The current face of filth in the Church
The phrase "I accept full responsibility..." has become trite and meaningless in our day when public officials usually say it to try to start getting out 'gracefully' of a sin or crime that they did commit. So when someone like Cardinal O'Malley says it, he is merely being consistent with his many brother bishops who have been seeking to justify their silence over McCarrick et al. But surely O'Malley is intelligent enough to realize that his 'apology' just does not cut it at all!
Cardinal O’Malley:
‘I accept responsibility’ for aide
not showing me a letter accusing McCarrick
by Alex Defert
August 21, 2018
Cardinal Sean O’Malley has accepted responsibility for failing to respond to a letter detailing sexual abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
The letter, sent by Fr Boniface Ramsey, contained details of Archbishop McCarrick’s illicit behaviour with seminarians but was not followed up. McCarrick was eventually stripped of his title by the Vatican in June, following credible allegations of sexual abuse from a former altar boy.
In a statement published on the Archdiocese of Boston’s website, Cardinal O’Malley explained the failure as an oversight on the part of his secretary, Fr Robert Kickham.
“
Fr Ramsey’s letter came to me in my role as President of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors,” he wrote. “Fr Kickham’s response to Fr Ramsey noted that individual cases such as he proposed for review fell outside the mandate of the Commission. Consequently, he did not bring the letter to my attention.”
[In his first explanation of why he did not see the letter, O'Malley had said it was because his 'staff' decided it had nothing to do with the Archdiocese of Boston, when obviously, the letter was written to him not as Archbishop of Boston but as the Church's pointman in what was supposed to be an 'all-out war of zero tolerance' against sexual abuses by ordained ministers of God.]
Last week, Cardinal O’Malley withdrew from his hosting a panel discussion on ‘Safeguarding Children and Vulnerable adults’ at the World Meeting of Families in order to investigate allegations of abuse at St John’s Seminary in his own Archdiocese of Boston.
“In retrospect, it is now clear to Fr Kickham and to me that I should have seen that letter precisely because it made assertions about the behavior of an Archbishop in the Church,” he stated. “I take responsibility for the procedures followed in my office and I also am prepared to modify those procedures in light of this experience.”
“Allegations regarding Archbishop McCarrick’s sexual crimes were unknown to me until the recent media reports. [Yeah, right!] I understand not everyone will accept this answer given the way the Church has eroded the trust of our people. My hope is that we can repair the trust and faith of all Catholics and the wider community by virtue of our actions and accountability in how we respond to this crisis.”
Fr Boniface’s letter was the second he had written about Cardinal McCarrick’s alleged activities. Writing that the letter “has taken me years to write and send,” Fr Boniface described accounts of abuse, some of which were “not presented to me as mere rumours, but told to me by persons directly involved” as well as passing on an account of a conversation he had with Archbishop Thomas Kelly of Louisville, during which Archbishop Kelly told him that “stories about Archbishop McCarrick had been circulating amongst the American Bishops”.
Fr Boniface’s first letter had been written more than a decade before, in 2000, but the lack of response, and McCarrick’s continuing presence at official events, prompted him to write again.
Cardinal O’Malley’s statement did not address whether or not Fr Boniface’s request that the letter be forwarded to the proper agency was honoured.
I still have to post anything about the reigning pope's letter on the current crisis, but I take it that the ploy has been to put emphasis on 'the children' or 'the victims' without any mention of homosexuality which is the lumbering morale-crushing elephant in the ecclesiastical room that the pope and many of his fellow bishops refuse to confront, even if it has its trunk coiled tight around their necks!
Significantly, the first account I have seen of the pope's letter is from a secular source.
Pope Francis blasts 'atrocities' by clergy:
'We showed no care for the little ones'
John Bacon
USA TODAY
August 20, 2018
Pope Francis condemned the "atrocities" of sexual abuse by priests and the hierarchy that covered up the crimes, apologizing to the church community Monday and demanding accountability from leaders in the future.
The letter to the world's 1.2 billion Catholics was issued less than a week after the latest in a long line of staggering abuse revelations. A withering grand jury report released by the Pennsylvania attorney general accused church leaders of protecting 301 "predator priests" in six dioceses across the state for decades at the expense of more than 1,000 victims.
"I acknowledge once more the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons," Francis said.
He said it was with "shame and repentance" that he acknowledged the church was slow in responding to the problem.
"We showed no care for the little ones," the pope wrote. "We abandoned them." [What about 'care' for the hundreds of priests whose 'disordered tendencies' led them to cause all the crimes against not just 'little ones' but bigger ones, too?]
The Vatican drew criticism last week for waiting two days before condemning the activity cited in the report as "criminal and morally reprehensible." Monday's letter was the first response directly from the pope – and it drew mixed reviews.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the watchdog website BishopAccountability.org, called the letter "2,000 words of recycled rhetoric" that failed to provide concrete measures to make ending abuse a priority.
"In the wake of the atrocities detailed in the Pennsylvania grand jury report, heartsick Catholics again look to the pope, yearning for a specific plan for ending the cover-up once and for all," she said. "His rambling letter today dashes this hope."
Francis this week will visit Ireland, where a string of abuse scandals has rocked the church. Prominent Irish abuse survivor Colm O'Gorman was not impressed with the pope's letter.
"He says the church must condemn the crimes of clerics who abused, and seek forgiveness for its own 'sins,'" O'Gorman tweeted. "And
again, fails to acknowledge the plain fact of the Vatican’s willful cover up of those very crimes. Of their facilitation of them."
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was more positive and said the letter "appropriately focuses" on the long-suffering survivors of abuse.
“It is my hope that, following the Holy Father’s words and teachings, church leaders in Pennsylvania will cease their denials and deflections," Shapiro said.
The abuses detailed in the grand jury report included crimes against children dating back to the 1940s. Victims were as young as 2 years old. Some victims who were raped also were beaten with whips and were shared in a "ring of predatory priests" within the Pittsburgh diocese, the report said.
A clergy abuse hotline Shapiro set up has drawn more than 300 calls since the report was released Tuesday.
"We're answering every call and following up every lead," Shapiro spokesman Joe Grace told USA TODAY.
The grand jury report was the latest development in an abuse scandal that has rocked the church. Last month, the pope accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a high-ranking Vatican official, amid claims of sexual abuse almost 40 years ago.
In May, an Australian archbishop was convicted in criminal court of covering up the sexual abuse of children by a priest. That same month, all 31 bishops in Chile offered their resignations; the pope has accepted at least five of them.
Francis wrote that lay Catholics must play a role in creating a culture that prevents abuse and protection of abusers.
"Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient," the pope wrote. "Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated."
Terry McKiernan, founder of BishopAccountability.org, saw positives in the letter but said it did not go far enough.
"He is talking about crimes, not sins, which is important," McKiernan said. But he added that bishops in Pennsylvania have lobbied hard against changing statute of limitation laws that make it difficult for survivors to sue.
"The pope's men on the ground (bishops) have spent millions fighting against change," McKiernan said. "If he would support it, obviously the deal would be done."
Pope Francis’s failed abuse letter
By ROD DREHER
August 20, 2018
Pope Francis today released a 2,000-word letter about the abuse scandal, directed to all Catholics. Read the full text here.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2018-08/pope-francis-letter-people-of-god-sexual-abuse.html
If you are new to this story, the letter sounds great. This excerpt, for example, is quite good:
In recent days, a report was made public which detailed the experiences of at least a thousand survivors, victims of sexual abuse, the abuse of power and of conscience at the hands of priests over a period of approximately seventy years. Even though it can be said that most of these cases belong to the past, nonetheless as time goes on we have come to know the pain of many of the victims. We have realized that these wounds never disappear and that they require us forcefully to condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this culture of death; these wounds never go away.
The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced. But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it, or sought even to resolve it by decisions that increased its gravity by falling into complicity. The Lord heard that cry and once again showed us on which side he stands. Mary’s song is not mistaken and continues quietly to echo throughout history.
For the Lord remembers the promise he made to our fathers: “he has scattered the proud in their conceit; he has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” (Lk 1:51-53). We feel shame when we realize that our style of life has denied, and continues to deny, the words we recite.
With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.
I make my own the words of the then Cardinal Ratzinger when, during the Way of the Cross composed for Good Friday 2005, he identified with the cry of pain of so many victims and exclaimed: “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to [Christ]! How much pride, how much self-complacency! Christ’s betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his body and blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison – Lord, save us! (cf. Mt 8:25)” (Ninth Station).
If I had not been following this story closely for years, I would be comforted by this epistle. Here’s why you should not be.
It’s very late in the game for this or any Pope to think that words alone are credible. Pope John Paul II said similar things when clerical sexual abuse was exposed … but the status quo remained. Pope Benedict XVI was significantly more active in fighting the culture of abuse, but bad bishops remained in place.
(The rumor is that when he was presented with a dossier detailing the extent of homosexuality in the Roman Curia, he resigned when he realized that he was powerless to combat it.) And now we have Francis, who releases a torrent of good words, but whose deeds, to this point, do not match them.
First, about those words. This brave priest has taken accurate measurement of them:
Exactly right. Exactly.
Now, to the Pope’s deeds.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s resignation has been on Pope Francis’s desk for two years. All Catholic bishops formally resign at age 75, but the pope does not have to accept it. The only thing keeping the disgraced Wuerl in office in Washington is the will of Pope Francis. As long as Donald Wuerl presides over the Archdiocese of Washington, you will know that the pope’s words are empty.
Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, one of the pope’s inner circle of advisers, and indeed the one tasked with leading curial reform, presides over a massive gay sex scandal in his own diocese. Cardinal Maradiaga has denied that it’s a problem. A Maradiaga auxiliary bishop, the one running the diocese, had to resign after being plausibly accused of having a string of boyfriends — and Maradiaga reportedly defended the corrupt bishop to the hilt during the Vatican’s investigation. And despite losing the gay Bishop Pineda, Cardinal Maradiaga has strengthened his position in the Curia.
More:In subsequent comments to LifeSiteNews, Pentin quoted one of the sources as saying that he predicted four consequences of this appointment. First, the Vatican will remove the current nuncio, Tanzanian Archbishop Novatus Rugambwa, who has been a stalwart in strongly resisting the corruption and scandal in the Tegucigalpa archdiocese. “Rodriguez Maradiaga doesn’t like him, as he’s the only one capable of saying the right thing and implementing it,” said the source.
A second consequence the source predicted is that Rodriguez Maradiaga, 75, will “secure his reign for another five years.” A third outcome is that once everything has calmed down, “he will bring back Pineda, converting him into the next archbishop of Tegucigalpa.” And finally, the source predicted the cardinal will “maintain the privilege of continuing to appoint bishops of his choice who will always be his slaves.”
“Ultimately, the whim of a homosexual (Pineda) determines the choices of an entire church,” the source said. “It makes one vomit. He will do everything that Maradiaga asks him to do.”
Meanwhile, over the past two decades, the Catholic population in Honduras has been halved, with masses either leaving the Church for Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism, or leaving the practice of Christianity entirely.
The cardinal is on the speaker’s line-up for this weekend’s World Meeting of Families in Dublin:
Tenderness my foot. Where is the Pope’s “tenderness” for the 50 or so seminarians in Tegucigalpa who put their futures on the line by writing a letter protesting the gay sex culture in Cardinal Maradiaga’s seminary, and begging the country’s bishops for help?
Cardinal Maradiaga is 75, and has presumably submitted his formal resignation to the Pope. The only thing keeping him in power in Honduras (and in Rome) is the will of Pope Francis. As long as Maradiaga — who once blamed Jews for the 2002 clerical sex scandal in the US — remains in power, you will know that the pope’s words are empty.
And so on. To be fair, Francis has done some good things on this front, like accepting the resignation of three Chilean bishops implicated by the gay sex abuse scandal rocking that country’s church. But he had to be dragged into acting in that case, after long rebuffing victims. [UPDATE: He also agreed to remove McCarrick from ministry, and to take away his cardinal rank.
But if he really cared, he would be moving heaven and earth to uncover how McCarrick got away with his corruption and deceit for so long. Taking away his red hat — so what? — RD]
It is nice to have strong words from the Pope, but as Father Longenecker says,
pay attention not only to what Francis says, but what he does not say. And, in the end, deeds are the only thing that count at this point. Catholics have heard strong words from popes and bishops for 16 years, and yet, here is the Church in 2018, its moral credibility shattered. Ordinary Catholics — priests and laity alike — surely know that if rescue is going to come, it’s going to have to come from them.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/08/2018 04:35]