canonically.

The Congregation was informed of the matter because it involved solicitation in the confessional, which is a violation of the Sacrament of Penance. It is important to note that the canonical question presented to the Congregation was unrelated to any potential civil or criminal proceedings against Father Murphy.

In such cases, the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties, but recommends that a judgment be made not excluding even the greatest ecclesiastical penalty of dismissal from the clerical state (cf. Canon 1395, no. 2).

In light of the facts that Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith suggested that the Archbishop of Milwaukee give consideration to addressing the situation by, for example, restricting Father Murphy’s public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts.

Father Murphy died approximately four months later, without further incident.

---

In his blog today, Andrea Tornielli comments on the New York Times's 'Milwaukee operation" against the Pope:


From the USA, stale poison
against the Pope and Bertone
Translated from

March 25, 2010


The New York Times has published a lengthy article on teh case of Fr. Lawrence C. Murphy, a priest in the diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who worked from 1950-1977 in a school for deaf and deaf-mutes, and who had molested some 200 of them in the confessional.

It is a particularly tragic case because his victims were physically unable to recount their experiences. In the 1970s, the families of some victims nonetheless managed to file criminal complaints which were dropped after police investigation.

No one ever informed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about this. Then in July 1996, the then Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF to tell him about Fr. Murphy.

In March 1997, Mons. Tarcisio Bertone, who was then Cardinal Ratzinger's #2 man at the CDF. gave instructions to the diocese to start a canonical trial against Murphy.

But in January 1998, Murphy wrote directly to Cardinal Ratzinger to say he was seriously ill, that he had repented, and that he wished to live the little time left to him as a priest. In fact, he died four months later.

As Fr. Lombardi said in his statement to the Times, because of Murphy's state of health, and especially because there had been no complaints against him in the 20 years since the 1970s charges, the Vatican suggested - after a meeting between Bertone and Murphy's bishop - that the priest be isolated and restricted from exercising his priestly ministry.

It was a similar case to the CDF's disposition in the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who was spared a canonical trial because of his age and state of health, but ordered by the Pope to live in retirement, penitence and prayer for the rest of his life. He died less than two years after the penalty was imposed.

The New York Times has placed online the documents relative to the case filed by attorneys for some of the victims against the Diocese of Milwaukee.

Some points to underscore:

1. No one from the Vatican ever prohibited reporting to civilian authorities nor even suggested doing so. The cases investigated by the police were dropped after investigation.

2. Although the events charged against Fr. Murphy took place in the 1970s or earlier, the CDF was first informed about it only in 1996. [Twenty years after the facts, both the civil and canonical statute of limitations would have long run out!]

Yet, Bertone later met at the Vatican with Murphy's bishop to discuss the case.

3. The case was not 'buried' at all.


The Times knew exactly what it was doing. It does not matter that it was blatantly misrepresenting the case to make it look like Cardinal Ratzinger showed unwarranted tolerance for Fr. Murphy's case, and that it was careful to make its first headline say 'Vatican fails to defrock priest', i.e., that is their principal accusation, which happens to be technically true.

The important thing was to sow a poison pellet in the minds of its readers, many of whom will only remember the headline and what they first read about it, and few of whom will bother to go to the documents that the Times has posted online to check for themselves.

Look at the first headlines already:


The media objective is still to 'get' Joseph Ratzinger, one way or the other,
in the US or in Germany, by fair means or foul, and mostly foul so far!


Question: Why was Archbishop Weakland on a 'crusade' against Fr. Murphy particularly, 20 years after the cases against him, if we take the Vatican account (which has no reason to lie!).


Avvenire online has now presented a summary of the facts in this case based on the documents that the Times placed online, and makes it clear that the Times reporting was clearly biased and tendentious, and nothing in it shows any questionable action on the part of the CDF in this case.

The dependable Massimo Introvigne has also written a rebuttal story to the Times and posted it on Facebook....

I won't be able to translate anything until tonight, though. My day job calls...

Pope Benedict XVI addresses
the bishops of Scandinavia

March 25, 2010




At noon today, the Holy Father met with the bishops of the Scandinavian Episcopal Conference, on ad limina visit to Rome, with whom he had earlier met separately and addressed them in English.

---

Dear Brother Bishops,

I welcome you to Rome on the occasion of your visit "to the threshold of the Apostles" and I thank Bishop Arborelius for the words he has addressed to me on your behalf.

You exercise pastoral governance over the Catholic faithful in the far north of Europe and you have travelled here to express and renew the bonds of communion between the people of God in those lands and the Successor of Peter at the heart of the universal Church.

Your flock is small in number, and scattered over a wide area. Many have to travel great distances in order to find a Catholic community in which to worship. It is most important for them to realize that every time they gather around the altar for the Eucharistic sacrifice, they are participating in an act of the universal Church, in communion with all their fellow Catholics throughout the world. It is this communion that is both exercised and deepened through the quinquennial visits of bishops to the Apostolic See.

I am pleased to note that a Congress on the Family is due to be held at Jönköping in May of this year. One of the most important messages that the people of the Nordic lands need to hear from you is a reminder of the centrality of the family for the life of a healthy society.

Sadly, recent years have seen a weakening of the commitment to the institution of marriage and the Christian understanding of human sexuality that for so long served as the foundation of personal and social relations in European society.

Children have the right to be conceived and carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage: it is through the secure and recognized relationship to their own parents that they can discover their identity and achieve their proper human development (cf. Donum Vitae, 22 February 1987).

In societies with a noble tradition of defending the rights of all their members, one would expect this fundamental right of children to be given priority over any supposed right of adults to impose on them alternative models of family life and certainly over any supposed right to abortion.

Since the family is "the first and indispensable teacher of peace" (Message for the 2008 World Day of Peace), the most reliable promoter of social cohesion and the best school of the virtues of good citizenship, it is in the interests of all, and especially of governments, to defend and promote stable family life.

While the Catholic population of your territories constitutes only a small percentage of the total, it is nevertheless growing, and at the same time a good number of others listen with respect and attention to what the Church has to say.

In the Nordic lands, religion has an important role in shaping public opinion and influencing decisions on matters concerning the common good. I urge you, therefore, to continue to convey to the people of your respective countries the Church’s teaching on social and ethical questions, as you do through such initiatives as your 2005 pastoral letter "The Love of Life" and the forthcoming Congress on the Family.

The establishment of the Newman Institute in Uppsala is a most welcome development in this regard, ensuring that Catholic teaching is given its rightful place in the Scandinavian academic world, while also helping new generations to acquire a mature and informed understanding of their faith.

Within your own flock, pastoral care of families and young people needs to be pursued with vigour, and with particular care for the many who have experienced difficulties in the wake of the recent financial crisis.

Due sensitivity should be shown to the many married couples in which only one partner is Catholic.

The immigrant component among the Catholic population of the Nordic lands has needs of its own, and it is important that your pastoral outreach to families should include them, with a view to assisting their integration into society.

Your countries have been particularly generous to refugees from the Middle East, many of whom are Christians from Eastern Churches. For your part, as you welcome "the stranger who sojourns with you" (Lev 19:34), be sure to help these new members of your community to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the faith through apposite programmes of catechesis – in the process of integration within their host country, they should be encouraged not to distance themselves from the most precious elements of their own culture, particularly their faith.

In this Year for Priests, I ask you to give particular priority to encouraging and supporting your priests, who often have to work in isolation from one another and in difficult circumstances in order to bring the sacraments to the people of God.

As you know, I have proposed the figure of Saint John Vianney to all the priests of the world as a source of inspiration and intercession in this year devoted to exploring more deeply the meaning and indispensable role of the priesthood in the Church’s life.

He expended himself tirelessly in order to be a channel of God’s healing and sanctifying grace to the people he served, and all priests are called to do likewise: it is your responsibility, as their Ordinaries, to see that they are well prepared for this sacred task. Ensure too that the lay faithful appreciate what their priests do for them, and that they offer them the encouragement and the spiritual, moral and material support that they need.

I would like to pay tribute to the enormous contribution that men and women religious have made to the life of the Church in your countries over many years.

The Nordic lands are also blessed with the presence of a number of the new ecclesial movements, which bring fresh dynamism to the Church’s mission. In view of this wide variety of charisms, there are many ways in which young people may be attracted to devote their lives to the service of the Church through a priestly or religious vocation.

As you carry out your responsibility to foster such vocations (cf. Christus Dominus, 15), be sure to address yourselves to both the native and the immigrant populations. From the heart of any healthy Catholic community, the Lord always calls men and women to serve him in this way.

The fact that more and more of you, the Bishops of the Nordic lands, originate from the countries in which you serve is a clear sign that the Holy Spirit is at work among the Catholic communities there. I pray that his inspiration will continue to bear fruit among you and those to whom you have dedicated your lives.

With great confidence in the life-giving power of the Gospel, commit your energies to promoting a new evangelization among the people of your territories.

Part and parcel of this task is continued attention to ecumenical activity, and I am pleased to note the numerous tasks in which Christians from the Nordic lands come together to present a united witness before the world.

With these sentiments, I commend all of you and your people to the intercession of the Nordic saints, especially Saint Bridget, co-patron of Europe, and I gladly impart my Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of strength and peace in the Lord.

---

I want to be sure I post the other papal news today - the easier ones to post - before proceeding to a translation of, at least, 1) Avvenire's summary of the Fr. Murphy case based on documents placed online by the New York Times and 2) a commentary in tomorrow's issue of the OR.

The Vatican Press Office released today the final program for the Holy Father's coming visit to Portugal.

---

APOSTOLIC VISIT OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

TO PORTUGAL

ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEATIFICATION OF

JACINTA AND FRANCISCO, THE SHEPHERD VISIONARIES OF FATIMA

May 11-14, 2010

P R O G R A M


Tuesday, May 11

ROME

08:50 - Leave Da Vinci international airport for Lisbon

LISBON

11:00 – Arrival at Portela international airport.
OFFICIAL WELCOME
- Address by the Holy Father.

12:45 - WELCOME CEREMONY, Monastery of Jeronimos
- Brief tour of the Monastery

13:30 - COURTESY VISIT to President Aníbal Cavaco Silva
Palacio de Belem

18:15 - HOLY MASS at Terreiro do Paço
- Homily
- Commemorative message on the 50th anniversary of the
Shrine of Christ the King in Almada


Wednesday, May 12

LISBON

07:30 - Private Mass at the Apostolic Nunciature, Lisbon

10:00 – MEETING WITH THE WORLD OF CULTURE, Centro Cultural de Belém
- Address by the Holy Father.

12:00 - MEETING WITH THE PRIME MINISTER, Apostolic Nunciature

15:45 - Leave the Nunciature for he International Airport

16:40 - Depart by helicopter for Fatima


FATIMA

17:10 - Arrive at Fatima Municipal Stadium

17:30 - VISIT TO THE CHAPEL OF APPARITIONS, Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima
- Prayer by the Holy Father

18:00 – VESPERS with priests, religious, seminarians and deacons,
Church of the Holy Trinity
- Address by the Holy Father

21:30 - BLESSING OF CANDLES for traditional candlelight procession
Esplanade of the Shrine of Our Lady
- Address by the Holy Father

RECITATION OF THE ROSARY, Chapel of Apparitions


Thursday, May 13

FATIMA

10:00 – HOLY MASS commemorating the anniversary of the Marian apparitions in 1917, Esplanade
- Homily by the Holy Father
- Multilingual greetings by the Holy Father

13:00 - Lunch with the Bishops of Portugal, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel House

17:00 - MEETING WITH MEMBERS OF PASTORAL AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS,
Church of the Holy Trinity
- Address by the Holy Father

18:45 – MEETING WITH THE BISHOPS OF PORTUGAL, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel House
- Address by the Holy Father


Friday, May 14

FATIMA

08:00 – Leave Our Lady of Mt. Carmel House

08:40 - Depart Fatima by helicopter for Porto.

PORTO

09:30 - Arrive at the Serra do Pilar heliport, Gaia district

10:15 – HOLY MASS at Avenida dos Aliados.
- Homily

13:30 – DEPARTURE CEREMONY, Porto international airport
- Address by the Holy Father

14:00 – Depart for Rome on TAP, the Portuguese national airline

ROME

18:00 - Arrive at Ciampino airport

Portugal is one hour ahead of Rome.

---

By Phil Lawler | March 25, 2010

Today's front-page story in the New York Times suggests that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), under the direction of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, failed to act against a Wisconsin priest who was accused of molesting scores of boys at a school for the deaf.

Is the story damaging? Yes. Should the Vatican have acted faster? Yes. Should the accused priest have been laicized? In all probability, Yes again.

Nevertheless, before assigning all blame to the Vatican, consider these factors:

1. The allegations of abuse by Father Lawrence Murphy began in 1955 and continued in 1974, according to the Times account. The Vatican was first notified in 1996: 40 years after Church officials in Wisconsin were first made aware of the problem. Local Church leaders could have taken action in the 1950s. They didn't.

2. The Vatican, following the standard procedures required by canon law, kept its own inquiries confidential. But the CDF never barred other investigations. Local Church officials could have given police all the information they had about the allegations against Murphy. Indeed they could have informed police 40 years earlier. They didn't.

3. Milwaukee's Archbishop Cousins could have suspended Father Murphy from priestly ministry in 1974, when he was evidently convinced that the priest was guilty of gross misconduct. He didn't. Instead he transferred the predator priest to a new diocese, allowing him to continue pastoral work giving him access to other innocent young people. And as if that weren't enough, later Archbishop Weakland made sure that there was no "paper trail." There was certainly a cover-up in this case. It was in Milwaukee, not in Rome.

4. Having called the Vatican's attention to Murphy's case, Archbishop Weakland apparently wanted an immediate response, and was unhappy that the CDF took 8 months to respond. But again, the Milwaukee archdiocese had waited decades to take this action. Because the Milwaukee archdiocese had waited so long to take action, the canonical statute of limitations had become an important factor in the Vatican's decision to advise against an ecclesiastical trial.

5. In a plea for mercy addressed to Cardinal Ratzinger, Father Murphy said that he had repented his misdeeds, was guilty of no recent misconduct, and was in failing health. Earlier this month Msgr. Charles Scicluna, the chief Vatican prosecutor in sex-abuse cases, explained that in many cases involving elderly or ailing priests, the CDF chooses to forego a full canonical trial, instead ordering the priest to remove himself from public ministry and devote his remaining days to penance and prayer. This was, in effect, the final result of the Vatican's inquiry in this case; Father Murphy died just months later.

6. The correspondence makes it clear that Archbishop Weakland took action not because he wanted to protect the public from an abusive priest, but because he wanted to avoid the huge public outcry that he predicted would emerge if Murphy was not disciplined. In 1996, when the archbishop made that prediction, the public outcry would--and should--have been focused on the Milwaukee archdiocese, if it had materialized. Now, 14 years later, a much more intense public outcry is focused on the Vatican. The anger is justifiable, but it is misdirected.

This is a story about the abject failure of the Milwaukee archdiocese to discipline a dangerous priest, and the tardy effort by Archbishop Weakland--who would soon become the subject of a major scandal himself--to shift responsibility to Rome.

www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=629

By Damian Thompson March 25th, 2010

In the early 1990s, when I was religious affairs correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, I reported on the American Catholic Church’s terrible failure to address allegations of child abuse. I think I was one of the first journalists in Britain to write about the way pervert priests were being shuffled around US parishes by bishops. So don’t accuse me of being an apologist for the culture of secrecy and cowardice that enabled wicked men to go unpunished.

But something smells fishy about today’s New York Times story implying that Pope Benedict XVI was complicit in the cover-up surrounding the crimes of a Wisconsin priest, Fr Lawrence Murphy, who abused children at a school for the deaf between 1950 and 1974.

Murphy? Guilty as hell. Various bishops? Likewise. But the fact that in 1996 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger may have approved the decision not to pursue complex canonical procedures against Murphy on the grounds that the guy was dying anyway doesn’t strike me as much of a smoking gun.

I do, however, get the very strong feeling that the Pope’s enemies, including his enemies in the Church, are trying desperately hard to discover serious complicity on his part in a child abuse case. Because that would be just so convenient, wouldn’t it?

The news stories on this subject have been written mainly from the perspective of angry victims’ advocates. I don’t deny for a second that (in so far as they can be separated) the grotesquely overdue delivery of justice to victims and their families is a more important priority than dealing fairly with the authorities involved in these cases. Even so, we must distinguish between full-scale guilt, complicity and less serious errors of judgment.

This Wisconsin scandal does not indicate that Joseph Ratzinger was guilty of anything more than misplaced compassion towards a seriously ill old man who had performed (but not been convicted of) acts of great wickedness. In the Munich case, he could be accused of lack of vigilance; the American scandal is much less damaging to him personally, once the full details are taken into account.

It drives me crazy that so much energy is being devoted to trying to acquire the papal scalp while certain profoundly compromised bishops and cardinals have managed to slip out of the public eye – and even land plum appointments in Rome. (And I don’t just mean Cardinal Law.)

Anyway, because some of the media coverage of this latest story has been so partial, in my opinion, I’m going to reproduce in full today’s report by John Thavis of the Catholic News Service. There are facts here that must be taken to account before we arrive at a nuanced judgment.

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100031495/the-pope-and-the-wisconsin-sex-abuse-scandal-i-smell-a-st...



Actually, David, since I was gone almost the whole day, Thavis's article should be posted in full. It's a fair account of the case, depending on facts publicly known as of today - TERESA.


Vatican defends 1997 CDF action
on Wisconsin sex-offender priest
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service


VATICAN CITY, March 25 (CNS) -- The Vatican has defended a decision not to laicize a Wisconsin priest who sexually abused deaf children, despite the recommendation of his bishop that he be removed from the priesthood.

In a statement responding to a report in the New York Times, the Vatican said that by the time it learned of the case in the late 1990s, the priest was elderly and in poor health. The Vatican eventually suggested that the priest continue to be restricted in ministry instead of laicized, and he died four months later, the Vatican said.

The Vatican decision not to proceed to a Church trial and possible laicization came after the priest wrote a personal appeal to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who was head of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation at the time, the Times article said.

On March 25, the day the article was published, members of the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests held a brief demonstration in front of the Vatican, distributing copies of documents related to the case and calling on the Pope to disclose how he and the doctrinal congregation handled allegations of sexual abuse by priests.

Vatican officials who spoke on background said the New York Times story was unfair because it ignored the fact that, at the urging of Cardinal Ratzinger himself, new procedures to deal with priest abusers were put in place in 2002, including measures making it easier to laicize them.

"This would be handled differently today, based on jurisprudence and experience," one Vatican official told Catholic News Service. "But you can't accuse people of not applying in 1998 a principle that was established in 2002."

The case involved Father Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee from 1950 to 1974. In the early 1970s, multiple allegations of sexual abuse against the priest were made to civil authorities, who investigated but never brought charges. He was placed on a leave of absence for a while and later returned to pastoral ministry in the Diocese of Superior, where he worked until 1993.

The Times story said that according to documents it obtained from lawyers involved in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, then-Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland in 1993 hired a social worker who interviewed Father Murphy and reported that the priest had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse. The archbishop placed restrictions on Father Murphy's ministry.

Archbishop Weakland wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger about the case in 1996 because he thought it might involve "solicitation in the confessional," a sin which because of its gravity involved the doctrinal congregation. [Why did Weakland wait three years before writing the CDF? No one so far has looked into Weakland's motivations in this case. Surely, he was aware that by 1993, when he looked into Murphy's case, the statute of limitations by both canonical and civilian law had already run out on Murphy. Or was the 'soliciting in the confessional' something that happened after the polcie dropped charges against Murphy in the mid-1970s?]

Later in 1996, the doctrinal congregation told Wisconsin bishops to begin a canonical trial of Father Murphy, the Times article said. But it said that process was halted after Father Murphy wrote directly to Cardinal Ratzinger, saying that he had repented and was in poor health, and that the allegations went beyond the Church's own statute of limitations for such crimes.

When Archbishop Weakland met in 1998 with Cardinal Ratzinger's assistants at the doctrinal congregation official, he failed to persuade them to allow a trial that could lead to the defrocking of Father Murphy.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the Father Murphy case was a "tragic" one that "involved particularly vulnerable victims who suffered terribly from what he did."

Father Lombardi pointed out, however, that the Vatican was only informed of the case more than two decades after the abuse had been reported to diocesan officials and the police. He noted that civil authorities had dropped their investigation without filing charges.

The Church's canonical procedures in such cases do not envision "automatic penalties," but recommend that a judgment be made, not excluding removal of a guilty priest from the priesthood, Father Lombardi said.

"In light of the facts that Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith suggested that the archbishop of Milwaukee give consideration to addressing the situation by, for example, restricting Father Murphy's public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts," Father Lombardi said.

"Father Murphy died approximately four months later, without further incident," he added.

The Vatican spokesman underlined a point made frequently by Church officials in recent weeks: that the rules on confidentiality in the Church's investigation of such allegations have never prohibited the reporting of child abuse to law enforcement agencies. [That is such an obvious fact if one reads both the 1962 Crimen sollicitationis and the 2001 De delictis gravioribus. But the propaganda actively sown by victims' lawyers and advocacy groups - best illustrated by the infamous BBC documentary in 2006 - deliberately and falsely allege that the documents 1) compel bishops to keep a lid of secrecy on all sex abuse cases, on pain of excommunication if they violate it!; and 2) as a consequence of that false premise, that therefore they must not report cases to the police at all. The fact that the Vatican itself has never posted anything but the Latin originals of those documents gives the propagandists believability to ordinary folk! BTW, I trust the unofficial English translations I have referred to since 2006 because I found them on a website by 'conventional (i.e. non-liberal) priests counselling abuse victims.]

The Vatican's doctrinal congregation was given oversight on all cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests in 2001. Under new Vatican rules established in 2001-2002, as the scope of the sex abuse scandal became clearer, the congregation was empowered in very grave and clear cases to laicize priest abusers without going through an ecclesiastical trial. [And yet almost all MSM reports on the 'scandal', including the Times story on Fr. Murphy, make it appear as though the CDF had been in charge all along, or at least for as long as Cardinal Ratzinger had been its head!]

One Vatican official said that today, Father Murphy would have fallen into that category and would have been laicized.

Since 2001, about 20 percent of the approximately 3,000 cases processed have resulted in removal of the offender from the priesthood, a Vatican official said recently. In most other cases, removal from public ministry is the result.

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said in a front-page commentary March 25 [not March 25, March 26] that the New York Times article was part of a media campaign against the Pope.

It defended Pope Benedict, saying he had operated with "transparency, firmness and severity in turning a light on various cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and religious," as shown in his recent letter to Irish Catholics.

"But the prevailing tendency in the media is to ignore the facts and to strain interpretations, with the aim of depicting the Catholic Church as the only institution responsible for sexual abuse, an image that does not correspond to reality," it said.

This strategy, it said, reflects the "evident and shameful attempt to strike, at any cost, Pope Benedict and his closest collaborators."

Since the event started at 8:30 p.m. and ended around 10, the initial reports from the wire agencies have been in bits and snatches, and there is no wrap-up story yet. I have combined three of them in this report:


70,000 young people show
their love for the Pope
by Salvatore Izzo


VATICAN CITY, March 25 (Translated from AGI) - "The young people love the Pope and they are here to say thank you for the shining testimony of faith that you offer us in confronting trials and incomprehension - and that is why we are here tonight in such numbers, in St. Peter's Square".

Words by Cardinal Agostino Vallini, the Pope's Vicar for Rome, in greeting Pope Benedict XVI tonight in the name more than 70,000 young people from Rome and Lazio who gathered for a meeting preparatory to the diocesan celebration of World Youth Day on Palm Sunday. It will also be the 25th anniversary of the first WYD convoked by Pope John Paul II in Rome.

Earlier, the Pope was greeted by prolonged applause. chanting and waving of scarves and flags as he arrived by Popemobile around 8:30 in the evening, making a long tour through all the sectors to allow the young people to see him closer.

And it was if they wanted to make him feel their love on a day that was marked by new controversy and false accusations against him in the media.

Also present for the occasion was the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, and the Italian Minister of Youth, Giorgia Meloni, who came forward to kiss the Pope's ring after the ceremony.

"In your face as a loving father, we see the Good Master. We know with certainty that you love the young people, and that you pray for them daily, but we want you to know that the young people love their Pope," Vallini repeated in his opening remarks to long applause from all sectors of the Piazza.

"In your dear person," Vallini resumed, after the nth interruption by applause and chanting of 'BE-NE-DET-TO', "we meet the Lord who speaks to us and encourages us to follow him."

"Present tonight," he said, " are the young people from the parishes, the community centers and oratories, and the schools, but also military men, workers, young religious men and women, along with a group of young people from Madrid who will be hosting the next international WYD in 2011."

"But we also have here the young people who were at Tor Vergata [a Rome suburb] 10 years ago [the WYD for the Christian Jubilee Year of 2000] and experienced that immense assembly with the beloved John Paul II at the dawn of the third millennium and called them the hope of an earth that will be more habitable for everyone".

"They are all searchers for the truth," the cardinal said, "and of the true meaning of life, who wish to overcome even the temptation to unbelief, and to mature a personal faith full of conviction."

He ended by calling attention to the WYD symbols in the Square: the great WYD Cross which has travelled from Sydney and will end up in Madrid next August, and Rome's most venerated icon of Mary, Health of the Romans (Salus Populi Romani), from the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, which was brought to Tor Vergata 10 years ago to preside at the WYD assemblies there.

After greetings from two youth representatives, three of them took turns asking a question from the Pope on the theme of this year's WYD: "Good teacher, what must I do to earn eternal life?".

The first question was about eternal life, to which the Pope said, "None of is can imagine it because it is outside our experience. But the essential thing is not to throw away the life we have, but to live it profoundly, live this life in all its richness and in its totality".





Thanks for the follow-up posts, David!...

I watched the event at St. Peter's on TV. What a great occasion it was for our Papino to feel the love and enthusiasm of all those young people!... My heart ached for him because he looked tired...but answering the questions by the young people, he was in great mental form as usual, with his now-familiar totally effortless flow of words - has anyone ever caught him out hesitating between words, or saying, er... or um... or their equivalents?? Our Benedictus Chrysostomos, Joseph Goldmund, indeed. Obama should take lessons from him in how to speak without a teleprompter, or even a prepared text!

A comment over at Damian Thompson's blog.

by chiaramonti

We are fast reaching the stage where words are losing their meaning in the rush to drag Pope Benedict into the firing line. How can he possibly be said to have participated in a cover up if the police in America were informed the abusive conduct a decade or so before the American church authorities referred the matter to the Vatican? If the American prosecuting authorities decided not to proceed with the case, perhaps the searchlight should be directed at them. To imply that an act of mercy towards an undeserving but dying man amounts to a cover up is simply absurd.

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100031495/the-pope-and-the-wisconsin-sex-abuse-scandal-i-smell-a-stitch-up/#...

Tomorrow 's issue of OR (3/26/10) has a front page editorial commentary on the New York Times calumny along with the statement Fr. Lombardi gave earlier to the Times when he was informed about the article and what it would say. However, the Times chose to use only part of his answer...

But the OR tack is strange because cover-up was hardly the accusation made by the article. It was worse: - it implied that in 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger did not appear to be very much concerned about sex crimes by priests to the point that he would not even 'defrock' someone against whom he had been repeatedly 'warned' about.


Regarding an article in
the New York Times:
There was no cover-up
Translated from
the 3/26/10 issue of




Transparency, firmness and severity in shedding light on the various cases of sexual abuses committed by priests and religious: These are the criteria that Benedict XVI, with constancy and calm, has been indicating the entire Church.

It is a way - consistent with his personal history and for his more than 20 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - that is evidently feared by those who do not wish the truth to be told and by those who prefer to be able exploit, without any basis in fact, horrible episodes and sorrowful events which, in many cases go back decades.

The last example is an article published today by the New York Times, along with a comment [it is actually an editorial - I posted it in TOXIC WASTE last night, since everything it has to say is all based on wrong premises and wrong facts!] regarding the serious case of the late priest Lawrence C. Murphy, who committed abuses on deaf children who were wards of a Catholic institution where he worked from 1960 to 1974.

According to the reconstruction by the article, based on ample documentation provided by the lawyers of some victims, information regarding the priest's conduct was not sent until July 1996 by the then Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - of which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was prefect, and Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, his number-2 man - for the purpose of requesting instructions on the right canonical procedure to follow.

The request itself was not about sexual abuses, but about the violation of the Sacrament of Penance through solicitation of sex in the confessional, which happens when the priest induces the penitent to commit a sin against the Sixth Commandment (Canon 1387).

It is important to observe - as the director of the Vatican Press Office said - that the canonical question presented to the CDF was not in any way linked to any potential civil or criminal complaint against Fr. Murphy.

Against whom the archdiocese had already started a canonical process as is evident in the abundant documents published online by the New York newspaper.

To the request from the Archdiocese, a response came on March 24, 1997 signed by then Archbishop Bertone, with the instruction to proceed according to the provisions of Crimen sollicitationis (1962) [which was primarily intended for sins against the Sacraments. contrary to the common idea that it was an anti-pedophilia measure. The sex offenses it envisions were heterosexual, and as I recall, only one sentence was given to pedophilia, as one of the possible sex offenses that should be considered a 'grave crime'].

One can easily see, even from the reconstruction by the New York Times itself, that there was never a question of covering up at the Vatican on the Murphy case. This is confirmed by the documentation accompanying the article, which also includes the letter written by Fr. Murphy in 1998 to then Cardinal Ratzinger, requesting that the canonical procedure be stopped because he was seriously ill.

The Congregation also responded to this, through Cardinal Bertone, who asked the bishop of Milwaukee to carry out all the pastoral measures provided by Canon 1341 in order to obtain reparation for the scandal and the establishment of justice.

An end which the Pope reiterated clearly in his recent Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, But the prevailing tendency in the media is to ignore the facts and impose a forced interpretation with the aim of spreading an image of the Church as though she alone were responsible for all sexual abuses - an image which does not correspond to reality.

However, such an image is functional to the evident and ignoble intention of scoring a hit, at all costs, against Benedict XVI himself and his closest collaborators. [Bertone is implicated in this case only because he happened to be the CDF secretary at the time, not because he is now Secretary of State and a close collaborator of the Pope. The real and principal target is the Pope. If there are any people close to him who are also tarred, that's just a bonus for the character assassins!]



This is a very deficient response, obviously, because it ignores the two real accusations made by the New York Times against Cardinal Ratzinger that have an apparent basis in fact:

1) That he failed to answer the Milwaukee bishop's first letter about Murphy for months [the letter was said to have been sent in July 1996, and Bertone's reply came in February). The implication is that the CDF did not think enough of such complaints against priests to act promptly.

It is very relevant that the action being sought against Murphy with the CDF had to do with soliciting sex in the confessional, not with actual sex abuse, but since the Times articles does not mention that at all, the reader is led to believe that Cardinal Ratzinger appeared not to give priority to sex abuse complaints at all if his office could afford to wait months to answer a letter.

2) That Cardinal Ratzinger decided against 'defrocking' Fr. Murphy - the Times decided was the most striking headline they could possibly use because it was a fact, which when presented without any explanation - as the Times did - paints the Cardinal as arbitrarily withholding just punishment from an erring priest.

But it is also the easiest to clear up. Strangely, the OR article only mentions that the CDF was lenient with Murphy because he was physically ailing - but the deciding reason was that there had been no complaints against him for 20 years(since the investigations were carried out against him by the police in the mid-1970s and then dropped), and that was taken as proof of Murphy's claim that he had repented. Fr. Lombardi's statement made that clear.

In any other context, this might have been a signal lesson in Christian charity and mercy to those who are penitent, the kind of mercy that Benedict XVI held out to priest offenders who sincerely repent. Instead, it is taken as an an example of how the Church has 'coddled' known sex offenders.

I decided to translate the OR piece first because it is much shorter, but I should have done the Avvenire summary first.... which follows:



The case of Fr. Murphy:
What really happened -
according to documents posted
online by the New York Times
Translated from

March 25, 2010


"Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the Church".

Thus begins an article in the New York Times today that has been picked up with great play-up by the Italian media [and everywhere else in the world].

In fact, the documentation posted online by the Times itself belies this tendentious reading of the facts about Fr. Lawrence Murphy, who was chaplain of a school for deaf children from 1950-1974 in the Diocese of Milwaukee.

The documents show in fact that the only ones who showed concern over the evil done by Fr. Murphy were his superiors in the diocese and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while civilian authorities shelved the case. [The first statements made on this indicated that the police investigated complaints filed by victims' families against Murphy in the mid-1970s and apparently found none of them sustainable. Which is not to say Murphy did not commit the offenses.]

In particular, the CDF, which became involved in the question only in 1996-1997, had approved proceeding with canonical proceedings against Fr. Murphy although the cases had long overrun their statute of limitations even in canon law.

It all started on May 15, 1974, when a former student of St. John's School for the deaf presented a complaint of abuses committed against him and other children by Fr, Lawrence Murphy from 1954 to 1970. But after investigations, the prosecutors took no action.

Meanwhile, the Diocese of Milwaukee immediately suspended Murphy alleging health reasons for up to November 1974, but the suspension soon became final. A letter from the Diocese of Superior in 1980 said Murphy was back in his mother's home but was helping his local parish priest with pastoral duties.

Meanwhile, complaints against him in the Diocese of Milwaukee continued to be received. In 1993-1994, he underwent four long interrogations by archdiocesan officials and psychologists who had expertise in pedophilia. The panel concluded that Murphy was a 'typical pedophile', for whom it recommended psychological treatment for sex maniacs, with accompanying pastoral and spiritual guidance and restriction of his ministerial activities.

The interrogators reported 29 complaints against Murphy, who admitted 'contact' with only 18 of them. Successive documents show that the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, sought to establish the extent of the abuses. In July 1996, Weakland wrote Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF asking for guidance over the case of Murphy and another priest who had been accused of sexual and financial offenses.

Mons. Weakland refers to the charges filed in 1974 and explains that he had only learned recently that some offenses were committed by Murphy in the confessional, so in December 1995, he assigned another priest, James Connell, to study the issue in depth. [The obvious question that arises is what might have motivated Weakland to pursue the Murphy case with the level of effort he showed.]

Weakland acknowledges that an obstacle to investigation was the understandable reticence of the boys involved and of the community served by St. John's school to publicize embarrassing events. Weakland turned to CDF to clarify who had jurisdiction for crimes of solicitation (Canon 1387)- the diocese or the CDF?

Successive documents indicate that the letter may never have reached Cardinal Ratzinger himself, nor even Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, who was then the CDF Secretary.

In the absence of a reply from the CDF, the archdiocese went ahead on on December 10, 1996, informed Murphy that it had opened a canon law case against him before a diocesan tribunal created ad hoc. The charge asked for Fr. Murphy's 'destitution from the clerical state'.

But the problem was the statute of limitations for the crimes alleged had lapsed. However, Weakland wanted an exemption from that restriction because of the physical and psychological state of the victims. An idea endorsed by Cardinal Bertone in a latter dated March 24, 1997. [It would seem from this summary that Weakland used the 'solicitation' charges as a pretext to reopen the sexual abuse charges against Murphy.]

At the end of 1997, the proceedings transferred to the Diocese of Superior, with the same tribunal president as in Milwaukee, Fr. Thomas Brundage.

The documents posted by the Times show clearly that officials in both the dioceses of Milwaukee and Superior wished to conclude the proceedings as soon as possible in order to get justice and reparation for the victims and the community served by St. John's school.

Meanwhile, on January 12, 1988, Murphy wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger requesting that the proceedings against him be called off, claiming that under the 1962 Crimen sollicitationis, a canonical hearing had to be opened within 30 days from the presentation of charges.

He also said - besides claiming he has repented for his actions - that he was seriously ill and that he had been retired for 24 years. He also asked at the very least not to be reduced to lay state.

On April 6, 1998, Mons. Bertone wrote in the name of the CDF, to Mons. Fliss, bishop of Superior, to explain that, after having examined the matter carefully, there was no statute of limitations for penal action as invoked by Fr. Murphy, and so the hearings could go on, but to bear in mind that Art. 1341 of the Code of Civil Law says that a penalty may only be imposed after it has been determined that "it is not possible to sufficiently obtain reparation for the scandal, the establishment of justice, and the emendment of the guilty" through other means.

Mons. Fliss responded on May 13 to Mons. Bertone that in accordance with his instructions, a canonical trial of Fr. Murphy was necessary in view of the gravity of the scandal and the great pain it had inflicted on the Catholic community of St. John's school. [Not language that one would use to refer to 'soliciting in the confessional'.]

On May 30, there was a meeting at the Vatican between Mons. Bertone, his undersecretary at CDF, Fr. Gianfranco Girotti, and the American prelates involved in the matter. From the minutes of the meeting, it appears that the CDF officials expressed doubts about the feasibility of such a trial because of the difficulty of reconstructing events that happened 35 years earlier, especially those that have to do with the crime of 'soliciting in the confessional', and since no other accusations had been presented since 1974.

At the end of the meeting, Bertone summarized the two fundamental lines he proposed: a territorial restriction for Murphy (in effect, he should remain in Superior), and a decisive action to obtain his repentance including the threat of 'reduction to lay status'.

On August 19, the bishop of Milwaukee wrote Bertone to let him know what had been done to put into effect the lines he had indicated, and to inform him that his diocese would continue being responsible for the cost of providing therapy for victims of sexual abuse.

Two days later, on August 21, Fr. Murphy died.