Some Italian media reports already referred to the following story last week, but I put them aside, as they could have misquoted Schoenborn again, as they did last January, when one Italian newspaper apparently made up an interview with Schoenborn quoting him as virtually endorsing Medjugorje as an authentic phenomenon that the Church should recognize. Schoenborn's office immediately denied he had said that - although the statements the Cardinal has made about Medjugorje on other occasions certainly seem to amount to the same thing.
Anyway, the Anglophone media have now latched on to Schoenborn's sanctimonious statements and are using it primarily to strengthen their working theorem that the Roman Curia is not just incompetent but also corrupt. But sharper minds in the Italian media look on it as yet another step by Schoenborn not so much to ingratiate himself with his predominantly liberal Catholic flock in Austria [as he seems to deludedly think it might], but as part of his media campaign to lay down now his 'open and liberal' credentials for the cardinals of the world to keep him in mind for the next Conclave. I tend to agree with this hypothesis, which I find just as tasteless as many of the actions by Schoenborn in the past two years! (He must not forget that in modern times, no cardinal who pushed himself too much with an eye to the next Conclave was ever elected Pope!)
Also, to 'urge reform in the Curia' by doing pointedly so in the media is certainly unworthy of someone everyone considers to be 'close to Benedict XVI", if only because he is the president of the Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI Foundation to preserve and propagate Ratzinger's thought! First, it implies he doesn't think Benedict XVI is paying attention to such a reform - which is an insult to the Holy Father - so he has to make a hue and cry about it to get his attention; and second, because he recently met with the Pope at the Vatican - surely he could have expressed himself strongly about such a reform directly to the Pope! I almost find his tactics despicable.
Schönborn attacks Sodano
and urges reform in the Curia
by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt
8 May 2010
The head of the Austrian Church has launched an attack of one of the most senior cardinals in the Vatican, saying that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, “deeply wronged” the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy when he dismissed media reports of the scandal.
In a meeting with editors of the main Austrian daily newspapers last week, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, also said the Roman Curia was “urgently in need of reform”, and that lasting gay relationships deserved respect. He reiterated his view that the Church needs to reconsider its position on re-married divorcees.
On Easter Day, Cardinal Sodano called the mounting reports of clerical sex abuse “petty gossip”. This had “deeply wronged the victims”, Cardinal Schönborn said, and he recalled that it was Cardinal Sodano who had prevented Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal, from investigating allegations of abuse made against Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, the previous Archbishop of Vienna, who resigned in disgrace in 1995.
[I cannot believe this! Schoenborn is deliberately pandering to the media by buying into their false and unjustified inflation of a term Cardinal Sodano used in the tribute to the Pope before the Easter Sunday Mass: the Italian word 'chiacchierare', which can be translated simply and generally as 'chatter', and pejoratively as 'gossip'.
Schoenborn and MSM, in going after Sodano for using the word, completely ignored that the Holy Father himself used the noun derivative of the same term in his Palm Sunday homily one week before Sodano used it. The Pope was speaking about the courage not to be intimidated by the 'chiacchiericcio delle opinioni dominanti' [translated officially by the Vatican as 'the gossip of prevalent opinions' - but in this case, the only sense could have been 'chatter', since opinion is not gossip!
In Sodano's case, he said it in this sentence (my translation): "Holy Father, with you are the People of God who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the idle chatter of the moment, nor by the trials that are meant to strike at the community of believers". Schoenborn knows Italian - did he check out the the Italian reports on Sodano's tribute, or did he simply see the media reports in German and perhaps English?
In fact, the Anglophone MSM did not initially zero in on Sodano's term until the following day when they sought to cite it alongside Fr. Cantalamessa's citation of a Jewish friend's statement in his Good Friday homily as examples of 'inflammatory language' from 'people around the Pope'.
But what is wrong with what Sodano said? One may surmise he used the term to distinguish 'idle chatter' which must be dismissed and not allowed to influence a right-thinking man, against 'hard facts' which a reasonable man should judge rationally.
Indeed, in an Easter Sunday editorial, L'Osservatore Romano denounced what it called the "vile defamation campaign" against the Pope - which is certainly an order of denunciatory magnitude far above 'idle chatter' or even 'gossip'!]
Cardinal Schönborn said that Pope Benedict was “gently” working on reforming the Curia but he had the whole world on his desk, as the cardinal put it, and
his way of working and his style of communication did not make it easy to advise him quickly from outside.
[That is plain BS, and deliberately damning with mild praise! What's to stop MSM now from saying, "Oh look, if even someone as close to him as Schoenborn says this, then he really is isolated in his ivory tower!", which is one of their favorite myths about Benedict XVI!] Cardinal Schönborn studied under Joseph Ratzinger at Regensburg University and is known to be close to him.
Questioned on the Church’s attitude to homosexuals, the cardinal said: “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” adding: “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.”
The cardinal also said the Church needed to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees “as many people don’t even marry at all any longer”.
The primary thing to consider should not be the sin, but people’s striving to live according to the commandments, he said. Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, he continued.
[And who will define what 'happiness' is? Is that not abdicating a Christianly-formed conscience to sheer individual subjectivism? Did Schoenborn never once think how his words are bound to be interpreted by Catholic smart-alecks just waiting for this sort of laxity to step up their advocacy of liberal positions - since after all, the editor, no less, of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is freely expressing all these doctrinal deviations!.
Cardinal Schönborn said clergy had often primarily protected perpetrators of abuse instead of the victims.
“It was said in the Church that we must be able to forgive, but that was a false understanding of compassion,” the cardinal insisted.
Since the Groer affair 15 years ago, however, the Austrian Church had appointed an ever-increasing number of lay people, especially women, to investigate abuse cases. However this new openness on the part of the Church was not shared by everyone in the Vatican, he said.
Asked if he thought celibacy was one of the causes of clerical sex abuse, Cardinal Schönborn said he had no answer and psychotherapists were divided on the issue.
Asked how he would rate the Church’s loss of credibility due to the abuse “tsunami” on a scale of 1 to 5, the cardinal said, “In Ireland the situation is catastrophic – almost a 5. In Austria it is dramatic – I’d say a 3.”
The Vatican press spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, praised the Austrian Church for its openness in dealing with the clerical abuse crisis and told the Austrian daily Kurier on Monday that
Cardinal Sodano’s words at Easter were “certainly not
the wisest”.
That remark by Fr. Lombardi was certainly uncalled for. All he had to do if he had been asked about it was to quote the entire short sentence in which Cardinal Sodano used the mistranslated term - without having to make his own judgment. It's not the first time Fr. Lombardi makes off-the-cuff statements that are not founded in fact,
During the Pope's vicit to the Holy Land, he told newsmen that Joseph Ratzinger 'never, never, never' belonged to the Hitler Youth - and had to apologize for his blatant mistake later. And just yesterday, in his weekly editorial (which was surely not off-the-cuff, he attributed statements from Cardinal Bertone to Cardinal Ratzinger about the 'third secret' of Fatima.
Overwork is no excuse for making these mistakes. I still give Fr. Lombardi the benefit of the doubt, but coupled with his apparent reluctance to speak to the Pope directly when he must about the ponderous issues that he must pronounce upon, I am not very hopeful.
But back to Cardinal Schoenborn who is fast becoming a loose cannon - in terms of both doctrine and discipline. He is not helping the Pope now by inflaming the media's Schadenfreude in seeing top cardinals behaving this way and citing it as a sign of serious trouble in the heart of Benedict XVI's Curia. (In a recent comment, I pointed out that only seven out of the top 24 Curial positions are still in the hands of John Paul II holdovers - and that the other 17 are without a doubt Ratzingerian. So, even for Schoenborn to condemn the Curia wholesale is rash, to say the least, and at worst, unthinking and unfair.)
And much as I have never found Cardinal Sodano to be particularly sympathetic, I do admire him for having given the Easter Sunday tribute, for what he said, and for how he said it. [Full translation of the tribute posted on Page 87 of this thread.]
Sodano's responsibility and/or culpability in the matter of coddling characters like Maciel and Groer are for now a matter of active conjecture, and if he has blame to bear, as Schoenborn says he has in the case of Groer, he must bear the blame and do penance for it. (In the same way as Schoenborn must do penance for the unintended - but surely not unforeseen - consequences of pushing his self-centered maverick act too far. And as I would like to think Cardinal Law, being a man of God, has been doing all these years in ways known only to God.)
Sodano now finds himself in a position almost like Cardinal Law, except that, being retired from office, he is beyond reward (if not beyond reproof), as one gets to be dean of the College of Cardinals by virtue of age and seniority, not because of any special merit, although they must be formally elected... It was all part of Divine Providence that Cardinal Ratzinger was Dean at the time that he was! Remember, he only took over when his older African 'classmate' in the 1977 consistory, Cardinal Gantin, decided he wanted to go back to Benin when he reached 80 in 2002. The dean of cardinals has to reside in Rome.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/05/2010 20:06]