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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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27/03/2010 21:03
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See preceding page for earlier entries today, 3/27/10.






The Church enters Holy Week
with prayers for children
and those in charge of them

Translated from
the Italian service of


March 27, 2010


"For children and young people and for those who are working to educate and protect them". This will be one of the prayer intentions offered at the Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square tomorrow to be presided over by Pope Benedict XVI.

The prayer condenses the sentiment in the Church today during a difficult period when the scourge of pedophile priests is very much on the minds of everyone.

On the question of abuse of minors by members of thr clergy, let us listen to Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican press director and director of Vatican Radio and CTV:


The question of sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy continues to receive great attention in the media of many countries, particularly in Europe and in North America, especially in the past week after the publication of the Holy Father's letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

It is not surprising. The subject is something that in and by itself draws media attention. But the way in which the Church faces the problem itself is crucial for her moral credibility.

In fact, the cases presented to public attention these days generally took place some time ago - even decades back. But to acknowledge them and and try to make amends with the victims is the price for re-establshing justice and of that 'purification of the memory' which can allow the Church to face the future with a new commitment, as well as with humility and confidence.

Numerous positive signals from the various episcopal conferences, bishops and Catholic institutions from nations in five continents contribute to this confidence - such as the instructions for the correct management and prevention of abuse cases have been reaffirmed, updated and/or renewed in Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada, etc.

Particularly good news is the seventh annual report on the appplication in the United States of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.

Without indulging in inappropriate complacency, one cannot fail to acknowledge the extraordinary preventive efforts taken by the Church in the United States in terms of courses of formation and training not just for the young, but for all the pastoral and educational workers in the parishes.

One must take note that the number of accusations of sexual abuse in the United States decreased in 2009 by 30% compared to the previous year - and most of these complaints were for incidents that took place more than 30 years ago.

Without going into detail, it must be acknowledged that the decisive measures that have been taken and continue to be in force have proven to be effective. The Church in the United States is on a significant course of self-renewal.

This seems to us important news in the light of recent media attacks against the Church which have undoubtedly caused damage to the image of the Church.

But a non-superficial observation will not miss the fact that the authority of the Pope and the intense and consistent commitment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are far from weakened by these attacks, but more determined than ever to sustain and orient the bishops and the national churches in fighting this scourge and eliminate it wherever it is manifested.

The recent letter of the Holy Father to the Church in Ireland is an intense testimonial that can contribute to prepare the future through a path of 'healing, renewal and reparation'.

With humility and confidence, in a spirit of penance and of hope, the Church enters Holy Week tomorrow, asking for mercy and grace from the Lord who suffers and rises again for all of us.




The moment I saw the title of the following Op-Ed piece by John Allen for the New York Times, my blood pressure shot up and stayed stratospheric as I read through the piece. It awakens - and typifies - all the bitter objections I have to his hopelessly equivocal treatment of Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict really has no one to stand up for him fair and square in the New York Times, which depends on John Allen and David Gibson as risible pretexts to counteract or at least neutralize their pure anti-Benedict venom. Both are too invested in projecting an image of objectivity to their liberal buddies but making sure it is just an image while they ultimately promote the liberal bias.

Compare this pusillanimous piece by Allen with the firm certainty of Vittorio Messori about Benedict XVI's integrity in his article for Corriere della Sera today (see preceding page), or the articles and blogs written by Andrea Tornielli and Paolo Rodari, to name two writers in the secular Italian press who have always been unwavering in the faith they repose in Benedict XVI, and always unequivocal in their support for him. No ifs, buts and maybes. It is possible to be objective and take a moral position, not sit on the fence and call that being objective, as Allen does.

BTW, most of the Italian Vaticanistas, bless them, are not buying any of the New York Times crap from Wisconsin and Munich. John Allen, on the other hand, is not just a satisfied customer but also a willing door-to-door peddler for the crap, whose stink of malice and untruth unfortunately overpowers the sweeteners he tries to serve it with! Sweetened crap - the very thought is revolting - is still crap!



A papal conversion
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
From the Op-Ed page

March 27, 2010


DENVER - IN light of recent revelations, Pope Benedict XVI now seems to symbolize the tremendous failure by the Catholic Church to crack down on the sexual abuse of children.

Both the Pope’s brief stint as a bishop in Germany 30 years ago and his quarter-century as a top Vatican official are being scoured for records of abusive priests whom he failed to stop, and each case seems to strengthen the indictment.

For example, considerable skepticism surrounds the Vatican’s insistence that in 1980 the Pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, was unaware of a decision to transfer a known pedophile priest to his diocese and give him duties in a parish.

In some ways, the question of what he knew at the time is almost secondary, since it happened on his watch and ultimately he has to bear the responsibility.


So in the first four paragraphs alone, Allen loads up all the negatives in his view, that also serve to reinforce the WRONG WRONG WRONG impressions already generated by the media about the Pope. Forgive the length of this comment on the above, because all these negatives have to be rebutted:
1. Now, Benedict symbolizes the failure of the Church to deal with the problem???? Right off the bat, Allen states the fallacious premise of his presentation.
2. 'Each case seems to strengthen the indictment'??? Because Allen uses the hedge-verb 'seems', he thinks that gives him an out? No, it's his way of signalling to the reader, 'I'm really on your side - look, I'm stating your conclusions for you!"
3. a) 'Considerable skepticism' by who? Allen's recent articles indicate he is with the rest of the media in displaying this skepticism - you can almost see him rolling his eyes - as to what Archbishop Ratzinger knew about the Hullerman case.
b) 'Unaware of a decision to transfer a known pedophile priest to his diocese' - That is a blatant falsehood, and Allen should be ashamed to misrepresent a simple and obvious fact. From the start, the Archdiocese said that the Archbishop approved giving parish lodgings to a priest whom the Diocese of Essen sent to Munich for therapy. What he did not approve, order, or know about, according to the Archdiocese, was the priest's assignment to pastoral duties.

Whether he learned about it afterwards is what cannot be established at this point, given the facts as we have been told so far. And I reiterate here that regardless of what was the culture of the day and its consequent SOP in Church practice in 1980, I do not think that Joseph Ratzinger would have knowingly approved of a sex offender taking on parish duties that necesarily involve contact with children.

4. What happened 'on his watch' for which 'he has to bear the responsibility?' That his Vicar made an assignment he did not approve of and did not know about? That's been conceded. But even so, strictly 'on his watch', if Allen will be technical about it - i.e. from February 1980 when the priest came to Munich, to February 1982, when Joseph Ratzinger left Munich for Rome, the priest apparently committed no offense, so nothing bad happened 'on his watch'.

Sure, the priest could potentially have sinned again, but the fact is, he apparently did not, as of February 15, 1982 - or we would have heard about it already from the New York Times 'investigators'. Apparently, however, Allen would hold Cardinal Ratzinger responsible also for the fact that in 1986, the priest did sin again and was caught out and convicted, and then continued carrying out pastoral duties after that till one week ago? None of that was any longer 'under his watch'!


However, all the criticism is obscuring something equally important: For anyone who knows the Vatican’s history on this issue, Benedict XVI isn’t just part of the problem. He’s also a major chapter in the solution. [OK, he's done for a while playing the bad cop. Now, he's good cop! Let's see how 'good'...]

To understand that, it’s necessary to wind the clock back a decade. Before then, no Vatican office had clear responsibility for cases of priests accused of sexual abuse, which instead were usually handled — and often ignored — at the diocesan level.

In 2001, however, Pope John Paul II assigned responsibility to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s all-important doctrinal office, which was headed by Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal.

As a result, bishops were required to send their case files to Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. By all accounts, he studied them with care, making him one of the few churchmen anywhere in the world to have read the documentation on virtually every Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse. The experience gave him a familiarity with the pervasiveness of the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic Church can claim.

And driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as “filth” in the church, Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have undergone a transformation. From that point forward, he and his staff were determined to get something done.

One crucial issue Cardinal Ratzinger had to resolve was how to handle the Church’s internal disciplinary procedures for abusive priests. Early on, reformers worried that Rome would insist on full trials in Church courts before a priest could be removed from ministry or defrocked. Those trials were widely seen as slow, cumbersome and uncertain, yet many in the Vatican thought they were needed to protect the due process rights of the accused.

In the end, Cardinal Ratzinger and his team approved direct administrative action in roughly 60 percent of the cases. Having sorted through the evidence, they concluded that in most cases swift action was more important than preserving the church’s legal formalities.

Among Vatican insiders, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith became the primary force pushing for a tough response to the crisis. Other departments sometimes regarded the “zero tolerance” policy as an over-reaction, not to mention a distortion of the Church’s centuries-long legal tradition, in which punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and in which bishops and other superiors have great leeway in meting out discipline.

After being elected Pope, Benedict made the abuse cases a priority. One of his first acts was to discipline two high-profile clerics against whom sex abuse allegations had been hanging around for decades, but had previously been protected at the highest levels [Italian priest Gino Burresi and Legionaries founder Marcial Maciel, a Mexican.]

He is also the first Pope ever to meet with victims of abuse, which he did in the United States and Australia in 2008. He spoke openly about the crisis some five times during his 2008 visit to the United States. And he became the first Pope to devote an entire document to the sex-abuse crisis, his pastoral letter to Ireland.

What we are left with are two distinct views of the scandal. The outside world is outraged, rightly, at the Church’s decades of ignoring the problem.

[Again, re-stating the 'outside world's conclusion and thereby amplifying it! And what has any other institution done, pray tell, to deal with the problem which is much more frequent in other sectors of society, including other religions, than among Catholic clergy????

Why do the media - and consequently, public opinion which is shaped so much by the all-pervasive media - only see the mote in the Church's eye? Any objective presentation of this crisis in the Church should point out the beam in other's eyes as well. A good researcher can easily come up with the pertinent comparative figures.]


But those who understand the glacial pace at which change occurs in the Vatican understand that Benedict, admittedly late in the game but more than any other high-ranking official, saw the gravity of the situation and tried to steer a new course.

Be that as it may, Benedict now faces a difficult situation inside the Church. From the beginning, the sexual abuse crisis has been composed of two interlocking but distinct scandals: the priests who abused, and the bishops who failed to clean it up.

The impact of Benedict’s post-2001 conversion has been felt mostly at that first level, and he hasn’t done nearly as much to enforce new accountability measures for bishops.

That, in turn, is what makes revelations about his past so potentially explosive. Can Benedict credibly ride herd on other bishops if his own record, at least before 2001, is no better? The Church’s legitimacy rests in large part on that question
.

OK, having played the good cop, Allen winds up as stern prosecutor, and like all prosecutors, he presumes his 'suspect' guilty until proven innocent.
1) Post-2001 conversion? Does he mean that before 2001, Joseph Ratzinger didn't care a rat's tail about sexual abuses by priests, and then suddenly had an epiphany in 2001 that "Oh my God! they are committing mortal sins!" 2001 was not Ratzinger's 'conversion' but that of the institutional Church with respect to treating sexual offenses by priests.

2. "If his own record, before 2001, is no better?" What record are we talking about here? Two cases, so far, both of which have very peculiar, almost unique, circumstances with respect to Joseph Ratzinger's direct involvement that they do not fall into the usual categories of 'faults' associated with these cases.

In more than a month now of no-expenses-spared spadework by investigative teams doing the moral equivalent of mucking about in septic tanks and teasing out the least spot of mildew on any toilet grouting, in the hope of uncovering something really damaging to Joseph Ratzinger - or at least, something they can spin to seem damaging - all they have come up with is
a) Fr. Hullerman, and the tenuous speculation that the Archbishop may have known he was being given pastoral duties although he was a known sex offender; and
b) Fr. Murphy in Wisconsin, about whose case the worse they can say, as substantiated fact, is that the CDF - read Ratzinger via Bertone - decided not to defrock 1) a dying man 2) who had apparently not committed any sex offense during 3) 24 years of retirement living in his mother's house - and 4) who did die a few months after the CDF recommended that restrictive sanctions be imposed, rather than a canonical trial 35 years after the events he was charged with, which the police had failed to prove when they investigated then!

The circumstances are definitely justifiable, or at least extenuating, for the CDF. Which, of course, does not make Murphy any less guilty because he admitted many of the offenses he was charged with. And the impression is that he left the diocese holding the bag for paying off some of his victims.

But, a slight digression: Does anyone not find it strange that the Bishop of Milwaukee - who a few years later would admit to having carried on a homosexual affair with a man he tried to pay off using church funds - would reopen a case closed in 1974 with no charges filed by the police and the priest sent into retirement twenty years later? Did the Diocese of Milwaukee have no other problems to think about?


Yet to paint Benedict XVI as uniquely villainous doesn’t do justice to his record. The Pope may still have much ground to cover, but he deserves credit for how far he’s come. [Gee, thanks for the condescension! You can only condescend if you think you are much better, or you think the other party bears some guilt. Obviously, Allen does, if we go by the prosecutorial parts of his exercise in trying to 'seem fair'.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/03/2010 22:54]
28/03/2010 03:34
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re:
Yes, I too was very annoyed reading it. He seems to me to have his own conversion experience every few weeks depending upon the publication he is invited to contribute to or the TV station or radio show he is called to appear on. He has been on the Anderson Cooper 360 show on CNN two times in the last week, last night’s appearance by John left me very angry, as per usual he just bottled it as he does so often on TV in the US. Anderson suggested near the end that maybe the Pope should take questions from the media as politicians do, and John just nodded and finished by saying that things have really got to change.
28/03/2010 04:03
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Maureen Dowd
If you think John's article is bad, it's probably not such a good idea to read Maureen Dowd's latest opinion piece in the New York Times.
28/03/2010 04:07
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Some liberal Catholics are thinking: It's payback time, Ratzinger!
By Damian Thompson : March 28th, 2010

There is still no good evidence that Pope Benedict XVI is seriously implicated in the atrocious child abuse scandals that are – rightly – blackening the reputation of the institutions of the Catholic Church. But still the attempts to join the dots continue. To put it bluntly, there is an increasingly frantic media campaign against the Pope in which headlines are being written first and then facts shaved to fit them.

It is also clear that many prominent liberal Catholics are turning a blind eye to this media vendetta because they don’t like Pope Benedict. They are happy for him to take the rap for diocesan cover-ups initiated, in some cases, by liberal prelates who are grateful for the opportunity to pass the buck to the one man who has done more than any other to rectify the Church’s lax procedures – Joseph Ratzinger.

Some Catholics, such as our blogger Cristina Odone, have protested against the unjust treatment of the Pope. God bless her, for I know that Cristina is not sympathetic to some of the Pope’s views; yet she recognises a stitch-up when she sees one.

I have to ask myself: if a liberal, liturgically wet Pope was persecuted in this way, would I stick up for him? I can’t be sure, but how shameful if I did not.

If I was Benedict XVI, I’d be asking myself if I even wanted to visit Britain this autumn. For, when he does, he will meet English bishops, Catholic journalists and self-appointed spokesmen for the Catholic community who did not dare offend liberal opinion by defending him properly, or whose judgment was clouded by personal dislike of the Pope and his agenda.

Some Catholics – not many, but they are prominent – are actually thinking: it’s payback time, Ratzinger. If we can make this mud stick, then we can continue to sabotage your liturgical reforms. In other words, they are using the victims of clerical child abuse to fight internal political battles. Why am I not surprised?

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100031730/some-liberal-catholics-are-thinking-its-payback-time-ra...
28/03/2010 04:14
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A Response to the New York Times
by Father Raymond J. de Souza : Saturday, March 27, 2010

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.

Before addressing the false substance of the story, the following circumstances are worthy of note:

• The New York Times story had two sources. First, lawyers who currently have a civil suit pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. One of the lawyers, Jeffrey Anderson, also has cases in the United States Supreme Court pending against the Holy See. He has a direct financial interest in the matter being reported.

• The second source was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, retired archbishop of Milwaukee. He is the most discredited and disgraced bishop in the United States, widely known for mishandling sexual-abuse cases during his tenure, and guilty of using $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to pay hush money to a former homosexual lover who was blackmailing him. Archbishop Weakland had responsibility for the Father Murphy case between 1977 and 1998, when Father Murphy died. He has long been embittered that his maladministration of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee earned him the disfavor of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, long before it was revealed that he had used parishioners’ money to pay off his clandestine lover. He is prima facie not a reliable source.

• Laurie Goodstein, the author of the New York Times story, has a recent history with Archbishop Weakland. Last year, upon the release of the disgraced archbishop’s autobiography, she wrote an unusually sympathetic story that buried all the most serious allegations against him (New York Times, May 14, 2009).

• A demonstration took place in Rome on Friday, coinciding with the publication of the New York Times story. One might ask how American activists would happen to be in Rome distributing the very documents referred to that day in the New York Times. The appearance here is one of a coordinated campaign, rather than disinterested reporting.

It’s possible that bad sources could still provide the truth. But compromised sources scream out for greater scrutiny. Instead of greater scrutiny of the original story, however, news editors the world over simply parroted the New York Times piece. Which leads us the more fundamental problem: The story is not true, according to its own documentation.

The New York Times made available on its own website the supporting documentation for the story. In those documents, Cardinal Ratzinger himself does not take any of the decisions that allegedly frustrated the trial. Letters are addressed to him; responses come from his deputy. Even leaving that aside, though, the gravamen of the charge — that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office impeded some investigation — is proven utterly false.

The documents show that the canonical trial or penal process against Father Murphy was never stopped by anyone. In fact, it was only abandoned days before Father Murphy died. Cardinal Ratzinger never took a decision in the case, according to the documents. His deputy, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, suggested, given that Father Murphy was in failing health and a canonical trial is a complicated matter, that more expeditious means be used to remove him from all ministry.

To repeat: The charge that Cardinal Ratzinger did anything wrong is unsupported by the documentation on which the story was based. He does not appear in the record as taking any decision. His office, in the person of his deputy, Archbishop Bertone, agreed that there should be full canonical trial. When it became apparent that Father Murphy was in failing health, Archbishop Bertone suggested more expeditious means of removing him from any ministry.

Furthermore, under canon law at the time, the principal responsibility for sexual-abuse cases lay with the local bishop. Archbishop Weakland had from 1977 onwards the responsibility of administering penalties to Father Murphy. He did nothing until 1996. It was at that point that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office became involved, and it subsequently did nothing to impede the local process.

The New York Times flatly got the story wrong, according to its own evidence. Readers may want to speculate on why.

Here is the relevant timeline, drawn from the documents the New York Times posted on its own website.

15 May 1974

Abuse by Father Lawrence Murphy is alleged by a former student at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. In fact, accusations against Father Murphy go back more than a decade.

12 September 1974

Father Murphy is granted an official “temporary sick leave” from St. John’s School for the Deaf. He leaves Milwaukee and moves to northern Wisconsin, in the Diocese of Superior, where he lives in a family home with his mother. He has no official assignment from this point until his death in 1998. He does not return to live in Milwaukee. No canonical penalties are pursued against him.

9 July 1980

Officials in the Diocese of Superior write to officials in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee about what ministry Father Murphy might undertake in Superior. Archbishop Rembert Weakland, archbishop of Milwaukee since 1977, has been consulted and says it would be unwise to have Father Murphy return to ministry with the deaf community. There is no indication that Archbishop Weakland foresees any other measures to be taken in the case.

17 July 1996

More than 20 years after the original abuse allegations, Archbishop Weakland writes to Cardinal Ratzinger, claiming that he has only just discovered that Father Murphy’s sexual abuse involved the sacrament of confession — a still more serious canonical crime. The allegations about the abuse of the sacrament of confession were in the original 1974 allegations. Weakland has been archbishop of Milwaukee by this point for 19 years.

It should be noted that for sexual-abuse charges, Archbishop Weakland could have proceeded against Father Murphy at any time. The matter of solicitation in the sacrament of confession required notifying Rome, but that too could have been done as early as the 1970s.

10 September 1996

Father Murphy is notified that a canonical trial will proceed against him. Until 2001, the local bishop had authority to proceed in such trials. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is now beginning the trial. It is noteworthy that at this point, no reply has been received from Rome indicating that Archbishop Weakland knew he had that authority to proceed.

24 March 1997

Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, advises a canonical trial against Father Murphy.

14 May 1997

Archbishop Weakland writes to Archbishop Bertone to say that the penal process against Father Murphy has been launched, and notes that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has advised him to proceed even though the statute of limitations has expired. In fact, there is no statute of limitations for solicitation in the sacrament of confession.

Throughout the rest of 1997 the preparatory phases of penal process or canonical trial is underway. On 5 January 1998 the Tribunal of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee says that an expedited trial should be concluded within a few months.

12 January 1998

Father Murphy, now less than eight months away from his death, appeals to Cardinal Ratzinger that, given his frail health, he be allowed to live out his days in peace.

6 April 1998

Archbishop Bertone, noting the frail health of Father Murphy and that there have been no new charges in almost 25 years, recommends using pastoral measures to ensure Father Murphy has no ministry, but without the full burden of a penal process. It is only a suggestion, as the local bishop retains control.

13 May 1998

The Bishop of Superior, where the process has been transferred to and where Father Murphy has lived since 1974, rejects the suggestion for pastoral measures. Formal pre-trial proceedings begin on 15 May 1998, continuing the process already begun with the notification that had been issued in September 1996.

30 May 1998

Archbishop Weakland, who is in Rome, meets with officials at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, including Archbishop Bertone but not including Cardinal Ratzinger, to discuss the case. The penal process is ongoing. No decision taken to stop it, but given the difficulties of a trial after 25 years, other options are explored that would more quickly remove Father Murphy from ministry.

19 August 1998

Archbishop Weakland writes that he has halted the canonical trial and penal process against Father Murphy and has immediately begun the process to remove him from ministry — a quicker option.

21 August 1998

Father Murphy dies. His family defies the orders of Archbishop Weakland for a discreet funeral.

corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDkxYmUzMTQ1YWUyMzRkMzg4Y2RiN2UyOWIz...



28/03/2010 06:24
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Father Z
Quite a surprising post by Father Z two days ago. Of course he's made something of a return to his usual self after reading Damian Thompson's blog post.

wdtprs.com/blog/2010/03/the-poisons-that-lurk-in-the-mud/
28/03/2010 11:22
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Mr. Allen



I think John Allen loves the sound of his own voice too much, respectively the image of his rather smug grin on TV screens! (shudder)

His record on Joseph Ratzinger is completely messed up - without any consistency whatsoever - seemingly always according to whatever benefits him most.
Surely the NYT is an irresistible lure for somebody like him. Unquestionably everybody who has half a brain knows what the conditions for the release of that piece were!
What a push-over he is! What he did is simply despicable! Does he even dare to go to confession!
The man gives me the creeps in a BIG way!

In terms of the NYT – don’t know if slipping into tabloid status is going to safe them. I hope NOT!

Teresa: you might want to check out kath.net – it seems that your terminology was adopted by Armin Schwibach of ZENIT!


28/03/2010 13:38
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Fox News Website
I've been carefully viewing a number of websites over the last week and I can see that the Fox News Website has become unusally hostile to the Catholic Church, the kind of articles you'd see on the London Times website make top billing.
28/03/2010 13:54
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Blog Coverage of Pope Benedict
I'm not talking about the liberal blogs, but about Fr. Z, who seems to be about ready to throw Pope Benedict under the bus over his "record" in Munich-Friesing. What record? One priest? I posted a bit on my own blog, Gregorian Rite Catholic.

And the idea that no one has brought up John Paul's record on this is nothing short of astonishing. Twenty-seven years and nearly total inaction until 2001, when all of this was transferred to the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger. And one article puts all the inaction under the rubric that John Paul's attitude was formed by his life under communism. When the first scandals arose in the USA, Ireland, and Australia, what was his answer then? These weren't communist countries.

My big question is: why has all of this come up NOW? What is it about 2010? Surely, all of these abuse cases have been well known for many years.
28/03/2010 14:11
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If a certain Jesuit in Germany back late last year hadn't decided to open an investigation into abuse at that prestigious school, then none of it would have come out nor for that matter would investigations have been launched in other countries across Europe. If Governments throughout Europe were to do likewise, as Sweden is in the process of doing, abuse would pop up all over the place. The real question now is whether it will all eventually come out or will those who could inflict massive damage, if given the chance, on Governments die before they get the opportunity to tell their stories. I fear the latter will happen.
28/03/2010 14:32
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Renewal
I predict that the Catholic Church in Europe will recover from this in a short period of time, about a year, no more. What the sudden resurgence will do is frighten the life out of atheists and other enemies of the Church. The question will no doubt be asked; what can't it recover from? In any case Europe is in need of renewal and so I think this is a great opportunity to revive the Church. I'm entirely optimistic about the situation.
29/03/2010 00:18
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Benedict XVI: 5 years under attack
From Regensburg to the Lefebvrians, from Vatican II to pedophilia.
Without the media shield of John Paul II,
the professor Pope governs with 'thought and prayer',
fragile-looking but strong on substance

by PAOLO RODARI
Translated from

March 27, 2010


Last March 10, while Germany was awash in the waves of newly uncovered cases of priests who had abused minors, Benedict XVI was in St. Peter's Square, telling the faithful his idea of governing the Church.

He took the example of St. Bonaventure, for whom "governing was not simply doing something, but above all, thinking and praying".

"For Bonaventure," he said, "the Church cannot be governed only through commands and structures, but by guiding and enlightening souls".

Since March 10 to the present, Benedict XVI has not had occasion to return to the subject. But in the face of accusations for his governing of the Church which have been mounting in recent days - the last assault being from the New York Times which has reported on the cases of two priest-offenders, the American Lawrence Murphy (deceased in 1998) and the German Peter Hullermann, to question Joseph Ratzinger's own actions, as Archbishop of Munich and as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1982, with regard to pedophile priests - his response has been to put into practice Bonaventure's words: most significantly by sharing his own 'enlightened thinking' to the faithful in the Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

It has always been so during his Pontificate, which marks its fifth anniversary on April 19.

Words are the primary way through which this Pope guides and orients the Church, well aware that the transmission of authentic Christian thought is the true 'sword' carried aloft in the world.

"Let us be clear about one thing," says veteran Vaticanista Luigi Accattoli, "this is not new. Furious reactions to a Pope's thinking have taken place before, and recently."

What is the trigger then?

"The idea that this Pope wants to turn back, to the time before Vatican II, to the supposed 'dark ages' of the Tridentine Mass. That his words are retrograde compared to contemporary culture, to the progressivism of the new times.

"Paul VI wrote Humanae vitae, and after the first years when the liberal media saw him as the conciliar Pope,
A Pope of hope, all of a sudden he was the devil!

"'The Pope and the devil', said a headline by Vittorio Gorresio in 1973. 'Paul VI's turnabout', wrote the Vaticanista of L'espresso in 1978, the ex-priest Carlo Falconi. What he meant by turnabout was the 'pre-Conciliar' stamp that they believed Papa Montini now wanted to place on his Pontificate!

"The same accusations were turned on John Paul II. Until 1989, Wojtyla represented hope for everyone. After the Berlin Wall fell, his thought was suddenly questionable, and the criticisms started. [Hmm... I can't judge that one way or the other. I am not familiar with the evidence nor the timeline]

"But for the media, the most retrograde of all is Papa Ratzinger. 'Restoration!' - all the newspapers headlined when his Rapporto sulla Fede [English edition, The Ratzinger Report] with Vittorio Messori came out in 1985. To them, the word is near synonymous with infamy."

Remember December 22, 2005. Benedict XVI was giving his first Christmas address to the Roman Curia.

And he launched a challenge to those who wish a Church that is not so much 'for the world' or 'close to the world' but 'of the world'.

Ratzinger spoke of Vatican-II. He said it was not a rupture with the past. He said that whoever advocated this interpretation was simply aligning with "the mass media and even with part of modern theology".

"On that December 22," says one of the most veteran of Vaticanistas, Benny Lai, "the media understood definitively who Joseph Ratzinger is. They all knew this is who they had to deal with. Until then, there were still those who hoped that the Joseph Ratzinger of Vatican-II, the one they thought to be progressive, would surface in the Pope. They were wrong.

"They were wrong when, during the Council, they considered him a progressive theologian. Even Cardinal Giuseppe Siri [Lai wrote a biography of the late great conservative Archbishop of Genoa, who had been the leading conservative papabile in the Conclaves that elected the two John Pauls] thought that - he did not have a good first impression of him. But then Ratzinger proved to be anything but the label they had tagged on him. It is this supposed change in his orientation that even today raises a lot of hackles in the Church and outside it."

From that address to the Roman Curia to the present, 'Ratzinger thought' has manifested itself in so many other ways that have triggered indignation in different circles.

"Of course," observes Benny Lai, "Ratzinger started with a handicap compared to Wojtyla, because for him, the crowd serves no therapeutic function as it did for the Polish Pope. But the problem for his critics is really with what he says. Crowds or no crowds, what he says annoys them and generates aversion. Even on the pedophilia issue, how much annoyance there is, within the Vatican and within the Church, that this Pope continues to insist on the rule of priestly celibacy!"

Not that any of their annoyance bothers him. When he was refused by a small minority the right to speak at La Sapienza University, he did not show up, all right, but he sent the text of his address in which he clearly said, "I do not want to impose the faith". Which became the headline in all the newspapers.

The same thing happened when he went to Africa last year. He said that AIDS cannot be overcome by distributing condoms.

Let the skies fall down! The secular intelligentsia of Western Europe rushed to the attack. Even if he did state a fact: to fight AIDS, man has to be educated to consider his body as other than just a vessel for pleasure. In short,
the opposite of the contemporary narcissistic self-referential idea of sexuality.

Benedict had experienced an earlier reaction of like outrage, after an academic lecture in Regensburg in 2006. He spoke on the relationship between faith and reason. He touched the nexus between religion and civilization, saying that to convert others by the use of force was contrary to reason and therefore to God.

But his citation of a sentence by Manuel II Paleologue - who said that Mohammed had brought nothing but "inhuman and evil things, such as his instruction to spread Islam with the sword" - triggered off indignation from the Muslim world.

"That episode," says Piero Gheddo, missionary, journalist and writer for PIME, the Vatican institute for foreign missions, "was emblematic of what this Pontificate is. Part of the Muslim world was indignant. And yet the Pope's words are remembered. Because he says truths that are inescapable.

"In fact, Regensburg has borne much fruit. One year ago, for example, I was in Bangladesh. Several Muslim thinkers were studying the Regensburg address for what it said about the relationship that must exist between faith and reason."

Not just his words have caused his critics to flinch, but also decisions he has made that go the heart of the life of the Church itself. Among this is his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum which liberalized the use of the traditional Mass, and lifting the excommunication of four bishops who had been consecrated in 1988 by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without the Pope's concurrence.

Ratzinger's revival of the traditional Mass angered the Vatican-II progressives, especially in France.

"What do you say to those in France who fear that Summorum Pontificum marks a step backward from the great initiatives of Vatican II?", he was asked in September 2008, enroute to Paris.

"It is unfounded," he said. "Because this motu proprio is simply a gesture of tolerance, with pastoral ends, for persons who were formed or who grew up in that liturgy, who love it, who know it well, and wish to follow that liturgy".

The accusation always comes to this: that this Pope wants to bring back the Church to its pre-Vatican II status. Therefore, he is against modernity.

So it was when he lifted the Lefebvrian bishops' excommunication. And the Pope explained it simply. First, he made it clear that the Magisterium of the Church "cannot be frozen as of 1962" (the year Vatican II opened). But on the other hand, "whoever wishes to be obedient to Vatican II must accept the faith that was professed for centuries - one cannot cut off the roots through which the tree lives".

Always Vatican II. For the Jewish world, the Pope's opening to the Lefebvrians is a return to a Church that is ‘hostile’ to them. One of the four Lefebvrian bishops is Richard Williamson, who has made statements minimizing or denying the Holocaust.

Benedict XVI had to reaffirm explicitly something that is obvious - that he does not share Williamson's views in any way. But many Jews are still unhappy.

In addition, his visit to Auschwitz and his pilgrimage to the Holy Land were highly criticized by Jews in some of Europe's largest cities who think that anything he has said about the Jews is, at the very least, insufficient.

From the German Pope, they demand more, even if he has done more than any theologian to bring Christians and Jews together. But despite all the pressures, the Pope has kept to his own course, and less than a month before visiting the Synagogue of Rome, he signed the decree proclaiming the heroic virtues of Pope Pius XII, a step closer to beatification. The Jewish world reacted. But the Pope had decided, and at the Synagogue, he told the Jews simply - without mentioning Pius XII: "(During the war), the Holy See carried out acts of assistance to the Jews, though these were often discreet and hidden".

Part of the Protestant world certainly does not understand Ratzinger. Last November, the Vatican issued the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus which provides for groups of Anglicans desiring to return to the Roman Church.

The Pope explained this gesture as a response to requests made by various Anglican groups. But many Anglicans and even part of the Catholic world have refused to understand the Pope's decision and have accused him of poaching in waters 'only of the right', namely those sectors of Christianity who are unhappy with the progressivist and 'liberal' trends of their own Churches.

Last February 1, meeting with the bishops of England and Wales who were making their ad-limina visit, the Pope said: "I ask you to be generous in carrying out the directives of the Apostolic Constitution in order to help those Anglican groups who wish to come into full communion with the Catholic Church. I am convinced that these groups will be a blessing for all the Church".

Piero Gheddo says: "I have gone around the world and have known various Anglican groups. Why do they want to return to communion with Rome? Because a Church that opens to the world indiscriminately, accepting female ordination and gay marriage, makes no sense. The Pope is fighting to safeguard a Church anchored on truth, and because of this, he has enemies".



HEY GUYS! Thanks for keeping the thread 'blazing'... I woke up early this morning to watch the Palm Sunday Mass, and just as I got EWTN on, my screen suddenly went blank, my phone went dead, and my modem to Time Warner Cable, which provides me with TV, phone and Internet service, had no lights on.... With my cell phone, I called up to find out why, and just my luck, I was within the radius of a service outage that they were still trying to troubleshoot... Now, 13 hours later, I'm back on... so I have to scramble and get myself updated first through my usual sources what else has been happening, and I suppose I will spend the rest of the night trying to catch up....

Meanwhile, I was working on the above translation last night when I couldn't manage to keep from dozing off.... I finished translating but I didn't have the juice to read it through and make my corrections, typos and language and all, so I carefully copied the post to WORD, went to bed...and here it is....




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I was pleasantly surprised by this... It made me feel like each of us should shout out: 'CATHOLICS OF THE WORLD UNITE! THE SPECTER OF SECULAR UNREASON IS HAUNTING THE GLOBE...."


Look! Catholics are
still going to Mass

by Isabelle de Gaulmyn

Mar 28, 2010 15:18 EDT


The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Isabelle de Gaulmyn is Religion Editor of the Paris Catholic daily newspaper La Croix and author of Benoît XVI, Le pape incompris (Benedict XVI, The Misunderstood Pope). She blogs in French at Une foi par semaine, where this first appeared.


Are Catholics masochists? After all that’s been happening these days, this looks like the question to ask. There were probably more than 3 million Catholics in France who went to church to celebrate Palm Sunday today. And during this Holy Week, millions more will to prepare for Easter. If the news we hear is anything to go by, these Catholics must be either mad or masochistic.

Why not take advantage of this Sunday to go fishing or play tennis rather than frequent a place full of pedophile priests and leaders who lie and hush up the truth? How can there still be people in the pews, on pilgrimages, in monasteries or volunteering in one of many charities?

And what about the adults who will be baptised as Catholics on Saturday evening?* Are they thoughtless, suicidal or stupid? In short, are Catholics “the blind being led to slaughter,” as was written in a militant secularist pamphlet dropped into my mail box?

These are legitimate questions if we go by the image of the Church found in the media now. It’s no surprise that the media focuses on the real flaws and shortcomings of the Church. But it makes Catholics feel hopeless and hurt to see their Church presented in a way that has little in common with what they experience daily in their own faith communities.

Today, the big problem Catholicism faces may not be secularisation but the Church’s inability to show the rest of society what actually happens in each of its parishes.


You know, if the Catholics in the parishes themselves 'see' it and what they see is good and true and therefore beautiful, then that's good enough! If that happens, no bushel can hide the light of faith and good works and honest lives in each parish and from every Catholic individual and family and institution. And it will somehow reach the larger society. Just as the light of Christ that comes from his Vicar, Benedict XVI, reaches the larger society somehow, despite the media.


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PALM SUNDAY AND THE PASSION OF OUR LORD
25th World Youth Day




At 9:30 Sunday morning, March 28, the Holy Father Benedict XVI presided in St. Peter's Square at the solemn liturgical celebration of Pal Sunday and the Passion of our Lord.

The Pope blessed the palm and olive branches and after the procession of teh Palms, celebrated Mass.

Taking part in the celebration were the young people of Rome and other dioceses for the 25th World Youth Day on the theme, "Good teacher, what should I do to inerhit eternal life?" (Mk 10,17)














There's a Schoenborn surprise somewhere in this convenient wrap-up story....


Pope opens solemn Holy Week
amid sex abuse crisis

By NICOLE WINFIELD



VATICAN CITY. March 28 (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI opened Holy Week on Sunday amid one of the most serious crises facing the church in decades, with protesters in London demanding he resign and calls in Switzerland for a central registry for pedophile priests.

Benedict made no direct mention of the scandal in his Palm Sunday homily. But one of the prayers, recited in Portuguese during Mass, was "for the young and for those charged with educating them and protecting them."

Jesus Christ, Benedict said in his homily, guides the faithful "toward the courage that doesn't let us be intimidated by the chatting of dominant opinions, towards patience that supports others."

Palm Sunday commemorates Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem, and is the start of the church's Holy Week, which includes the Good Friday re-enactment of Christ's crucifixion and death and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

This year, the most solemn week on the Catholic Church's liturgical calendar has been stained by a clerical abuse scandal that has spread across Europe to the pope's native Germany.

In London on Sunday, a few dozen people gathered outside Westminster Cathedral to demand the Pope resign. Demonstrators carried placards saying "Pope? Nope!" and "Don't Turn a Blind Eye."

The Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols insisted the pope wouldn't - and shouldn't - quit. "In fact, it is the other way around," he told BBC television. "He is the one above all else in Rome that has tackled this thing head on."

In Austria, where several cases have come out in recent weeks, the archbishop of Vienna announced the creation of a church-funded but clergy-free and independent commission to look into Austrian abuse claims.

It will be run by a woman, the former governor of Styria province, and is not meant to take the place of a possible state-run investigative commission, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn told public broadcaster ORF on Sunday.

And in Switzerland, Swiss President Doris Leuthard told the weekly SonntagsZeitung that Switzerland should consider creating a central registry of pedophile priests to prevent them from coming into contact with more children.

Church leaders say about 60 people have reported to be victims of priest abuse in Switzerland.

"It doesn't make any difference if the perpetrators are from the secular or spiritual world. Both violate Swiss law," she said. "It's important that pedophile priests, like teachers and other guardians, don't come into contact with children."

The Vatican has been on the defensive amid mounting questions about the pope's handling of sex abuse cases both when he was archbishop of Munich and when he headed the Vatican's doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was Munich archbishop when a priest was allowed to resume pastoral work with children even while receiving therapy for pedophilia. He was subsequently convicted of abusing minors. In addition, a case has come to light in which Ratzinger's deputy at the Congregation told Wisconsin bishops to quash a church trial for a priest alleged to have abused up to 200 deaf boys.

The Vatican insists Ratzinger was unaware of the Munich priest's move to the pastoral job and has defended its handling of the Wisconsin case.

Schoenborn, a close Benedict confidante, defended the pope against suggestions that he was behind church cover-ups, including for the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer. The Austrian church was rocked by allegations in 1995 that Groer molested youths at a monastery in the 1970s.

Schoenborn replaced Groer as archbishop in 1995; but it wasn't until 1998 that, on Vatican orders, Groer relinquished all religious duties and sought exile in Germany. He died in Austria in 2003.

At the time, the Vatican drew sharp criticism from many Austrians for taking three years to act against Groer. Disgust over how the case was handled has been cited as contributing to the exodus of disaffected Austrians from the church.

Schoenborn said Ratzinger had immediately pushed for an investigative commission when abuse allegations against Groer arose. However, others in the Vatican - described by Schoenborn as the "diplomatic track" - did not let this happen.

"I can still very clearly remember the moment when Cardinal Ratzinger sadly told me that the other camp had asserted itself," Schoenborn told ORF.

"To accuse him of being someone who covers things up - having known the Pope for many years, I can say that is certainly not true," he added.

Benedict has only publicly spoken about the scandal in Ireland, writing a letter to the Irish faithful last week in which he chastised Irish bishops for leadership shortcomings and errors in judgment for failing to apply church law to stop abusive priests.

On Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, acknowledged that the way the Church responds to the abuse scandal is "crucial for its moral credibility."

His comments indicated that the Vatican is now looking at the scandal as a way to purify itself so that it can emerge renewed and strengthened. He pointed to the action taken by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops after the clerical abuse scandal erupted there in 2002, instituting tough norms to protect children.

Separately Sunday, a retired Italian cardinal and one-time candidate for the papacy said in comments published in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse that celibacy for priests should be reconsidered.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, former archbishop of Milan and considered one of the more liberal-leaning princes of the Church, was quoted as saying that mandatory chastity for churchmen should be thought over to prevent further abuse cases by clergy and help the Church regain lost trust.

The Vatican has rejected suggestions that celibacy caused the abuse and Benedict has reaffirmed it as a gift to God as recently as this month.

{I'm sorry to have to diss an 83-year-old cardinal, but he is speaking completely from Hans Kueng's illogical playbook! They both ignore objective fact to blame celibacy as the cause of sexual perversion. Has it led Kueng and Cardinal Martini then to become pedophiles? If they have been able to observe celibacy, what makes them think others can't?

How dare they dismiss the heroic renunciation made by the 400,000 (less 3,000 accused ones) Catholic priests of the world, when they chose to become priests, knowing full well they would have to try and live up to their vow of chastity all their life! If all those hundreds of thousands of priests can keep their chastity as did all the good priests who preceded them through the centuries, why should the Church lower its standards to accommodate what the world today thinks? Why are 'Catholics' like Kueng and Martini so eager to lower these standards?

Kueng and Martini should read Benedict XVI's beautiful explanation the other night of the need for renunciation in the life of every man when he spoke to the young people of Rome - and St. Paul's analogy of the athlete who knows he must give up certain things and discipline himself severely if he wants to win the crown of excellence, if not perfection!












I just saw a portion of Archbishop Dolan's homily on TV and, silly me!, I can't stop crying....

Archbishop Dolan defends the Pope
in homily at St. Patrick's -
and gets an ovation


Sunday, 28 Mar 2010


New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan came to the Vatican’s defense Sunday, saying embattled Pope Benedict XVI -- recently under fire for a decades-old sex abuse scandal -- is suffering the same slings and arrows as Jesus did before his crucifixion.

In a Palm Sunday service at a packed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dolan gave a spirited defense of the pontiff’s leadership and received a standing ovation.

“Sunday Mass is hardly the place to document the inaccuracy, bias and hyperbole of such aspersions,” Dolan told parishioners.

“But Sunday Mass is indeed the time for Catholics to pray for Benedict, our Pope, and Palm Sunday Mass is surely a fitting place for us to express our love for and solidarity for our earthly shepherd now suffering from the same unjust accusation and shouts of the mob as Jesus did.”

Dolan praised the Pope, calling him “the leader in purification reform.” At the same time, Dolan called the transgressions of pedophile priests a “vicious sin and nauseating crime.”

The head of the Catholic Church is under increasing pressure following claims that he covered up incidents of sexual abuse by priests when he was serving in Germany as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

A week before Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, Benedict made no direct mention of the scandal in his own Palm Sunday homily but indicated that his faith would give him the courage not to be intimidated by critics.

The Pontiff said faith in God helps lead one “towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”

And one of the prayers, recited in Portuguese during the Mass, was “for the young and for those charged with educating them and protecting them.”

The 82-year-old Pope used the Popemobile for the first time on a Palm Sunday for his traditional outing in St Peter's Square.

Security concerns may have prompted the decision to use the white bulletproof vehicle. As the Pope was about to celebrate Christmas Eve mass last year, a young woman assaulted him and knocked him to the floor, but he quickly recovered.




Illustrations in libretto: Murals by Gaudenzio Ferrari, 1513. Santa Maria delle Grazie, Varallo.

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PALM SUNDAY - II








Here is a translation of the Holy Father's homily:


Dear brothers and sisters,
Dear young people:


The Gospel of the Blessing of the Palms, which we heard, gathered here in St. Peter's Square, starts with these words: "Jesus proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem" (Lk 19,28).

Right at the start of the liturgy today, the Church anticipates its response to the Gospel: "Let us follow the Lord". With this, the theme of Palm Sunday is clearly expressed: It is following.

To be Christian means to consider the life of Jesus Christ as the right way for human beings - the way that leads to the goal, to a fully realized and authentic humanity.

In a special way, I wish to repeat to all the young people on this 25th World Youth Day, that being Christian is a journey, or better yet, a pilgrimage, walking together with Jesus Christ. A journey towards the direction he has shown us and continues to show us.

But what direction is this? How is it found? The sentence from the Gospel offers two indications for this. First, it says that it is an ascent. This has first of all a very concrete significance.

Jericho, where the last part of Jesus's earthly pilgrimage began, is 250 meters below sea level, whereas Jerusalem - the destination of this journey - is 740-780 meters above sea level, an ascent of almost a thousand meters.

But this external way is above all an image of the interior movement of existence that takes place when we follow Jesus: it is an ascent to the true height of the human being.

Man can choose an easy way and avoid any effort. He can also descend to the low, the vulgar. He can sink into the swamp of lies and dishonesty. But Jesus walks ahead of us, and his way is upward. He leads us to what is great, pure; he leads us to the salubrious air of the heights: towards a life that is in accordance with truth; towards courage which does not let itself be intimidated by the chattering gossip of dominant opinions; towards patience which supports and sustains the other.

He leads us towards being available to those who suffer, to those who are abandoned; towards faithfulness to stand by the other even when the situation makes that difficult. He leads us towards the readiness to bring help; towards goodness which is not disarmed even by ingratitude. He leads us to love - he leads us to God.

"Jesus proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem". If we read these words of the Gospel in the context of Jesus's entire journey on earth - a way which he will continue until the end of times - we can discover several levels in the identification of his destination as Jerusalem.

Naturally, one must understand it simply as the place Jerusalem: the city in which was found the Temple of God, whose uniqueness must be attributed to the uniqueness of God himself.

This place name therefore immediately announces two things. On the one hand, it says that there is only one God in all the world, and that he surpasses immensely all our places and times - the God to whom all creation belongs. He is the God whom all men are seeking in their most intimate depth and about whom everyone in some way has some knowledge.

But this God gave himself a name. He let himself be known to us. He started a story with men. He chose a man, Abraham, as the starting point of this story. The infinite God is at the same time the God who is near us. He, who cannot be enclosed in any edifice, nonetheless wishes to dwell in our midst, to be totally with us.

Jesus, together with pilgrim Israel, is going up to Jerusalem - he is going to celebrate Passover with Israel: the memorial of the liberation of Israel - a memorial which, at the same time, is always hope for the definitive freedom which God will give.

Jesus is going to this feast knowing that he himself will be the Lamb in which will be fulfilled what the Book of Exodus says: a lamb without blemish, male, who at sunset, before the eyes of the children of Israel, would be immolated 'as a perennial ritual" (cfr Ex 12,5-6.14).

Finally, Jesus knows that his life will go on beyond - it will not end on the Cross. He knows that his way will tear away the veil between this world and the world of God; that he will ascend to the very throne of God and will reconcile God and man in his body.

He knows that his resurrected body will be the new sacrifice and the new Temple; that around him, from the ranks of angels and saints, the new Jerusalem in heaven will take form, which is also already on earth, because through his Passion, he will have opened the frontier between heaven and earth.

His way leads far beyond the summit of Temple Mount to the height of God himself: this is the great ascent to which he invites us all. He remains always near us on earth and is always near God. He leads us on earth and beyond earth.

Thus, the amplitude of Jesus's ascent makes visible all the dimensions of our following him,the goal to which he wants to lead us: up to the heights of God, to communion with God, to being-with-God. This is the true goal, and communion with him is the way.

Communion with Christ is to be on a journey, a continuing permanent ascent towards the true height of our calling. Walking together with Jesus is at the same time always a walking together of the 'us' who want to follow him. He introduces us into this community.

Because the journey towards true life, to being a human being who conforms to the model of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, surpasses our own powers, this journeying together is also always being borne along. We find ourselves, so to speak, roped together with Jesus Christ, together with him in the ascent towards the heights of God.

He draws us along with him and sustains us. And it is part of following Christ to let ourselves be part of this being roped together, to accept that we cannot do this by ourselves. Part of following him is this act of humility, of entering into the 'us' of the Church, holding on to the rope, the responsibility of communion - and not pulling away out of obstinacy and conceit.

Believing humbly with the Church, being held firmly together in the ascent towards God, is an essential condition of following Christ. Part of being together is also not behaving like masters of the Word of God, not to run after a false idea of emancipation.

The humility of 'being with' is essential for the ascent. Part of it is also that in the Sacraments, we always allow ourselves to be taken by the hand anew by the Lord; that we allow ourselves to be purified and corroborated by him; that we accept the discipline of the ascent even when we are tired.

Finally, it must be said yet again: In the ascent of Jesus Christ towards the heights, the Cross is part of this ascent towards God. Just as in the events of this world, one cannot achieve great results without renunciation adn hard exercise, just as the joy in a great discovery of knowledge or of a true functional ability is linked to discipline, to the effort of learning, in the same way mankind is linked to communion with him who ascended to the heights of God through the Cross. In the last analysis, the Cross is the expression of what love means: that only he who loses himself, finds himself.

Let us sum up: following Christ requires as a first step to wake ourselves up to the nostalgia for authentic human 'being' and thus, to wake up to God.

It then requires that we join the roped gathering of those who are making the ascent, in the communion of the Church. In the 'we' of the Church, we enter into communion with the 'you' of Jesus Christ on the road towards God.

It is also asked that we listen to the Word of Christ and that we live it - in faith, hope and charity. Thus we journey together towards the definitive Jerusalem, but even now, we find ourselves there, in some way, in communion with all the saints of God.

Therefore, our pilgrimage in the following of Christ is not towards any earthly city but to the new City of God which grows even amidst this world. The pilgrimage towards the earthly Jerusalem, nonetheless, can be, even for us Christians, a useful element for the greater journey.

I myself find three meanings linked to my pilgrimage to the Holy Land last year. Above all, I had thought that on such an occasion, we might experience what St. John describes at the start of his first Letter: that what we have heard, we can, in some way, see and touch with our hands (cfr 1 Jn 1,1).

Faith in Jesus Christ is not a legendary invention. It is based on a story that truly happened. And we can say that we are able to contemplate and touch this history.

It is moving to be in Nazareth at the spot where the Angel appeared to Mary and conveyed to her the task of becoming the Mother of the Redeemer.

It is moving to be in Bethlehem at the place where the Word, having become flesh, came to dwell among us; to set foot on the holy ground where God became man and child.

It is moving to climb the ladder to Calvary to the place where Jesus died for us on the Cross. And finally to be in front of the empty tomb - to pray where the Holy Body rested, and where, on the third day, the Resurrection took place.

To follow the external paths that Jesus trod should help us walk more joyously and with a new certainty along the interior road that he showed us and which is he himself.

When we go to the Holy Land as pilgrims, we also go - and this is the second meaning - as messengers of peace, with prayer for peace; with the strong appeal to everyone to do - in that place [Jerusalem] which has in its name the word 'peace' - everything possible so that it may truly become a place of peace.

Thus, this pilgrimage is at the same time, as a third aspect, an encouragement for Christians to stay in the land of their origins and there, to engage themselves intensely for peace.

Let us turn back to the liturgy of Palm Sunday. In the prayer to bless the palms, we pray so that in communion with Christ we may be able to bear the fruit of good works. From a mistaken interpretation of St. Paul, there has developed repeatedly in the course of history and even today, the opinion that good works are not part of being Christian, and that in any case, they would be insignificant for the salvation of man.

But when Paul says that works cannot justify man, he is not opposing the importance of acting right, and when he talks of the purposes of the Law, he does not declare the Ten Commandments to have been surpassed and irrelevant.

It is important to point out that by the term 'Law' he does not mean the Ten Commandments, but the complex lifestyle to which Israel was obliged in order to protect herself against the temptations of paganism.

But now, Christ had brought God to the pagans, and this form of distinction was not imposed on them. The only Law that comes to them is Christ. And this means love for God and for one's neighbor - and everything that comes with that love. Part of it are the Commandments themselves read in a new and more profound way, starting from Christ - the Commandments which are nothing but the fundamental rules of true love.

First of all, and as a fundamental principle, the worship of God, the primacy of God expressed in the first three commandments. They tell us that without God, nothing can happen in the right way. Who this God is and how he is, we know from the person of Jesus Christ.

What follows next is about the sanctity of the family (the fourth Commandment), the sanctity of life (fifth); the order of matrimony (sixth), the social order (seventh), and the inviolability of truth (eighth). All this is of the greatest relevance today, and even in the sense of St. Paul - if we read all his Letters.

"To bear fruit with good works": At the start of the Holy Week, let us pray to the Lord that he may always give all of us ever more of this fruit.

At the end of the Gospel for the blessing of the palms, we hear the acclamation with which the pilgrims greet Jesus at the gates of Jerusalem. It comes from Psalm 118(117), which originally, the priests proclaimed to the pilgrims coming to the Holy City, but which had become an expression of the Messianic hope: "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" (Ps 118[117], 26; Lk 19,38).

The pilgrims saw in Jesus the Awaited One, who comes in the name of the Lord. And according to the Gospel of St. Luke, they inserted a word, to say: "Blessed is he, the King, who comes in the name of the Lord".

And they continue with an acclamation that recalls the message of the Angels at the Nativity, but they modify it in a way that makes us reflect. The angels had spoken of the glory of God in the highest and peace on earth for men of good will.

The pilgrims at the entrance to the Holy City say: "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heavens". They know very well that on earth, there is no peace. And they know that the place of peace is heaven - they know that part of the essence of heaven is that it is a place of peace.

Thus, this acclamation is one of profound sorrow but at the same time, a prayer of hope: that he who comes in the name of the Lord may bring to earth what is in heaven. His kingship becomes the kingship of God, the presence of heaven on earth.

The Church, before the Eucharistic consecration, chants the words of the Psalm with which Jesus was greeted before entering the Holy City: It greets Jesus as the King who, coming from God, comes among us in the name of God.

Even today this joyous greeting is always both supplication and hope. Let us pray to the Lord so that he may bring heaven to us: the glory of God and peace among men. We understand this greeting in the spirit of the request we make in the Our Father: "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven".

We know that heaven is heaven, the place of glory and peace, because there, the will of God reigns totally. And we know that earth is not heaven as long as in it, the will of God is not realized. Therefore, let us greet Jesus who comes from heaven and pray that he may help us to know and do the will of God. May the kingship of God enter the world that we may be filled with the splendor of peace. Amen.





At the end of the Mass, the Holy Father led the recitation of the Angelus, delivering these words before the prayers:

As we end this celebration, our thoughts must go to Palm Sunday 25 years ago. It was 1985, which the United Nations had declared the Year for the Youth. The Venerable John Paul II wished to avail of the occasion and, in commemorating the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to the acclamation of his young disciples, he began the observance of World Youth Day.

Since then, Palm Sunday has acquired this feature, which every two or three years is also manifested in large international gatherings that have traced a kind of youth pilgrimage throughout the entire planet in the name of Jesus.

Twenty-five years ago, my beloved predecessor invited young people to profess their faith in Christ "who had taken on himself man's cause" (Homily, March 31, 1985, nn. 5,7, Teachings VIII, 1(1985), 884,886).

Today, I renew this appeal to the new generation to bear witness with the gentle and luminous power of truth so that men and women of the third millennium will not lack its most authentic model, Jesus Christ.

I entrust this mandate in particular to the 300 delegates of the International Youth Forum who have come here from around the world under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

In English, he said:

I greet all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors at this Angelus, especially the young people present who are celebrating the twenty-fifth World Youth Day.

Today we also begin Holy Week, the Church’s most intense time of prayer and reflection, by recalling Jesus’s welcome into Jerusalem by the children. Let us make their joy our own, by welcoming Christ into our lives, our hearts and our families.

Upon you and your loved ones, I gladly invoke the strength and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.







All those who wish ill of the Holy Father and think that because they so, it will be so, should take a lesson from the crowds of faithful who were present Thursday night and again Sunday morning in St. Peter's Square. All the headlines and picture captions posted by the news agencies insist that the Holy Father is 'besieged' - yes, he is besieged with malevolence by them alone, but protected by the affection and prayers of the faithful, and the grace of God.

The faith of simple folk - who do not need the media to tell them what to think - has the strength of purity. And this is one of the reasons why the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church Christ founded nor against his Vicar on earth.


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Monday, March 29

BLESSED LODOVICO DA CASORIA (Italy, 1814-1885)
Franciscan, Founder of Gray Brothers and Gray Sisters
Born Arcangelo Palmentieri near Naples, he was a cabinet-maker before
he joined the Franciscan Friars Minor in 1832. His first assignment was
to teach chemistry, physics and math in Franciscan schools. In 1847,
he underwent a mystical experience which he called 'a cleansing', after
which he dedicated himself to charitable work with such energy that one
biography calls him 'a cyclone of charity'. Specifically he set up schools
and institutions to serve the poor, children and the elderly. In 1859, he
set up the Gray Brothers (Frati Bigi) from members of the Franciscan Third
Order to carry out this work, and a few years later, the Gray Sisters (Suore
Bigie). He was beatified in 1993.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/nab/readings/032910.shtml



No OR today.


THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father met today with

- Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches

- Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples

- Cardinal Julián Herranz, Emeritus President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts

- Mons. Salvatore Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Live, and
Rector of the Pontifical Lateran University


This evening at 6 p.m., the Holy Father will preside at a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica to commemorate
the fifth anniversary of the death of the Venerable John Paul II. This year, it falls on Good Friday,
therefore the commemorative Mass has been advanced.



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Scoundrel Time(s)
by GEORGE WEIGEL

March 29, 2010


The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking.

In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother — thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture.

Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000.

According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests — a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today.

That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by any empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down — and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy.

For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.

The Church itself is in some measure responsible for this. Reprehensible patterns of clerical sexual abuse and misgovernance by the Church’s bishops came to glaring light in the U.S. in 2002; worse patterns of corruption have been recently revealed in Ireland.

Clericalism, cowardice, fideism about psychotherapy’s ability to “fix” sexual predators — all played their roles in the recycling of abusers into ministry and in the failure of bishops to come to grips with a massive breakdown of conviction and discipline in the post-Vatican II years.

For the Church’s sexual abuse crisis has always been that: a crisis of fidelity. Priests who live the noble promises of their ordination are not sexual abusers; bishops who take their custody of the Lord’s flock seriously protect the young, and recognize that a man’s acts can so disfigure his priesthood that he must be removed from public ministry or from the clerical state.

That the Catholic Church was slow to recognize the scandal of sexual abuse within the household of faith, and the failures of governance that led to the scandal being horribly mishandled, has been frankly admitted — by the bishops of the United States in 2002, and by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland.

In recent years, though, no other similarly situated institution has been so transparent about its failures, and none has done as much to clean house. It took too long to get there, to be sure; but we are there.

These facts have not sunk in, however, for either the attentive public or the mass public. They do not fit the conventional story line. Moreover, they impede the advance of the larger agenda that some are clearly pursuing in these controversies.

For the crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance has been seized upon by the Church’s enemies to cripple it, morally and financially, and to cripple its leaders.


That was the subtext in Boston in 2002 (where the effort was aided by Catholics who want to turn Catholicism into high-church Congregationalism, preferably with themselves in charge).

And that is what has happened in recent weeks, as a global media attack has swirled around Pope Benedict XVI, following the revelation of odious abuse cases throughout Europe.

In his native Germany, Der Spiegel has called for the Pope’s resignation; similar cries for papal blood have been raised in Ireland, a once-Catholic country now home to the most aggressively secularist press in Europe.

But it was the New York Times’'s front page of March 25 that demonstrated just how low those determined to bring the Church down were prepared to go.

Rembert Weakland is the emeritus archbishop of Milwaukee, notorious for having paid hundreds of thousands of dollars [of diocesan funds!] to satisfy the demands of his former male lover.

Jeff Anderson is a Minnesota-based attorney who has made a substantial amount of money out of sex abuse “settlements,” and who is party to ongoing litigation intended to bring the resources of the Vatican within the reach of contingency-fee lawyers in the United States.

Yet these two utterly implausible — and, in any serious journalistic sense, disqualified — sources were those the Times cited in a story claiming that, as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF], Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, had prevented sanctions against Father Lawrence Murphy, a diabolical Milwaukee priest who, decades before, had abused some 200 deaf children in his pastoral care.

This was simply not true, as the legal papers from the Murphy case the Times provided on its Web site demonstrated (see here for a demolition of the Times’ case based on the documentary evidence it made available). The facts, alas, seem to be of little interest to those whose primary concern is to nail down the narrative of global Catholic criminality, centered in the Vatican.

The Times’s descent into tabloid sourcing and innuendo was even more offensive because of recent hard news developments that underscore Pope Benedict’s determination to root out what he once described as the “filth” in the Church.

There was, for example, the Pope’s March 20 letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland, which was unsparing in its condemnation of clerical sexual offenders (“. . . you betrayed 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”) and unprecedented in its critique of malfeasant bishops (“grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred . . . [which have] undermined your credibility and effectiveness”).

Moreover, the Pope mandated an Apostolic Visitation of Irish dioceses, seminaries, and religious congregations — a clear indication that dramatic leadership change in Ireland is coming.

In framing his letter to Ireland so vigorously, Benedict XVI succeeded in overcoming the institutional Vatican preference for the subjunctive in dealing with situations like this, and the pleas of Irish bishops that he cut them some slack, given the intense pressures they were under at home.

That the Pope rejected both curial and Irish opposition to his lowering the boom ought to have made clear that Benedict XVI is determined to deal with the problem of sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance in the strongest terms.

But for those obsessing over whether a Pope had finally “apologized” for something (as if John Paul II had not spent a decade and a half “cleansing the Church’s historical conscience,” as he put it), these unmistakable signals were lost.

Then there was the March 25 letter from the leadership of the Legionaries of Christ to Legionary priests and seminarians and the Legion-affiliated movement, Regnum Christi.

The letter disavowed the Legion’s founder, Father Marcial Maciel, as a model for the future, in light of revelations that Maciel had deceived popes, bishops, laity, and his brother Legionaries by living a duplicitous double life that included fathering several children, sexually abusing seminarians, violating the sacrament of penance, and misappropriating funds.

It was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who, as CDF prefect, was determined to discover the truth about Maciel; it was Pope Benedict XVI who put Maciel under virtual ecclesiastical house arrest during his last years, and who then ordered an Apostolic Visitation of the Legion of Christ that is currently being concluded: hardly the acts of a man at the center of a conspiracy of silence and cover-up.

While the Vatican has been far quicker in its recent response to irresponsible media reports and attacks, it could still do better.

A documented chronology of how the archdiocese of Munich-Freising handled the case of an abusing priest who had been brought to Munich for therapy while Ratzinger was archbishop would help buttress the flat denials, by both the Vatican and the archdiocese, that Ratzinger knowingly reassigned a known abuser to pastoral work — another charge on which the Times and others have been chewing.

More and clearer explanations of how the canonical procedures put into place at CDF several years ago have accelerated, not impeded, the Church’s disciplining of abusive clergy would also be useful.

So, of course, would elementary fairness from the global media. That seems unlikely to come from those reporters and editors at the New York Times who have abandoned any pretence of maintaining journalistic standards.

But it ought not be beyond the capacity of other media outlets to understand that much of the Times’s recent reporting on the Church has been gravely distorted, and to treat it accordingly. [A consummation devoutly to be wished, but let's not hold our breath!

In fact, I can only use about 80% of the papal news items (not counting the repretitions) that turn up these days on any search list for Benedict XVI news). The extent and degree of calumniation beggars what it was after Regensburg and Williamson and the condoms - as is the depth of the prejudice and the appalling ignorance and disdain for facts. It is hard to be Christian and say, "Father forgive them..." because they know exactly what they are doing, and they are revelling, gloating, chortling, wallowing in their malice and ill will!]



An antidote for all the sulfurous toxins from Hell that are being discharged these days into the air of Western civilization are the remarks delivered yesterday by Archbishop Timothy Dolan in defense of the Pope. Here is the full text:




Left photo: Mons. Dolan received the pallium from the Pope, June 2009; right, Dolan delivering his remarks from the cathedra of St. patrick's yesterday.


REMARKS BY MONS. TIMOTHY DOLAN
ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK


St. Patrick's Cathedral
Palm Sunday, 2010


Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, Archbishop of New York, made the following remarks at the conclusion of Palm Sunday Mass in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on Sunday, March 28, 2010.


May I ask your patience a couple of minutes longer in what has already been a lengthy — yet hopefully uplifting — Sunday Mass?

The somberness of Holy Week is intensified for Catholics this year.

The recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again.

Anytime this horror, vicious sin, and nauseating crime is reported, as it needs to be, victims and their families are wounded again, the vast majority of faithful priests bow their heads in shame anew, and sincere Catholics experience another dose of shock, sorrow, and even anger.

What deepens the sadness now is the unrelenting insinuations against the Holy Father himself, as certain sources seem frenzied to implicate the man who, perhaps more than anyone else has been the leader in purification, reform, and renewal that the Church so needs.

Sunday Mass is hardly the place to document the inaccuracy, bias, and hyperbole of such aspersions.

But, Sunday Mass is indeed the time for Catholics to pray for “ . . . Benedict our Pope.”

And Palm Sunday Mass is sure a fitting place for us to express our love and solidarity for our earthly shepherd now suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the pillar, as did Jesus.

No one has been more vigorous in cleansing the Church of the effects of this sickening sin than the man we now call Pope Benedict XVI.


The dramatic progress that the Catholic Church in the United States has made — documented again just last week by the report made by independent forensic auditors — could never have happened without the insistence and support of the very man now being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.

Does the Church and her Pastor, Pope Benedict XVI, need intense scrutiny and just criticism for tragic horrors long past?

Yes! He himself has asked for it, encouraging complete honesty, at the same time expressing contrition, and urging a thorough cleansing.

All we ask is that it be fair, and that the Catholic Church not be singled-out for a horror that has cursed every culture, religion, organization, institution, school, agency, and family in the world.

Sorry to bring this up … but, then again, the Eucharist is the Sunday meal of the spiritual family we call the Church. At Sunday dinner we share both joys and sorrows. The father of our family, Il Papa, needs our love, support, and prayers.



Is it too much to hope that all bishops and parish priests around the world would take the same initiative at some point these days and show their communion with the Vicar of Christ in a concrete way?


AP reported this in a surprisingly straightforward manner - as a real news report, not as a pretext for opinion-mongering.

Archbishop defends Pope
against sex abuse furor


Sunday, March 28, 2010

Archbishop Timothy Dolan was greeted with applause after finishing Palm Sunday Mass by defending Pope Benedict XVI against suggestions he aided cover-ups of reports of child abuse.

The standing-room-only crowd at St. Patrick's Cathedral applauded for 20 seconds after Dolan read a statement calling the Pope the "leader in purification, reform and renewal that the church so very much needs."

[The report then quotes liberally from the archbishop's remarks.]

Outside the cathedral Sunday, worshippers emerging from the service with palm fronds were largely supportive of Dolan's remarks.

"I thought it was very well put," said Inga Yungwirth, of Hagerstown, Md. "It doesn't shake my faith."

Earlier, several protesters had gathered outside the Gothic-style cathedral, which sits on Fifth Avenue opposite Rockefeller Center.

"Honk if Pope should resign," said one sign, which attracted only an occasional toot from drivers.



Back from its weekend break. CNS has this useful wrap-up story of the past two days:


Vatican steps up defense of Pope
on sex abuse decisions

By John Thavis



VATICAN CITY, March 29 (CNS) -- The Vatican and other Church officials have amplified their defense of Pope Benedict XVI and his decisions regarding priestly sex abuse, and rejected accusations of a continued cover-up of such crimes.

After a series of reports in the New York Times and other media criticizing the Pope for alleged "inaction" on sex abuse cases, Vatican authorities emphasized that it was the Pope who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, pushed for harsher measures against abusers and made it easier for the Church to defrock them.

On March 27, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, ran the full texts of two landmark documents that in 2001 placed the sexual abuse of minors by priests among the most grave sins, and established that allegations be handled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Ratzinger.

The same day, the newspaper ran a front-page commentary by British Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster that had appeared in the Times of London, expressing shame over priestly sex abuse but strongly defending the pPpe's efforts to curb it.

"What of the role of Pope Benedict? When he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he led important changes made in church law: the inclusion in canon law of Internet offenses against children, the extension of child abuse offenses to include the sexual abuse of all under 18, the case by case waiving of the statute of limitations and the establishment of a fast-track dismissal from the clerical state for offenders," Archbishop Nichols wrote.

"He is not an idle observer. His actions speak as well as his words," he said.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the recent media focus on the sex abuse cases and the way they were dealt with by the hierarchy comes as no surprise.

"The nature of the question is such as to attract the attention of the media, and the way in which the church deals with it is crucial for her moral credibility," he said in a commentary on Vatican Radio.

But Father Lombardi pointed to the "many positive signals" that indicate the Church has understood the problem and addressed it. For example, he said, a recent report showed that the number of reported sex abuse cases declined between 33 and 36 percent in U.S. dioceses and religious institutes between 2008 and 2009.

"It must be recognized that the decisive measures currently being implemented are proving effective: the Church in the United States is on the right road to renewal," he said.

"This, we feel, is an important piece of news in the context of recent media attacks, which have undoubtedly proved harmful," the spokesman said.

Father Lombardi said impartial observers would recognize that the Pope and the CDF are continuing to guide bishops and help them "combat and root out the blight of abuse wherever it appears." The Pope's strongly worded letter to Irish Catholics earlier this month demonstrated his commitment to "healing, renewal and reparation" in the Church, he said.

German Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's top ecumenical official, said the Pope's letter to Irish Catholics was "courageous." It indicated that the Church was on an "irreversible" path toward greater transparency and severity in dealing with sex abuse by priests, the cardinal told the newspaper Corriere della Sera March 27.

Pope Benedict has never tried to protect abusers, and the criticism aimed at him is really an attack on the church itself, Cardinal Kasper said.

"He was the first who, even as a cardinal, felt the need for new and stricter rules, which didn't exist before. That some newspapers are now using terrible cases to attack the pope head-on is something that goes beyond every limit of justice and fairness," he said.

Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, mentioned the sex abuse scandal in his weekly Lenten meditation. In his sermon to the Pope and Roman Curia officials March 26, Father Cantalamessa said the Church and its members are called to purify themselves and, if there is humility, then "the Church will end up more resplendent than ever from this war."

"The media's tenacity -- and we have seen it in other cases -- in the long run will bring about the opposite effect that they had hoped for," he added.

Addressing the Pope specifically, Father Cantalamessa reminded him that God told Jeremiah that before his detractors he would make him "a solid wall of brass. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail. For I am with you to deliver and rescue you."

French bishops, assembled at their annual spring meeting, sent a "message of support" to Pope Benedict, saying they were with him "in the difficult period our church is going through."

Italian Archbishop Giuseppe Betori of Florence told Vatican Radio March 26 that the media was manipulating information in order to falsely accuse the Pope of inaction on sex abuse.

He said he had dealt directly with the doctrinal congregation under Cardinal Ratzinger on abuse allegations, and found that the congregation demonstrated "the maximum attention and the maximum severity."

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Remembering John Paul II
five years after his death



Libretto cover: Christ Pantocrator, from a 15th cent. Missal. Antun, France.


John Paul II: 'Totus tuus' -
A witness for Christ
who gave himself totally

Translated from
the Italian service of


March 29, 2010




A witness for Christ who gave himself totally, without reservation, without measure, without calculation. Thus did Benedict XVI describe his predecessor, the Venerable Servant of God John Paul II, at Mass this evening in St. Pete's Basilica to mark the fifth anniversary of his death on April 2, 2005.

What motivated John Paul II "was his love for Christ, to whom he had consecrated his life, a love that was super-abundant and uncoditional", the Pope said.

The annual commemorative Mass was offered today because April 2 falls on Good Friday.

Speaking to a congregation that included consdierable Polish representation, led by the Archbishop of Cracow, Cardinal Stanislas Dsiwisz, Benedict XVi asked Christians to loon on John Paul II and his works as an exanple of 'Taith, hope and love".

Massimiliano Manichetti reports further:

The emotion of those who love turns to joy in the knowledge that death on earth copincides with birth into the true life. Such sentiments were clearly visible on the facesd of those who were at the Mass tonight, some still shedding tears.

Noting how appropriate the Holy Week is as a context for prayer and meditation on his predecessor, Benedict XVI opened his homily by underscoring how the late Pope gave himself totally to Christ.

"During his long Pontificate, he gave all he could in proclaiming what is right, with firmness, without any weakness or hesitations, and especially when he had to face resistance, hostility and rejection.

"He knew that the Lord held him by the hand, and this allowed him to exercise a mnistry that was very fruitful, for which, once again, we must render fervent thanks to God"

The Holy Father also dwelt on the act of faith and great love by Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus, who "in humble service" poured perfume on the feet of Jesus, then wiped them with her hair, saying that every gesture of love and authentic devotion for Christ does not remain just a personal act but involves the entire body of the Church, instilling 'love, joy and light".

He contrasted this attitude to that of Judas who, in the Pope;s words, "hid the selfishness and the falsity of a man closed in on himself, chained by greed of possession, who does not allow himself to be enveloped by the perfume of divine love".

He noted that Love found its supreme expression on the wooden Cross where "the Son of God gives himself so that man may have life, then descends to the abysss of death in order to bring man to the heights of God".

Citing St. Augustine, Benedict said that every soul who wants to be faithful to Christ joins Mary of Bethany in anointing and wiping the feet of the Lord.

"The entire life of the Venerable John Paul II took place under the emblem of chairty, the capacity to give oneself generously, without reservation, without measure, without calculation. What motivated him was love of Christ, to whom he had consecrated his life, a love that was super-abundant and unconditional. And because he came ever closer to God in love, he could make himself a fellow pilgrim for contemporary man, spreading the perfume of God's love".

"Those who had the joy" of meeting or becoming familiar with John Paul II, said his successor, "could touch with the hand how much the faith was alive in him".

"In fact, his progressive physical weakness in later years, never affected his rock-strong faith, his luminous hope, his fervent charity. He allowed himself to be consumed - for Christ, for the Church, for the whole world. His was a suffering lived to the very end for love and with love".

In conclusion, he addressed himself to the Poles present, and called on all to "look on the life and work of John Paul II, a great man and reason for pride" as an "example of faithful testimony, hope and love of Christ".




Here is a full translation of the Holy Father's homily:


Venerated brothers in the episcopate and priesthood,
Dear brothers and sisters:

We are gathered at the altar over the tomb of the Apostle Peter to offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice in memory of the elected soul of the Venerable John Paul II on the fifth anniversary of his departure. We are doing this a few days ahead, because this year, April 2 is Good Friday.

We are nonetheless in Holy Week, a context that could not be more appropriate for meditation and prayer, during which the liturgy allows us to relive more intensely the last days of the earthly life of Jesus.

I wish to express my gratitude to all of you are taking part in this Holy Mass. I cordially greet the cardinals - especially Archbishop Stanislas Dsiwisz - the bishops, priests, and religious men and women, as well as the pilgrims who came especially from Poland, all the many young people and the numerous faithful who did not want to miss this celebration.

In the first Biblical reading that was proclaimed, the prophet Isaiah present the figure of a 'Servant of God', who is also his chosen one, in whom he is well pleased. The Servant will act with indestructible faith, with an energy that will not wane until he has realized the task which he has been assigned.

And yet, he will not always have at his disposition those human means that seem indispensable for the realization of a task so great. He presents himself with the strength of his conviction, and it will be the Spirit God placed in him which will give him the ability to act with gentleness and with power, assuring him of final success.


What the inspired prophet said of the Servant, we can apply to our beloved John Paul II: the Lord called him to his service and in entrusting him with tasks of increasing responsibility, he also accompanied him with his grace and his continuous assistance.

During his long Pontificate, he did all he could to proclaim what is right with firmness, without weakness or hesitations, especially when he had to face resistances, hostility and rejection. He knew that the Lord took him by the hand, and this allowed him to exercise a very fruitful ministry, for which once again, let us give fervent thanks to God.

The Gospel just now took us to Bethany where, as the evangelist notes, Lazarus, Martha and Mary offered a dinner for the Master (Jn 12,1). This banquest at the house of the three friends of Jesus is characterized by presentiments of imminent death: it is six days before Passsover; the suggestion from the traitor Judas; the response of Jesus which recalls a pious act of burial that is anticipated by Mary; the hint that they will not always have him with them; the proposal [by the Jews] to eliminate Lazarus, reflecting their desire to kill Jsus.

In this Gospel story, I wish to call attention to one gesture: Mary of Bethany took "costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair" (12,3).

Mary's gesture is the expression of great faith and love for the Lord: For her, it was not enough to wash the feet of the Master with water, but she anointed them with a great quantity of precious perfume which - as Judas would protest - could have been sold for 300 denarii.

She does not anoint the head, as was the custom, but the feet: Mary offers to Jesus the most costly thing she had with a gesture of profound devotion. Love does not calculate, it does not measure, it is not concerned with cost, it has no barriers - but it gives with joy, it only seeks the good of the other, it triumphs over pettiness, meanness, resentment and the closures that man sometimes carries in his heart.

Mary puts herself at the feet of Jesus in a humble attitude of service, as the Master himself would do at the Last Supper when - the fourth Gospel tells us - "he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet" (Jn 13,4-5), so that, he said, "as I have done for you, you should also do" (v 15).

The rule of Jesus's community was that of love which knows how to serve up to the gift of one's life. And the perfume spread: "the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil" (Jn 12,3), the Evangelist tells us.

The meaning of Mary's gesture, which is a response to God's infinite love, was not lost to any of the guests. Every gesture of charity and authentic devotion to Christ does not remain a personal fact, it does not concern only the relationship between the individual and God, but it concerns the entire body of the Church. It is contagious - it spreads love, joy and light.

"He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him" (Jn 1,11). In contrast to Mary's action were the attitude and words of Judas, who, under the pretext of giving aid to the poor, hides the selfishness and falsity of the man who is closed up in himself, imprisoned by the greed of possession, who will not let himself be wrapped by the perfume of divine love.

Judas calculates what cannot be calculated; with his mean spirit, he intrudes into the space of love, of giving, of total dedication.

And Jesus, who until that moment, had remained silent, intervenes in favor of Mary's act: "Leave her alone. Let her keep this for the day of my burial" (Jn 12,7).

Jesus understood that Mary had intuited the love of God, and indicates that now his 'hour' had come, the 'hour' when Love would find its supreme expression on the wood of the Cross. The Son of God would give himself so that man would have life, would descend to the abyss of death in order to bring man to the heights of God, and will not fear to humble himself "becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross" (Phil 2,8).

St. Augustine, in the sermon where he comments on this Gospel passage, addresses urgently to each of us an invitation to enter this circle of love, imitating the gesture of Mary and concretely following him.

Augustine writes: "Every soul that wishes to be faithful should join Mary in anointing the feet of the Lord with precious perfume. Anoint the feet of Jesus: follow the footsteps of the Lord leading to a worthy life. Wipe his feet with your hair: If you have any surplus, give them to the poor, and you will have wiped his feet". (In Ioh. evang., 50, 6).

Dear brothers and sisters! The whole life of the Venerable John Paul II took place under the emblem of such charity, of the capacity to give himself generously, without reservations, without neasure, without calculation.

What motivated him was his love of Christ, to whom he had consecrated his life, a love that was super-abundant and unconditional. And precisely because he was increasingly close to God in love, he could make himself a fellow pilgrim to the man of today, diffusing through the world the perfume of God's love.

Whoever had the joy of meeting him and of becoming familiar with him could touch with the hand how alive in him was the certainty of "contemplating the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living", as we heard in the Responsorial Psalm (26.27,13) - a certainty that accompanied him throughout his existence and which was particularly manifested during the last stage of his pilgrimage on this earth.

Indeed, his progressive physical weakness never affected his rock-firm faith, his luminous hope and his fervent charity. He allowed himself to be consumed for Christ, for the Church, for the entire world. His was a suffering lived to the very end for love and with love.

In the homily on the 25th anniversary of his Pontificate, he confided that he heard loudly in his heart, at the moment he was elected Pope, Jesus's query to Peter: "Do you love me? Do you love me more than the others do...?" (Jn 21,15-16).

And he added: "Every day, that dialog between Jesus and Peter takes place in muy heart; in the spirit, which feels the benevolent look of the Risen Christ. He, though he knows mty human weakness, encourages me to reply trustingly as Peter did: 'Lord, you know everything: you know I love you' (Jn 21,17). And then, he asks me to take on the responsibility that he himself had entrusted to me" (Oct. 16, 2003).

These are words full of faith and love, the love of God that triumphs over everything.

In Polish, he said:

Finally, I wish to greet all the Poles who are present. You have gathered in large numbers at the tomb of the Venerable Servant of God with a special sentiment - as sons and daughters of the same land, who grew up in the same culture and spiritual tradition.

The life and the work of John Paul II, a great Pole, can ba reason of pride for you. But you must remember that this is also a great call to be faithful witnesses to faith, hope and love, which he taught us uninterruptedly.

Through the intercession of John Paul II, may the blessing of the Lord sustain you always.

He ended in Italian:
As we proceed with the Eucharistic celebration, preparing ourselves to live the glorious days of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord, let us entrust ourselves confidently - with the example of the Venerable John Paul II - to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, so that she may sustain us in the commitment to be, in every circumstance, tireless apostles of her divine Son and his merciful love. Amen!






Benedict honors John Paul
five years after his death

By FRANCES D'EMILIO



VATICAN CITY, March 28 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI hailed the legacy of John Paul II Monday five years after his death, while questions swirl over the late pontiff's record in combatting pedophile priests and whether a miracle needed for his sainthood really happened.

During an evening Mass in St. Peter's Basilica to pay tribute to the late pope, Benedict told pilgrims from John Paul's Polish homeland that his predecessor had "without interruption taught us to be faithful witnesses to faith, hope and love."

Krakow Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who for decades was John Paul's personal secretary, was among the prelates at the commemoration. Also attending was Cardinal Bernard Law, who after resigning as Boston archbishop in the sex abuse scandal which rocked his diocese, was put in charge of a prestigious Rome basilica by the late Pope.

The 84-year-old John Paul died April 2, 2005, after battling Parkinson's disease. The commemoration was early because April 2 this year falls on Good Friday, when Benedict will preside over Lenten services at the Vatican and at the Colosseum in Rome.

Immediately after John Paul's death, faithful began clamoring for his sainthood, and Benedict in December signed a decree proclaiming his predecessor "venerable" for his holy virtues.

At first, the inexplicable healing of a young French nun from Parkinson's disease had initially seemed like the miracle required for remarkably swift approval for beatification, the last formal step before canonization. The nun, who had prayed to John Paul for years, woke up one morning two months after his death, seemingly inexplicably cured of the progressively degenerative neurological disorder.

But a Polish newspaper recently reported that doubts had been cast about whether the nun might not have had Parkinson's at all. Without citing sources, Rzeczpospolita, one of Poland's most respected and dailies, said the Vatican had summoned new experts to scrutinize the case.

The Vatican's former head of its saint-making office, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, indicated two medical consultants might have had doubts.

According to the National Parkinson Foundation, an estimated 20 percent of patients thought to have the disease were found at autopsy not to have had it.

"Most movement disorders experts would agree that miracle cures of Parkinson or other movement disorders usually have a psychogenic component to the illness," the foundation's Dr. Michael S. Okun said when asked by e-mail by The AP about Parkinson patients.

While another possible miracle might be found from the many allegedly inexplicable healing experienced by those devoted to the late pope, a potentially more serious shadow has been cast on the beatification process. Intense scrutiny is being thrown on how the Vatican handled sex abuse cases from dioceses around the world, particularly an explosion of complaints from U.S. faithful, during John Paul's 26 year papacy.

The harsher look at the Vatican's policy on sex abuse has come as Benedict's own record on dealing with the problem is being scrutinized in his native Germany, when he was Munich archbishop, as well as his long tenure at the Vatican as John Paul's watchdog for purity in the Catholic church.
[Yeah right! After six weeks now, is it?, of huffing and puffing - and very likely, reward money we don't know of - all they have come up with so far are two cases, both tenuous at best and what in contact sport might be considered 'forcing', to pin some blame somehow on Joseph Ratzinger, or at the very least, cast doubt on his consistency.]

John Paul's transfer of Cardinal Law to St. Mary Major's, one of Rome's most storied basilicas, was seen by many abuse victims as rewarding, not punishing, the Boston cleric for a policy by which many molester priests were shuttled from parish to parish, instead of removed from contact with children.

And John Paul held up as a model, the rigorously conservative founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who was later revealed to have fathered a child and had molested seminarians.

The Vatican began investigating allegations against the Rev. Marcial Maciel of Mexico in the 1950s, but it wasn't until 2006, a year into Benedict's pontificate, that the Vatican instructed Maciel to lead a "reserved life of prayer and penance" in response to the abuse allegations — effectively removing him from power.

A Pole who was honoring John Paul in Monday evening's St. Peter's Basilica commemoration said she had no doubt that her late compatriot was "already a saint.

"I hope that he becomes a saint soon, because you feel that the years are going by," Magdalena Wolinska said. "As far as I'm concerned, they are holding back on the beatification, but not because of the sex scandal, but because of other reasons," she said, in a reference to the doubts about a miracle.



Fine time to bring up these things about John Paul II! Why didn't they do it last week, for instance, since after all, the Cardinal Law and Father Maciel cases always stood out like ulcerated thumbs! You don't bring up nasty things on the anniversary of his death, in a story about a solemn commemorative Mass. It's indecent.

And I am surprised they're actually taking on someone who is widely considered a saint already except for the formalities. Are they so desperate to 'damage' the Church that they would turn against JP2? And lose their favorite foil for that archvillain Joseph 'Luthor' Ratzinger?

Of course, this is one area where no one can possibly claim Benedict XVI is less meritorious than his predecessor. The Law and Maciel cases are certainly blots on a saint's copy book, but they're minor deductions in the broad sweep of his unique life and achievements. So he was not perfect, but who is?

As for the questioned miracle, perhaps the AP should also have looked up the French bishops' reply to the Polish newspaper's claim.

In any case, MSM really is really scraping the barrel for testimonials against Benedict XVI! The 'best' they have come with so far are the publicity-crazed and otherwise mad-as-a-rabid dog lowlife assassin-for-hire Ali Agca and that bitter hate-full has-been Sinead what's her name! I'm not including the lefties and atheists, the Dawkinses, Hitchenses and Andrew Sullivans who have joined Hans Kueng in the quagmire of unreason and whose lifeblood is pure cyanide, because all they do is slaver and froth in the mouth as if the cyanide is working on them rather than their targets!

MSM did not report at all on the Pope's encounter with at least 70,000 young people Thursday night in St. Peter's Square, but earlier in the day, they lavished reams of copy on the five or so demonstrators that the New York Times gifted with an all-expenses trip to Rome for the photo-op to match their contemptible but also pitiable Milwaukee malarkey. In the same way that they gave no numbers for the Palm Sunday crowd at St. Peter's because it was huge, compared to the what? 50 people? who demonstrated in London demanding the Pope's resignation! More mad dogs, mad Pavlov dogs conditioned by centuries of British anti-Popery and flaunting their abysmal ignorance to anyone who will listen - perhaps only the MSM who are so eager to be their pandering publicists!




[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/03/2010 23:11]
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The political side of Benedict XVI:
A new book analyzes the basis
of the Pontiff's social thought

By Father John Flynn, LC



ROME, MARCH 28, 2010 (Zenit.org).- We are accustomed to looking at the Popes for spiritual and theological guidance, but a recent book highlights the importance and influence of the social and political thought of Benedict XVI.



In The Social and Political Thought of Benedict XVI, Thomas R. Rourke analyzes the Pope's record on these issues both before and after his election to the Chair of Peter. Rourke is a professor in the department of political science at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.

While more known as a theologian, Benedict XVI is a very profound political thinker, and his social thought merits more attention that it has so far received, Rourke argued.

He starts off by looking at the anthropological foundation of the Pope's thought. In his book On the Way to Jesus Christ the then Cardinal Ratzinger looked at the development of the concept of a person.

The contribution of the Bible and Christian thought enabled the original Greek consideration on this to be considerably enriched, particularly in the aspect of seeing a person as a relational being. This leads to a spirituality of communion, which Rourke says is at the root of Benedict XVI's understanding of social doctrine.

Thus, in the community of the divine persons of the Trinity, we discover the spiritual roots of the human community. So, in the Pope's anthropology it is not as though we are individuals who in a second moment enter into relations with other people. Rather, relationship is at the core of a person's nature.

This brotherhood among persons is grounded in the fatherhood of God and so differs fundamentally from a secular view of brotherhood, such as that espoused in the French Revolution.

Added to this is the dimension of creation. Created in the image of God human life is given an inviolable dignity, leading the Pope to condemn a utilitarian interpretation of our humanity.

While this anthropology might seem very abstract it is a necessary foundation for political philosophy, explained Rourke. Our view of what the shared life of people should be is necessarily grounded on an understanding of what a person is and what a community is.

According to Rourke, Benedict XVI considers politics to be an exercise of reason, but a reason that is also informed by faith. As a result Christianity does not define learning as the mere acquisition of knowledge, but requires it to be guided by fundamental values, such as truth, beauty, and goodness.

When reason is separated from a clear understanding of the ends of human life, established by Creation and affirmed in the Ten Commandments, then it has no fixed reference points for making moral judgments. If this happens then the way is open to consequentialism, which denies that anything is good or bad in itself.

One interesting line of thought in the writings of Cardinal Ratzinger is the division between Church and state, Rourke comments. The separation by Jesus, in Mark 12:17, of the two -- "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," meant that Christianity destroyed the idea of a divine state.

Prior to Christianity the union of Church and state was the normal practice and even in the Old Testament the two were fused. In fact, this was the cause of the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, as they refused to accept the state religion.

The separation of the two by Jesus was beneficial for the state, as it did not have to live up to expectations of divine perfection, Cardinal Ratzinger affirmed. This new Christian perspective opened the door for a politics based on reason.

Furthermore, he contended that when we revert to a pre-Christian understanding of politics we end up eliminating moral limitations, as happened in Nazi Germany and in communist states.

In today's world, the future Pontiff warned that mythological understandings of progress, science and freedom represent a danger. The element in common that they have is the tendency to the development of an irrational politics that places the search for power above the truth.

As Pope, he took up this theme again in his second encyclical on hope. He warned that what we hope for as Christians should not be confused with what we can achieve through political action.

Returning to what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his book, Church, Ecumenism, and Politics, Rourke added that the separation of Church and state has become confused in modern times in being interpreted as ceding the entire public square to the state.

If this is accepted then democracy is reduced to a set of procedures, limited by no fundamental values. Instead, the future Pope affirmed the need for a system of values that goes back to the first principles, such as the prohibition of taking innocent human life, or the foundation of the family on the permanent union of man and woman.

Among the many other topics that Rourke examines is that of conscience. This might seem to have little in connection to social or political issues at first glance. Instead, it turns out to play a critical role.

It is in the inner forum of our conscience that we preserve the fundamental norms upon which the social order is based. It is also a limit on the power of the state, as the state does not have the legitimate authority to transgress these norms. So it is that conscience is at the roots of limited government.

The destruction of conscience is the prerequisite for totalitarian rule, the then Archbishop Ratzinger, explained in a lecture given in 1972. "Where conscience prevails, there is a limit to the dominion of human command and human choice, something sacred that must remain inviolate and that in its ultimate sovereignty eludes all control, whether someone else's or one's own," he said.

Rourke clarified that in saying this, the future Pope was not diminishing what are the constitutional or institutional limits on power. The point being made is more fundamental. Namely, that no institution or structure can preserve people from injustice when those in authority abuse their power. In this situation it is the power of conscience, wielded by the people, that can protect society.

This, in turn, connects with faith, which is the ultimate teacher of conscience. Faith becomes a political force in the same way Jesus did, by becoming a witness to the truth in conscience.

"The power of conscience is then to be found in suffering; it is the power of the Cross," explained Rourke in his summary of what the 1972 lecture expressed.

"Christianity begins," Archbishop Ratzinger said, "not with a revolutionary, but with a martyr."

Rourke's study includes an appendix that examines Benedict XVI's latest encyclical on social matters, Caritas in veritate. While he had almost finished the book when the encyclical was published, Rourke noted that what the Pope wrote was consistent with the themes in his previous writings.

The introduction clearly shows this, Rourke noted, by its linking of truth with love and the idea that there is objective truth, contrary to relativism.

The encyclical concludes, Rourke commented, with the Pontiff's longstanding affirmation that what is truly human flows from Christ and that Christ leads us to discover the fullness of our humanity. This Christian humanism is what Benedict XVI holds out as our greatest contribution to development. A compelling and inspiring goal to strive for.

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