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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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Page change before the end of the reporting day!
See preceding page for earlier entries today, 3/20/10.






Cardinal Schoenborn's unexpected (given his spotty record in the past two years) but most welcome statements recently in 'defense' of Benedict XVI's record against pedophilia by priests was thankfully given some play in the MSM, though not quite as much as they gave to raving lunatics like Ali Agca or Sinead O'Connor. Here's the BBC report.

NB: I find the word 'defense' or 'defend' used in this context inappropriate because they imply there is something to defend. I prefer rebut' or 'refute', which imply an answer that contradicts the very premise of an accusation...



Austrian cardinal defends
Pope over Church abuse


March 29, 2010

A senior Austrian cardinal has defended Pope Benedict XVI's record on tackling child abuse within the Church.

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn said efforts by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to investigate a 1995 case were blocked by then Pope John Paul II.

[That's not exactly right. Schoenborn was careful to avoid making any such direct attribution to the late Pope - his references were all to "some in the (Roman) Curia". But of course, probably the main reason the MSM paid attention at all to his statements, made to Austrian TV, is because they were about obstructionism in the Curia - which supports the MSM working premise that the Church hierarchy in general has been responsible for stifling the pedophilia problem among priests.]

Cardinal Schoenborn said the Vatican had argued an investigation would generate bad publicity.

The cardinal's comments follow a week when the Vatican's record on child abuse has been intensively scrutinised.

Cardinal Schoenborn told Austrian television that the current Pope tried to establish a Church investigation into abuse allegations against a previous Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer.

The Austrian Church was rocked by allegations in 1995 that Cardinal Groer had molested youths at a monastery in the 1970s.

But it was not until 1998 that, on Vatican orders, Cardinal Groer relinquished all religious duties and sought exile in Germany. He died in Austria in 2003.

At the time of his resignation, Cardinal Groer, in a statement released by the Church in Vienna, asked for forgiveness but made no admission of guilt.

At the time, the Vatican drew sharp criticism from many Austrians for taking three years to act against Cardinal Groer. [At least it did act finally. And against a cardinal. It's always better late than never.]

Cardinal Schoenborn, who replaced Cardinal Groer as Archbishop of Vienna in 1995, said Joseph Ratzinger was blocked in his efforts to confirm if there was a case to answer.

According to Cardinal Schoenborn, Vatican officials persuaded Pope John Paul II that the allegations were exaggerated and that an investigation would open the Church up to negative publicity.

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

"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.

This is not the first time that Christoph Schoenborn has intervened in the scandal currently confronting the Church.

Earlier this month, he said clergy celibacy should be examined in trying to uncover the causes of abuse by priests.


In her blog, Lella notes that strangely, only the obsessively anti-Church ultraliberal mouthpiece Repubblica saw fit to run a story on Schoenborn's statement - but I suppose that proves the point I made earlier: That the anti-Church elements find it useful 'evidence' to buttress their premise that the Church hierarchy was more interested in avoiding scandal than in confronting criminal priests, and by extension, in redressing the wrong inflicted on innocent victims - both of which are appallingly wrong and un-Christian.


The March 29-30 issue of L'Osservatore Romano carried an item about two other weekend statements of support for the Pope by two prominent Churchmen:


In the campaign against the Pope,
the Archbishop of New York and
Cardinal Kasper speak up for him

Translated from
the 3/29-3/30/10 issue of




An 'almost frenetic campaign' is under way to implicate the Pope in cases of sexual abuses committed by priests and religious against children, according to the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Michael Dolan, in his homily at the Palm Sunday Mass in Manhattan's St. Patrick Cathedral. [Slight factual error there - the remarks were made separately at the end of the Mass, not during the homily.]

The archbishop called Benedict XVI "a leader in the purification, reform and renewal of the Church" and called on the faithful to pray for the Pope.

Referring to the scourge of pedophile offenses by priests, he said: "Every time that this horror, this nauseating crime, is denounced - as it should be - victims and their families are wounded anew, the vast majority of priests hand their heads in shame, and sincere Catholics are exposed to another dose of schock, displeasure and even rage".

Archbishop Dolan added that the sadness is made worse by 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'.

The progress made by the Catholic Church in the United States to combat this 'disgusting crime', he continued, "could never have happened without the insistence and support of the very man now being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo".

On this same issue, Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said this during a Palm Sunday homily at the Church of Ognissanti (All Saints) in Rome:

"These days, not just the Pope but the whole Church, and therefore every faithful, each of us, is frontally attacked and denounced by some influential media in a way that goes beyond good faith and even beyond truth".

"We are not surprised," he continued. "Jesus predicted this. The acclamations of 'Blessed is he who comes" can at any time rapidly change to hostile shouts of "Crucify him!" But there is no reason to be discouraged or to feel beaten down."

"We know that the people who blessed Jesus with singing and palms were right ultimately. Believers in Jesus triumphed. Because the Via Crucis did not end with the Crucifixion but with the Resurrection on Easter.

"The Church today needs a humble cleaning up of the unacceptable filth within, and we all need that, each of us in his own way. But if we repent and purify ourselves, the Church will emerge from this present crisis renewed, more splendid and more beautiful".

The German cardinal later said in an interview to be published in La Stampa today (March 30): "All the experts have documented that the overwhelming majority of child abuses cases takes place within families, not in ecclesiastical circles".

Kasper said what is taking place is "an instrumentalization of the incidence of pedophilia among priests", going on to denounce its corollary: "To blame priestly celibacy for this is the true adn proper abuse above all abuses".

"The Pope," he reminded, "teaches us that the priest no longer belongs to himself, but that through the sacramental seal that he received in Holy Orders, becomes the property of God".

He believes that it is most of all 'inopportune' to raise the question of celibacy "in the present atmosphere that is poisoned by polemic and scandals over the sexual abuses committed by some priests and religious".

Meanwhile, the national bishops' conferences around the world are taking strict measures that will make clear the Church's position against sexual abuse of children.

In Austria, the bishops have named an 'independent representative' of the victims to conduct an inquiry. This was announced by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, who said the role has been given to Waltraud Klasnic, ex governor of the state of Styria.

[I am surprised the OR did not carry Schoenborn's statements to ORF, but then its news reporting and selection is normally erratic, seemingly random and editorially perplexing. Case in point!

And I do thank Cardinal Kasper, and salute him sincerely for having volunteered public statements quite a few times in recent weeks to speak up for the Pope on this issue. It sort of makes up for his at best questionable remarks in 2009 in the wake of the Williamson case.]



in his blog yesterday, Damian Thompson picks up Cardinal Schoenborn's statements and chooses not to show the Austrian cardinal's discretion and deference with respect to the late Pope:

John Paul II ignored Ratzinger's pleas
to pursue Austrian cardinal for sex abuse


March 29, 2010


Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger tried to persuade Pope John Paul II to mount a full investigation into a cardinal who abused boys and young monks, one of the Church’s most senior figures revealed yesterday. But Ratzinger’s opponents in the Vatican managed to block the inquiry. As the future Benedict XVI put it: “The other side won.”

The pervert cardinal was the late Hans Hermann Groer, removed as Archbishop of Vienna in 1995 following sex allegations. The source for the story is Groer’s successor in Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, an intellectual whom some commentators have tipped as a possible future Pope.

That’s quite a revelation, in my book – but it doesn’t fit the script that the Benedict-hating media have written, so we’re not hearing too much about it.

Also, I suspect that former advisers to John Paul would rather not remind us that the late Pope didn’t do enough to curb sex abuse and cover-ups. Safer to blame Benedict, eh?

Here’s the quote from a report by Philip Pullella of Reuters:

Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, in defence of the Pope, told ORF Austrian television on Sunday that Benedict wanted a full probe when former Vienna Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer was removed in 1995 for alleged sexual abuse of a boy.

But other Curia officials persuaded the then Pope John Paul that the media had exaggerated the case and an inquiry would only create more bad publicity.

“[Ratzinger] told me, ‘the other side won’,” Schoenborn said.


The other side. I suspect he was referring to a Vatican old boys’ club that Cardinal Ratzinger never joined, and which didn’t want sex abuse cases to “damage the good name of the Church” (ie, disturb their back-slapping suppers in favoured trattorie).

And the irony is that the journalists who have written lazy and hate-filled articles about Benedict XVI are unwittingly providing protection to the really compromised figures in the Vatican and bishops’ conferences.

Groer, who was as guilty as hell, died in 2003. Here is a BBC report from 1998:

The news agency of the Roman Catholic Church in Austria says a former Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, is to go into exile, because of accusations against him of sexual misconduct.

The report follows the release of a statement by the Church in Vienna in which Cardinal Groer, 78, asked for forgiveness but made no admission of guilt.

“In the past three years there have been many often incorrect statements concerning me. I ask God and the people for forgiveness if I have brought guilt upon myself,” he says in the statement.

Cardinal Groer stepped down as head of the Roman Catholic Church in Austria in 1995 following charges that he had sexually abused a schoolboy 20 years earlier. After his resignation there were further allegations that he sexually molested monks.

The charges were ignored by the Church hierarchy until two months ago when a papal investigation commenced. The inquiry was ordered by the Pope after appeals from Church leaders to settle the controversy and restore the Church’s status in Austria.

Now the statement follows a request from the Pope that Cardinal Groer give up his duties and is being taken as a sign that the investigation has found against him.

The BBC correspondent in Vienna says many Catholics in Austria are bitterly divided over the issue and some have accused the Church of covering up.

The Bishop’s chancellery in Vienna said no further steps are expected from Rome. The correspondent says this is likely to further offend the many Catholics who think Hermann Groer should no longer be a cardinal.


No further steps from Rome. Why? Probably because, according to Cardinal Schoenborn – who has some maverick views but is certainly not a liar – the future Benedict XVI had lost his battle to mount a proper investigation of a sex abuser Cardinal, instead of the secretive and inconclusive one that apparently took place. No wonder he demanded full authority to investigate these cases and assumed greater responsibility for them in 2001.

He’s facing a terrible situation, no doubt about it; and no doubt also he made mistakes himself: the fact that he was far more vigilant than other cardinals doesn’t mean he was vigilant enough. [Et tu, Damian? After Father Z? To say that after one tenuous case unearthed so far that seems to reflect more about archdiocesan, institutional bureaucracy than personal lack of vigilance on the part of Cardinal Ratzinger????]

But history will show that it was Benedict XVI, not John Paul II, who initiated the “purification” of the Church to remove its “filth” – his words - and uttered long before this current crisis arose.




STATEMENT OF SUPPORT
FROM U.S. CATHOLIC BISHOPS





March 30, 2010

On behalf of the Catholic bishops of the United States, we, the members of the Executive Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, write both to express our deep concern for those harmed by the crime and sin of sexual abuse by clergy and to express our profound gratitude for the assistance that Pope Benedict XVI has given us in our efforts to respond to victims, deal with perpetrators and to create safe environments for children.

The recent emergence of more reports of sexual abuse by clergy saddens and angers the Church and causes us shame. If there is anywhere that children should be safe, it should be in their homes and in the Church.

We know from our experience how Pope Benedict is deeply concerned for those who have been harmed by sexual abuse and how he has strengthened the Church’s response to victims and supported our efforts to deal with perpetrators.

We continue to intensify our efforts to provide safe environments for children in our parishes and schools. Further, we work with others in our communities to address the prevalence of sexual abuse in the larger society.

One of the most touching moments of the Holy Father’s visit to the United States in 2008 was his private conversation with victims/survivors at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington. Pope Benedict heard firsthand how sexual abuse has devastated lives. The Holy Father spoke with each person and provided every one time to speak freely to him. They shared their painful experiences and he listened, often clasping their hands and responding tenderly and reassuringly.

With the support of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, we bishops have made a vigorous commitment to do everything in our power to prevent abuse from happening to children.

We live out this commitment through the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which calls us to respond with compassion to victims/survivors, to work diligently to screen those working with children and young people in the Church, to provide child abuse awareness and prevention education, to report suspected abuse to civil law enforcement, and to account for our efforts to protect children and youth through an external annual national audit.

As we accompany Christ in His passion and death during this Holy Week, we stand with our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI in prayer for the victims of sexual abuse, for the entire Church and for the world.

Cardinal Francis George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago
President

Bishop Gerald Kicanas
Bishop of Tucson
Vice-President

Bishop George Murry, SJ
Bishop of Youngstown
Secretary

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz
Archbishop of Louisville
Treasurer

Bishop Arthur Serratelli
Bishop of Paterson
Elected Member




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Why the attacks on Pope Benedict?
The sexual abuse crisis has now led to calls* for Pope Benedict to resign the papacy,
precisely on the 5th anniversary of John Paul II’s death and his own election.
The goal, it seems, is to “strike the shepherd.” Why? To silence the Church’s voice

By Robert Moynihan, reporting from Rome

March 29, 2010


[I think it is important to make clear at the outset that such 'calls' have come so far only from rabidly anti-Church demonstrators and even more rabidly anti-Benedict bloggers and 'opinion makers' - all of them having the common characteristic of being throughly uninformed, deliberately or otherwise, about simple facts that are most relevant to taking a responsible position about this issue. So, from no one credible, and with no knowledge whereof they speak. Starting with the fact that the Pope, Vicar of Christ, is not like a prime minister dependent on a parliamentary majority to keep his job, a lifetime appointment that is not purely the result of human inrtervention.]


“Awake, O sword, against my shepherd.
Strike the Shepherd, that the sheep may be scattered.”

—Zechariah (13:7)

ROME, Italy, Monday, March 29, 2010 — As I write, it is a cool, clear March evening in Rome, and a luminous full moon shines over the Eternal City at the beginning of Holy Week.

But the situation of the world is not holy.

In front of St. Peter's this evening, there were no protesters. It was calm and peaceful. People were leaving the piazza after a prayer service in memory of Pope John Paul, who died five years ago on April 2. Some had tears in their eyes.

But in the world, there are wars and rumors of wars in various places, wars with much unjust "collateral damage." There are simmering conflicts in places like Chechnya (a bomb went off in a Moscow metro station this morning, killing two dozen innocent people).

And the world's economic system remains unbalanced and fragile, and profoundly unjust, massively exposed by the manipulations of financial operators to mountains of debt, and so subject to abrupt disruptions, and possible cardiac arrest.

In the midst of all this, Pope Benedict XVI has come under relentless personal attack in the very week of Christ's Passion.

The world’s media in recent days has been focusing on Pope Benedict’s role in not doing more to prevent the sexual abuse of minors by priests. There have been calls from Germany, England and Ireland for him to resign. Some are even calling for his arrest.

Are these calls fair? Or are they part of a frenzied campaign to smear his name with false accusations?

Many thoughtful Church observers, including Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, the leading Catholic bishop of England, think it is the latter.

(For a complete, critical analysis of the charges in the New York Times, and a defense of Benedict's actions in this regard, see:
corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDkxYmUzMTQ1YWUyMzRkMzg4Y2RiN2UyOWIz...
The Corner: Saturday, March 27--A Response to the New York Times)


And the Pope said yesterday, on Palm Sunday, that he would not be intimidated by these attacks.

"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," the American Catholic writer George Weigel wrote in a March 29 article in First Things magazine.

In short: we are in a child-abusing world.

This "global plague" is our collective shame as human beings.

It is recorded that Jesus only became really angry on two occasions: when he whipped the money-changers out of the Temple court, because "they have made my Father's house into a den of thieves" and when he denounced the abuse of children, crying out: "Whoever shall offend one of these little ones, it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

And yet, much of our modern culture tolerates, even condones, the sexual exploitation of children.

Perhaps it is time for our culture to have a millstone hung around its neck.

Perhaps it is time for a new culture altogether.

But is protecting children what the attackers of Benedict are really after?

No.

The recent attacks on Pope Benedict aim to portray him, and the Catholic Church he leads, as "the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young."

But this is an absurd, false, charge.

It is absurd because Benedict has for decades been in the forefront of proclaiming the need for our modern culture to be less sexually abusive, and he has acted when others did not act, even almost alone, and courageously, against great pressures, in particular in the case of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

In his address in Subiaco, Italy, on April 1, 2005, the day before Pope John Paul II died, Benedict (then still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) spoke, in a way that not a single other leader of the Church has spoken, of the imperative to cleanse the Church of "filth."
[Hmmm... I think not in Subiaco, where his topic was the crisis of Christianity in Europe today. he spoke about the filth in the Via Curcis meditations two weeks before Subiaco.]

Benedict is the modern Pope who has sought most energetically to cleanse the Church of corrupt tendencies and practices which, from various sources — some known, some unknown or only partially known — took root within the Church decades ago, under other Popes... under John Paul II, under Paul VI, under, even, Pius XII.

And now Benedict is being attacked for not having done enough.

This is a travesty that begs for explanation. Why Benedict? Why now?

"The narrative that has been constructed [by the world's media] is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by 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," Weigel argued. "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.”

This seems a possible answer — that an agenda lies behind these attacks against this Pope, and that that agenda is to so shame the Pope in the eyes of the world that his voice, the voice of the Catholic Church, will be eliminated “as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy.”

It is a surgical operation.

But why is this important precisely at this time? That is the final question.

The answer must be in some way connected to our historical situation. It must be that we are at an "inflection point," or soon will be — an historical moment when society will have to grapple with many policy debates on matters that are of fundamental important to very powerful forces in this world.

It must be that there are now occurring — or will soon occur — debates in which the voice of the Church, the wisdom of the Christian faith and tradition, could be critical to balancing, even rejecting, an “anti-Christian” vision of the world which seems to be growing stronger day by day, and therefore, that voice must be silenced.

The "anti-Christian" vision is one which believes human life is not sacred, and so does not have to be defended in the womb; that marriage is not simply and intrinsically between a man and a woman, and so can be entered into by members of the same sex; that fundamental civil liberties — freedoms — can be sacrificed in dramatic economic times...


Children must be protected, their innocence defended — both from deviant priests, who must be punished, and from myriad deviant forces in modern society, which should be fought and overthrown.

The Church, aware of grave flaws in her administrative procedures over the years, must reform those procedures, and, under Benedict XVI, is doing so.

But the attempt to ruin the name of this Pope, and so the moral authority of the Church in general, seems to be part of a larger design that, in the name of truth and justice and our human future, also must be fought.

It may not be an easy battle.

The archbishop of Dublin, Ireland, Diarmuid Martin, gave a homily on Palm Sunday.

“I, as Archbishop of Dublin, am committed to working with all of you who wish to renew our Church, to purify our Church from all that has damaged the face of Christ,” Martin said.

“These have not been easy days for me personally. But with the many believers who wish to journey together on the path of renewal, I know that that path will inevitably be a way of the Cross...

"The challenge is not to follow the short-cuts of the disciples who found that fleeing was the quick and easy answer...

"Our challenge is to be like Jesus who, with all the anguish and fear it entails, does not flinch or waver in remaining faithful to the will of his Father, even at the price of enduring the ignominious death on a criminal’s cross.”

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The Pope, the judge, the paedophile priest and The New York Times
By Damian Thompson : March 30th, 2010

Fr Thomas Brundage, the former Archdiocese of Milwaukee Judicial Vicar who presided over the canonical criminal case of the Wisconsin child abuser Fr Lawrence Murphy, has broken his silence to give a devastating account of the scandal – and of the behaviour of The New York Times, which resurrected the story.

It looks as if the media were in such a hurry to to blame the Pope for this wretched business that not one news organisation contacted Fr Brundage. As a result, crucial details were unreported.

Moreover, Fr Brundage – who seems to have shown admirable tenacity in pursuing the loathsome Fr Murphy – claims that a document of questionable provenance was quoted authoritatively by the media as a source for his own opinions. At the very least, The New York Times and many other organisations have some explaining to do. They must be held to account for the way they pursued this story, which led to hysterical attacks on Benedict XVI.

I am reproducing Fr Brundage’s article in full, with thanks to the Archdiocese of Anchorage, where Fr Brundage now works. I implore you to read all of it. My emphases are in bold type. (Hat-tip: Simon Caldwell.)


Setting the record straight in the case of abusive Milwaukee priest Father Lawrence Murphy

Then-presiding judge for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee gives first-person account of church trial

By Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JLC

For CatholicAnchor.org

To provide context to this article, I was the Judicial Vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee from 1995-2003. During those years, I presided over four canonical criminal cases, one of which involved Father Lawrence Murphy. Two of the four men died during the process. God alone will judge these men.

To put some parameters on the following remarks, I am writing this article with the express knowledge and consent of Archbishop Roger Schwietz, OMI, the Archbishop of Anchorage, where I currently serve. Archbishop Schwietz is also the publisher of the Catholic Anchor newspaper.

I will limit my comments, because of judicial oaths I have taken as a canon lawyer and as an ecclesiastical judge. However, since my name and comments in the matter of the Father Murphy case have been liberally and often inaccurately quoted in the New York Times and in more than 100 other newspapers and on-line periodicals, I feel a freedom to tell part of the story of Father Murphy’s trial from ground zero.

As I have found that the reporting on this issue has been inaccurate and poor in terms of the facts, I am also writing out of a sense of duty to the truth.


The fact that I presided over this trial and have never once been contacted by any news organization for comment speaks for itself.

My intent in the following paragraphs is to accomplish the following:

To tell the back-story of what actually happened in the Father Murphy case on the local level;

To outline the sloppy and inaccurate reporting on the Father Murphy case by the New York Times and other media outlets;

To assert that Pope Benedict XVI has done more than any other pope or bishop in history to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of child sexual abuse and provide for those who have been injured;

To set the record straight with regards to the efforts made by the church to heal the wounds caused by clergy sexual misconduct. The Catholic Church is probably the safest place for children at this point in history.

Before proceeding, it is important to point out the scourge that child sexual abuse has been — not only for the church but for society as well. Few actions can distort a child’s life more than sexual abuse. It is a form of emotional and spiritual homicide and it starts a trajectory toward a skewed sense of sexuality. When committed by a person in authority, it creates a distrust of almost anyone, anywhere.

As a volunteer prison chaplain in Alaska, I have found a corollary between those who have been incarcerated for child sexual abuse and the priests who have committed such grievous actions. They tend to be very smart and manipulative. They tend to be well liked and charming. They tend to have one aim in life — to satisfy their hunger. Most are highly narcissistic and do not see the harm that they have caused. They view the children they have abused not as people but as objects. They rarely show remorse and moreover, sometimes portray themselves as the victims. They are, in short, dangerous people and should never be trusted again. Most will recommit their crimes if given a chance.

As for the numerous reports about the case of Father Murphy, the back-story has not been reported as of yet.

In 1996, I was introduced to the story of Father Murphy, formerly the principal of St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. It had been common knowledge for decades that during Father Murphy’s tenure at the school (1950-1974) there had been a scandal at St. John’s involving him and some deaf children. The details, however, were sketchy at best.

Courageous advocacy on behalf of the victims (and often their wives), led the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to revisit the matter in 1996. In internal discussions of the curia for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, it became obvious that we needed to take strong and swift action with regard to the wrongs of several decades ago. With the consent of then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, we began an investigation into the allegations of child sexual abuse as well as the violation of the crime of solicitation within the confessional by Father Murphy.

We proceeded to start a trial against Father Murphy. I was the presiding judge in this matter and informed Father Murphy that criminal charges were going to be levied against him with regard to child sexual abuse and solicitation in the confessional.

In my interactions with Father Murphy, I got the impression I was dealing with a man who simply did not get it. He was defensive and threatening.

Between 1996 and August, 1998, I interviewed, with the help of a qualified interpreter, about a dozen victims of Father Murphy. These were gut-wrenching interviews. In one instance the victim had become a perpetrator himself and had served time in prison for his crimes. I realized that this disease is virulent and was easily transmitted to others. I heard stories of distorted lives, sexualities diminished or expunged. These were the darkest days of my own priesthood, having been ordained less than 10 years at the time. Grace-filled spiritual direction has been a Godsend.

I also met with a community board of deaf Catholics. They insisted that Father Murphy should be removed from the priesthood and highly important to them was their request that he be buried not as a priest but as a layperson. I indicated that a judge, I could not guarantee the first request and could only make a recommendation to the latter request.

In the summer of 1998, I ordered Father Murphy to be present at a deposition at the chancery in Milwaukee. I received, soon after, a letter from his doctor that he was in frail health and could travel not more than 20 miles (Boulder Junction to Milwaukee would be about 276 miles). A week later, Father Murphy died of natural causes in a location about 100 miles from his home

With regard to the inaccurate reporting on behalf of the New York Times, the Associated Press, and those that utilized these resources, first of all, I was never contacted by any of these news agencies but they felt free to quote me. Almost all of my quotes are from a document that can be found online with the correspondence between the Holy See and the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. In an October 31, 1997 handwritten document, I am quoted as saying ‘odds are that this situation may very well be the most horrendous, number wise, and especially because these are physically challenged , vulnerable people”. Also quoted is this: “Children were approached within the confessional where the question of circumcision began the solicitation.”

The problem with these statements attributed to me is that they were handwritten. The documents were not written by me and do not resemble my handwriting. The syntax is similar to what I might have said but I have no idea who wrote these statements, yet I am credited as stating them. As a college freshman at the Marquette University School of Journalism, we were told to check, recheck, and triple check our quotes if necessary. I was never contacted by anyone on this document, written by an unknown source to me. Discerning truth takes time and it is apparent that the New York Times, the Associated Press and others did not take the time to get the facts correct.

Additionally, in the documentation in a letter from Archbishop Weakland to then-secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone on August 19, 1998, Archbishop Weakland stated that he had instructed me to abate the proceedings against Father Murphy. Father Murphy, however, died two days later and the fact is that on the day that Father Murphy died, he was still the defendant in a church criminal trial. No one seems to be aware of this. Had I been asked to abate this trial, I most certainly would have insisted that an appeal be made to the supreme court of the church, or Pope John Paul II if necessary. That process would have taken months if not longer.

Second, with regard to the role of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), in this matter, I have no reason to believe that he was involved at all. Placing this matter at his doorstep is a huge leap of logic and information.

Third, the competency to hear cases of sexual abuse of minors shifted from the Roman Rota to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith headed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001. Until that time, most appeal cases went to the Rota and it was our experience that cases could languish for years in this court. When the competency was changed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in my observation as well as many of my canonical colleagues, sexual abuse cases were handled expeditiously, fairly, and with due regard to the rights of all the parties involved. I have no doubt that this was the work of then Cardinal Ratzinger.

Fourth, Pope Benedict has repeatedly apologized for the shame of the sexual abuse of children in various venues and to a worldwide audience. This has never happened before. He has met with victims. He has reigned in entire conferences of bishops on this matter, the Catholic Bishops of Ireland being the most recent. He has been most reactive and proactive of any international church official in history with regard to the scourge of clergy sexual abuse of minors. Instead of blaming him for inaction on these matters, he has truly been a strong and effective leader on these issues.

Finally, over the last 25 years, vigorous action has taken place within the church to avoid harm to children. Potential seminarians receive extensive sexual-psychological evaluation prior to admission. Virtually all seminaries concentrate their efforts on the safe environment for children. There have been very few cases of recent sexual abuse of children by clergy during the last decade or more.

Catholic dioceses all across the country have taken extraordinary steps to ensure the safety of children and vulnerable adults. As one example, which is by no means unique, is in the Archdiocese of Anchorage, where I currently work. Here, virtually every public bathroom in parishes has a sign asking if a person has been abuse by anyone in the church. A phone number is given to report the abuse and almost all church workers in the archdiocese are required to take yearly formation sessions in safe environment classes. I am not sure what more the church can do.

To conclude, the events during the 1960’s and 1970’s of the sexual abuse of minors and solicitation in the confessional by Father Lawrence Murphy are unmitigated and gruesome crimes. On behalf of the church, I am deeply sorry and ashamed for the wrongs that have been done by my brother priests but realize my sorrow is probably of little importance 40 years after the fact. The only thing that we can do at this time is to learn the truth, beg for forgiveness, and do whatever is humanly possible to heal the wounds. The rest, I am grateful, is in God’s hands.

Father Thomas T. Brundage, JCL

go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=lukecoppen.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcatholicanchor.org%2Fwordpress%2F%3Fp%3D601&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.catholicherald....

catholicanchor.org/wordpress/?p=601





ALLELUIA! and DEO GRATIAS! All Catholics and men of goodwill owe Fr. Brundage this early Easter gift - he does honor not only to his faith and his priesthood but also to his journalism education.

God knows how the New York Times will try to justify its arrogant display of jackbooted, truth-trampling journalism - I don't expect them to retract anything, much less apologize - but they probably will try to displace the public's fickle attention to some new revelation' seeking to inculpate Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI somehow!

In fact, we can celebrate the great and essential fact that truth has come out about the Milwaukee case, but the poison has been spilled and minds have been corroded already.

Also, in modern journalism, the unwritten rule is that a Page 1 headline of a lie or falsity never gets a Page 1 retraction or correction. And that will be the case here, mark my word.

I am not expecting any of the media outlets who are out to get the Pope and the Church to give Father Brundage's first-hand account any notice. They've already gone way overboard - weighted with the hook-line-sinker-and-kitchen-sink they swallowed whole from the Times, along with supersize servings of their own purple more-Popish-than-the-Pope pontifications - to go back on their tracks now!


TERESA


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Tuesday, March 30

ST. PEDRO REGALADO (Spain, 1390-1456), Franciscan, Reformer, Mystic
He lived at a time of great historical transitions: In 1418, the Council of Constance settled the Great Western
Schism and ended the Avignon papacy; France and England were fighting the Hundred Years' War; the Muslim
Turks finally ended the Byzantine Empire in 1453, Gutenberg had just invented the printing press, and
the century would end with Columbus reaching America. In Villadolid, Spain, young Pedro entered the Order
of the Franciscans, went on to became superior of a convent, actively engaged in reform of the Franciscan
order, and by 1442, was head of the Reformed Franciscans in Spain. His charism was in service to the poor,
and tradition says that when he fed them, he never ran out of food to share. He was immediately the object
of a cult after his death, and 36 years later, when Spain's 'Catholic Queen' Isabella ordered his body
exhumed to be transferred to a better tomb, the body was found to be incorrupt. He was canonized in 1746.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/033010.shtml



OR for 3/29-3/30/10:

Benedict XVI celebrates Palm Sunday and World Youth day in St. Peter's Square:
'Jesus Christ is the right way to be a man'
He also calls on authorities to keep the peace in Jerusalem

Other Page 1 stories: A commentary on new Israeli housing in east Jerusalem puts the burden on Israel; terrorists strike two subway stations in the heart of Moscow; and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo brings continued civilian massacres. In the inside pages, French commentator Bernard Lecomte writes a eulogy on John Paul II, "The Pope who went against the current", and a most interesting and admiring review of a new book by an Israeli professor examining Jesus Christ in the context of his Jewishness, based on the work of Jewish scholars of the 20th century; they concluded, among other things, that Jesus belonged to the Pharisees, a sect long reviled throughout history.


THE POPE'S DAY

Normally the Holy Father has no scheduled events in Holy Week other than the liturgies. Today was an exception.
He met with Cardinal Stanislas Dsiwisz, Archbishop of Cracow, who is in Rome for the fifth anniversary of
John Paul II's death.



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Hmmm... I've never really taken the effort to read any of their material - for the obvious reason.
But nevertheless, just a question: what type of readership to they have? Is it widespread? Across all fractions? Is it distributed freely?

The mud-dumping episode from today sort of makes me wonder how they can call themselves Catholic!

Can you fill me in about them?





I have no special information about the diocese of Anchorage, but since Alaska is a vast state and sparsely populated, the diocese cannot possibly have more than few thousand souls, and the diocesan newspaper is probably not seen outside the diocese at all.

But the crucial thing is whether the MSM will use Father Brundage's story at all.... And as of right now, 24 hours since Father Brudnage's brief was posted, not one of them has. Instead, to my horror, their new battlehorse is some frivolous lawsuit in the United States seeking to implicate the Vatican and the Pope himself (in his role as Cardinal Ratzinger) as co-defendants in some suit against a diocese - and they are all reporting it as if it was the first time this has happened. I won't even bother posting all this new crap!

And yet it has happened a few times already since 2005, and each time, the suit was thrown out by the courts for two reasons: the Vatican is a sovereign state, and as head of state, the Pope is immune from lawsuits; and 2) local priests and bishops are not employees of the Vatican at all, since dioceses are autonomous structures within the Catholic Church; they are not political or administrative subdivisions of the Vatican.

Perhaps I can resurrect some relevant posts from the past about the court dismissals....

The pot at the end of the rainbow, of course, for victims and their rapacious treasure-hunting lawyers is what they perceive to be the Vatican's literally inestimable wealth.... And no matter how frivolous these lawsuits are, it gets the lawyers a lot of worldwide publicity and makes them heroes to all the lunatic hate-driven anti-Church Jacobins of the world.

In his own way, through the homily on Palm Sunday, and especially the homily about John Paul II yesterday, Benedict XVI is reassuring us the faithful adn all who love him that as it was with John Paul II, the Lord has him by the hand and "accompanies him with grace and continuous assistance".

And so,we pray, and we pray, and we pray.....

TERESA



P.S. I'm sorry, Heike... Your question was about John Allen's newspaper or whatever, not the Anchorage diocesan paper! Stupid me, my mind has been on a single track since this morning.... I can't seem to find any information about their circulation, but according to the only statistics I can find, from 2003, there were 626 Catholic newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, with a combined circulation of 27 million, which averages to about 40,000 per publication.

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I'm still turning imaginary cartwheels over and over about Fr. Brundage's account and the precious increasingly rare gift of truth that I'm practically reduced to inactivity. So the only coherent thing I can do right now is to 'memorialize' Fr. Brundage somehow on this thread and in this Forum...


A celebration of truth:
With gratitude and best wishes
to Father Thomas Brundage





And now, to settle myself, I will translate the Holy Father's homily last night on the Venerable John Paul II....

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Since my first post on this event was last night shortly after it took place, and the photos and text of the papal homily only came out this morning, I've decided to post the photographs here, and the translation of the Pope's homily.



Remembering John Paul II
five years after his death








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!










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The Catholic League of the United States took out this advertisement in the New York Times today:



Given the deadline for material submission to newspapers if you want to make it to a certain date, it's too bad teh Catholic League came out with this before they could learn of Father Brundage's statement!

I think they should get another ad to publish the full statement of Father Brundage because that is the only way it will ever have a chance to come out in the NYT, 'the newspaper of criminal record'.

Or the Knights of Columbus, or some other Catholic organization or individual Catholic who can afford to pay for a one-page ad.



Two articles in tomorrow's issue (3/31/10) of the OR reporting support from various bishops for the Pope. The first one leads off with Cardinal Schoenborn's statements from Sunday, but does not say anything more. This report illustrates the OR's unconventional - to be charitable about it - style of news reporting, which is infuriatingly unsatisfactory!



A chorus of solidarity
with Benedict XVI

Translated from
the 3/30/10 issue of




"The accusation that Cardinal Ratzinger did not act on sex-abuse complaints or ignored them is false", the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, said in an interview with Austrian state TV ORF and with the newspaper Kleine Zeitung, citing the case of Cardinal Hans hermann Groer, who resigned in 1998 three years after Cardinal Ratzinger had recommended an investigation by the Vatican.

Meanwhile, unconditional support and full solidarity with Benedict XVI was expressed by the Bishops of the Middle East.

In Iraq, the Archbishop of Mosul, Emil Nona, told the news agency SIR: "Our faithful are convinced that this is propaganda against the Church, in order to sling mud at her in the eyes of the world. Still, there is sorrow, of course, for what is happening. On our part, we are making sure they know what the Pope has said against this scandal and the measures that he has taken to shed light on sex abuse cases with firmness, transparency and severity.

"The serious errors committed by a few priests cannot undo everything that the Church has always done for the benefit of children and young people, and the most vulnerable members of society".

In Lebanon, some bishops met to express their closeness to the Pope.

"A scandal that erupts somewhere in the Church", said the Bihop of Beirut, Mons. Michael Kassarji, "cannot be used to discredit it altogether, Unfortunately, there is too much superficiality which creates equally superficial opinions."

"The Church, with the Pope out front, is facing this scandal with firmness, and the faithful should me made aware of it. Trust in the Church must not be undermined by misdeeds that involve only a few of those who serve her and are part of her in various capacities. Now more than ever we need the witness of prayer".

The Bishop of Aleppo of the Chaldeans, Mons. Antoine Audo said: "We are witnessing a serious form of anti-Catholic propaganda that we must confront and which will tend to cause difficulties. We are comforted by the firmness shown by Benedict XVI in dealing with the issue [of sexual abuses by priests]. On our part, we are doing our best to inform the faithful correctly, even if we are handicapped by not having our own communications media."

The Catholic Church is the only institution that has had the courage to look into herslef in order to correct past wrrors, and this should be made more evident, said the Patriarchal Vicar of Jerusalem, Mons. Salim Sayegh:

"We are with Benedict XVI at this momnent when he and the Church are being attacked, and we have profound confidence in all the initiatives adapted by the Church to avoid that such things will recur.

"Here in Jordan, our faithful feel close to the Pope and wish to bear witness to the faith and to the Church as the best response to those who are trying to instrumentalize this episode".

Yesteerday, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, emeritus Archbishop of Milan, corrected a report in the Sunday edition of the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, subsequently carried by the Italian newspapers, regarding his thinking about priestly celibacy.

He said he was 'very surprised' by the reported "statements that do not correspond to what I think". He said the newspaper never spoke to him directly, but quoted from a letter he had written to Austrian youth and did so out of context.

He said, "My text said 'It is necessary to rethink the lifestyle of priests', by which I was underlining the importance of promoting a better community of living and brotherhood among priests so they can avoid possible situations of solitude, even of the interior kind".

Cardinal Martini added, "I believe it is a stretch to associate the duty of priestly celibacy with scandals of sexual abuse or violence with a sexual basis".

{I apologize, Youur Eminence. When it was first reported, and the way it was reported, it looked as if you had cast in your lot with Hans Kueng on this issue. It is good to know you still believe in priestly celibacy.

For the record, I think this is the first time that Cardinal Martini has ever denied press reporting of his statements, which would indicate that he felt the media correctly reported what he has said in the past five years [I won't enlarge my frame of reference beyond April 19, 2005) on bioethical issues where his position does not coincide with the Magisterium.]



Italian bishops
support the Pope

Translated from
the 3/30/10 issue of



ROME, March 30 - "The 'dismay', the 'sense of betrayal', and 'remorse' for the sexual abuses committed by some ministers of the Church explain the firm and enlightened attitude of Benedict XVI who, without leaaving any room for uncertainty nor indulging in minimization, has called on the ecclesial community to ascertain the truth of facts, taking the necessary measures accordingly. To him goes the full and affectionate solidarity of the Italian bishops, who are together around Peter and are thankful for his crystalline testimony of faith and his passionate Magisterium".



This was underscored by the final communique of the Permanent Council of the Italian bishops' conference which met last week.

The prelates wished to reaffirm their closesness "to the victims of abuses and their families, a wounded and offended part of the Church herself".

They also "agree with the fact that rigor and transparency in applying the procedural and penal canonical standards constitute the right way to arrive at the truth".

The bishops said "they do not oppose, but on the contrary, agree to loyal collaboration with State authorities whose task it is to ascertain the truth behind acts that are denounced".

The communique also confirms "the need for a very careful selection of candidates to the prieshood, weighing the candidate's human and emotional maturity, not just their spiritual and pastoral potential."

The bishops underscored "the importance of celibacy, which does not constitute an impediment nor a disablement of sexuality but represents, especially in our day, an alternative and humanly enriching form of living one's own humanity in radically giving oneself to Christ and the Church".

Finally, the bishops expressed their "full confidence and sincere gratitude to so many priests who, like the religious orders, dedicate themselves unseen and with a spirit of abnegation to announcing the Gospel, and to educational work, often being the only fixed reference point in social contexts that are fragmented and fraying".

The permanent Council reviewed the revised draft of pastorial orientations for the 2010-2020 decade, dedicated to education, and decided it was ready to be sent to all the bishops of Italy for discussion and possible approval in the next general assembly which will be held in Rome on May 24-28.

The bishops also reviewed the preparatory document for Social Action Week which will take place this year in Reggio Calabria (southern Italy) on Oct. 14-17.

In line with Benedict XVI's encyclical Caritas in veritate, they affirmed in particular that "every social question is always an anthropological question".

With respect to the encyclical itself, the commuique states that "the non-negotiable values, as recalled in detail by the CEI president in his opening remarks last week, represent the reason and the mission of the Catholic commitment in political and social action".

These values are the dignity of the human being, which is irrepressible under ay conditions; the indisposability of life form conception to natural death; religious freedom and the freedom to educate; and the family based on matrimony between a man and a woman.

Still echoing Cardinal Bagnasco's opening remarks. the bishops reiterated that "it is only on these foundations that other indispensable values can be proposed and guaranteed".

Ample attention was devoted to a first evaluation of the presence of foreign priests in Italy. In recent years, the bishops note, the number who have dedicated themselves to pastoral service has grown significantly, now representing 5% of all priests working in Italy.

Finally, the Permanent Council discussed the proposed outlay in the current year of the Church's 0.08% share of Italian tax revenue, to be presented to the next General Assembly.



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Wednesday, March 31

Monastery of Mar Saba, Holy Land.
[I cannot find any online images of today's saint]

ST. STEPHEN OF MAR SABA (Palestine, 725-796)
Orthodox monk, Hermit
Stephen was the nephew of St. John Damascene who took him into the 5th century Mar Saba
monastery when the boy was 10 and educated him for the next 15 years. After John's death in
749, Stephen spent the next 8 years of his life passing on what he had learned from his uncle.
Then he decided he wanted to be a hermit, and was allowed by his superior to spend 5 days of
the week alone, but to provide spiritual guidance on Saturdays and Sundays. Towards the end
of his life, Stephen saw the Saracens invade Palestine and take over many of its cities.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/033110.shtml



OR today.

Illustration from 2010 Via Crucis Meditations by Cardinal Camillo Ruini.
The Holy Father's Mass on the fifth anniversary of the death of John Paul II, praising him as
'A fellow pilgrim for contemporary man'


The other papal story is the Holy Father's telegram to Russian President Medvedev expressing his condolences for
the dead and wounded in Monday's terrorist suicide bomb attacks in two Moscow subway stations. Other Page 1
stories: More than a million are going hungry in northeast Uganda as a result of drought; and an essay on the
Shroud of Turin in the age of secularization. The issue contains the full text of the meditations and prayers for
the Via Crucis on Good Friday at the Rome Colosseum, written this year by Cardinal Camillo Ruini.




THE POPE'S DAY

The Holy Father held his regular General Audience at St. Peter's Square and spoke about the significance
of the Easter Triduum liturgies that begin tomorrow, Maundy Thursday.



NB; While today's OR contains two articles regarding support by the Middle East and Italian bishops for the Pope (translated and
posted in the preceding postbox on this page), it is puzzling - and in a way, shocking even - that it contains not a word about
Father Brundage's statement setting the record straight on the case of the late Milwaukee priest Fr. Lawrence Murphy. Perhaps
no one had the time to translate it to Italian? The site mesainlatino immediately provided one as early as yesterday morning!

To its credit, the English service of Vatican Radio online carries the full statement.



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The foreign news service of the British newspaper Daily Mail have done a summary of the new nuisance suit against the Vatican and the Pope by a US lawyer whom I can only describe most charitably as delusional. I am posting it because, despite its obvious bias, it does present relevant facts.

I hope that until it is dismissed as it ought to be, none of us has to post any more 'new' items about this utterly frivolous and malicious action, which of course, the MSM worldwide seized on yesterday as their next trumpery in their ongoing 'case' against Benedict XVI - totally ignoring the Brundage rebuttal of the deliberately distorted New York Times account of a Milwaukee case.

But almost all the MSM bought uncritically into the NYT story despite the fact that the 'supporting' documents posted online showed the story woven by the Times was pure poisonous bunkum! - and because they can't admit they were played for fools, feel they cannot now afford to print the rebuttal. That's contemporary journalism at what is proving to be its most typical and condemnable mode - reporting deliberate falsehoods as news instead of facts in order to promote their ideological biases.

At the very least, it should be clear to any sensible reader that "There is no there there" in all these trumpery, but unfortunately, MSM is not allowing the truth to come through
.




WHAT, ME WORRY??? The Holy Father at the General Audience today.


Why the Vatican cannot be held liable
for sex abuses and cover-ups

The Pope has immunity as head of state
Bishops and priests are not employees of the Vatican
1962 document does not provide proof of cover-up


March 31, 2010


The Vatican has revealed its three-point defence against an American lawsuit seeking to have the Pope deposed over claims of sexual abuse and cover-ups in the Catholic Church. [DIM]8pt[=DIM]['Revealed"? These arguments were already used in previous attempts by US victims' lawyers to name the Vatican and the Pope as co-defendants in abuse cases!]

The Kentucky case is the first in the U.S. to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself [????] for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children. [Media has been so willfully blind to the facts in everything that has to do with sex abuses in the Church, that I need to go back and check the cases dismissed earlier!]

The Holy See is set to fight back and protect the Pope by claiming that: He has immunity as a head of state; that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren't employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the 'smoking gun' that provides proof of a cover-up.

The strategy was revealed in court documents filed just days after the Pope was personally implicated in a separate case involving the alleged cover-up of the abuse of 200 deaf schoolboys in Wisconsin.
The case was filed in 2004 in Kentucky by three men who claim they were abused by priests and claim negligence by the Vatican.

Their lawyer, William McMurry, is seeking class-action status for the case, saying there are thousands of victims across the country.

"This case is the only case that has been ever been filed against the Vatican which has as its sole objective to hold the Vatican accountable for all the priest sex abuse ever committed in this country," he said. "There is no other defendant. There's no bishop, no priest."


[Omigosh! I did not realize the new suit case was as frivolous as this. Please, can any Catholic lawyer in the US stand up right away and denounce this mother of all publicity-seeking stunts? McMurry is even more despicable than Ali Agca!]

The Vatican is seeking to dismiss the suit before Benedict XVI can be questioned or secret documents produced in evidence. The preview of the legal defence was submitted last month in a U.S. District Court in Louisville.

The Vatican's strategy is to be formally filed in the coming weeks. Vatican officials declined to comment yesterday.

Complainants in the Kentucky suit argue that U.S. diocesan bishops were employees of the Holy See, and that Rome was therefore responsible for their alleged wrongdoing in failing to report abuse. They say a 1962 Vatican document ordered that bishops should not report sex abuse cases to police.

The Vatican has argued that there is nothing in the document that precluded bishops from calling the police. [Which will be readily seen by any judge who is not being willfully blind!]

With the U.S. scandal reinvigorated by reports of abuse in Europe and scrutiny of the Pope's handling of abuse cases when he was archbishop of Munich, the Kentucky case and another in Oregon have taken on greater significance.

Lawyers as far away as Australia have said they plan to use similar strategies.


However, the hurdles remain enormously high to force a foreign government to turn over confidential documents, let alone to subject a head of state to questioning by U.S. lawyers, experts say.

Mr McMurry is also seeking to depose Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and Cardinal William Levada. [Plan all you want, McMoron!]

The U.S. considers the Vatican a sovereign state - the two have had diplomatic relations since 1984.

In 2007, U.S. District Court Judge John Heyburn rejected an initial request by the complainants to depose Pope Benedict.

'They will not be able to depose the Pope,' said Joseph Dellapenna, a professor at Villanova University Law School and author of Suing Foreign Governments and their Corporations.

'But lower level officials could very well be deposed and there could be subpoenas for documents as part of discovery,' he said.

Mr McMurry last week filed a new court motion seeking to depose the Pope; Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, currently Vatican secretary of state but for years the Pope's deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Cardinal William Levada, an American who currently heads the Congregation; and Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican's representative in the U.S.

On Tuesday, Mr McMurry filed a memorandum in support of his demand to depose the Pope based on documents publicly released last week detailing the role of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in shutting down a canonical trial for a Wisconsin priest who allegedly molested up to 200 deaf boys.

'These documents confirm that the CDF, under Pope Benedict XVI's lead, discouraged prosecution of accused clergy and encouraged secrecy to protect the reputation of the church,' wrote Mr McMurry, who represented 243 sex abuse victims that settled with the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2003 for $25.3 million.

Jeffrey Lena, the reclusive mastermind of the Vatican's legal strategy in the U.S., is seeking to have the court rule on the Vatican's other defences before allowing the Pope to be deposed, in the hope that the suit will be dismissed.

Mr Lena noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that when a defendant enjoys immunity, a court shouldn't allow a 'discovery fishing expedition on claims that are baseless or speculative.'

Mr Lena also has argued that the Pope's deposition would violate the Vatican's own laws on confidentiality, and would set a bad precedent for U.S. officials.

'If Pope Benedict XVI is ordered to testify by a U.S. court, foreign courts could feel empowered to order discovery against the president of the United States regarding, for example, such issues as CIA renditions,' Mr Lena wrote in 2008.

Mr McMurry is eager to find out what the Vatican knew and did, in particular, about Rev. Louis Miller, who was removed from the priesthood in 2004 by the late Pope John Paul II.

Miller pleaded guilty in 2003 to sexually abusing one of the Kentucky defendants and other children in the 1970s. He is serving a 13-year prison sentence.

In a deposition transcription, Miller said he had offered to resign as early as 1962 to his then Archbishop John Floersh, and that two subsequent archbishops knew of his crimes but continued to keep him as a priest, moving him from parish to parish.

In explaining why he wanted to resign, Miller said: 'I just knew that the crime was so horrendous in my own mind that I didn't feel that I was worthy to remain a priest.'

But he said Floersh was 'compassionate,' kept him on, and told him, 'You will always be a good priest.'

Crucial to the Kentucky lawsuit is the 1962 document Crimen Sollicitationis - Latin for crimes of solicitation.

It describes how church authorities should deal with cases of abuse of children by priests, cases where sex is solicited in the confessional - a particularly heinous crime under canon law - and cases of homosexuality and bestiality.

Mr McMurry argues that the document imposed the highest level of secrecy on such matters and reflected a Vatican policy barring bishops from reporting abuse to police.

Mr Lena declined to comment yesterday, but he has tried to shoot down Mr McMurry's theory by arguing that Mr McMurry's own expert witness, canon lawyer Thomas P. Doyle, has rejected theories that Crimen was proof of a cover-up.

The complainants, Mr Lena wrote in a 2008 motion, 'fail to offer any facts in support of their theory that Crimen caused their injuries, nor indeed any facts that Crimen was ever in the possession of the Louisville archdiocese or used in Kentucky.'

Mr McMurry insisted yesterday that Crimen is a smoking gun. 'The fact is, this document and its predecessors make it an excommunicable offence to reveal any knowledge of allegations that a priest has sexually abused,' he said.
[McMoron either cannot read, or he is depending on a wrong translation of the document. The excommunication provision is for priests who fail to report sex crimes that they know about. Actually, I think he knows he's merely trumpeting 'talking points' even if he knows they are baseless, the way proagandists do.]

The existence of Crimen did not become publicly known until 2003, when a lawyer noticed a reference to the document while reading a 2001 letter written by Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Mr McMurry is seeking to produce Ratzinger's letter as evidence, which instructed all bishops to send cases of clerical sex abuse to him and to keep the proceedings secret.


[Go ahead, s'il vous plait! The letter referred to is De delictis gravioribus - and no Latin super-expert that McMoron and company can bring in to translate the document could possibly prove it contains something it does not!]

In 2008, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the go-ahead for the Kentucky lawsuit to continue, ruling that an exception to sovereign immunity, which shields most foreign governments from U.S. lawsuits, should be applied.

The 6th Circuit eliminated most of the complainants' claims in its late 2008 ruling before returning it to district court.
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The Pope and his Pharisaical attackers
Editorial
By George Neumayr

Issue of April 2010


The very secularists and libertine Catholics who wanted the aberrant sexual revolution to enter the Church in the 1960s and 1970s now hold Pope Benedict XVI responsible for its lingering effects. This takes considerable gall, but that has never stopped them before.

Moreover, what moral authority and “credibility” do they bring to the issue of protecting children, exactly?

These are the same people who favor the abortion of unborn children. They favor the high-brow child abuse of turning children over to homosexual couples at gay adoption agencies. They think it enlightened to bring Planned Parenthood representatives into elementary schools. They celebrate on Main Street gay-pride parades that include the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

The moral authority of these Church-hating ideologues is nil. We are witnessing the repulsively absurd spectacle of a culture drenched in depravity lecturing the Vicar of Christ on moral responsibility.

One doesn’t even have to agree with every action or inaction of Benedict's ecclesiastical career to see that these attacks on him have been appallingly stupid, glib, and Pharisaical.

Liberal pundits call for the resignation of the Pope with about as much consideration as they order a latte. The press interprets the Pope’s recent comment that faith leads one “toward the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion” as a response to these calls. It probably wasn’t, but if it was, he is right.

This is just the petty punditry of petty people who preside over a culture increasingly defined by the corruption of children.

Pope Benedict has taken serious steps to address the abuse scandal in the Church. What steps have a degenerate liberal elite taken to protect children in society at large?

The feverish drive to silence and smear the Pope — from the New York Times to pundits like Andrew Sullivan and Maureen Dowd to editorialists at the National Catholic Reporter — is not about the protection of children but the imposition of liberal ideology on the Church. Period.

Their real objection to Benedict is not that he has done too little to reform the priesthood but that he has done too much.

It was the New York Times and the National Catholic Reporter that pounced on him for issuing, in his first year as pope, a ban on the ordination of homosexuals.

It was the National Catholic Reporter that ran pieces casting the “zero-tolerance” policy as heartless and draconian to wayward priests.

These are not reformers of a permissive priesthood but proponents of one.





The Archbishop of New York strikes again in behalf of the Pope, the Church and truth! From his blog this week...


'All we ask is for media
to be fair and accurate'



March 30, 2010



To Whom Shall We Go?

In some ways, Holy Week is hardly the time I would choose to make the following comments. Still, the matter is so pressing that I feel compelled to address it.

Last week I asked for some fairness in the seemingly unappeasable criticism of the Church over the catastrophe of clergy sexual abuse.

Not to my surprise, if anything, it has only gotten worse, especially in the interminable headlines about the Pope himself.

Last fall I wrote in this blog about anti-Catholicism in the New York Times and other media, providing a list of contemporary examples. A few tried to slap me back into place, suggesting that I stupidly believed the Church to be immune from scrutiny. [The blog entry, posted in the ISSUES thread last October, was actually a letter to the New York Times from the Archbishop of New York which the 'newspaper of record' refused to publish! If the Archbishop of New York can be denied access to his own hometown newspaper, the New York Times, how credible can it be? Not that it hs been credible at all since it swung all the way to one-sided journalism during the George W. Bush years.]

Baloney! The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves; we do not expect any special treatment…so bring it on.

All we ask is that it be fair and accurate.

The reporting on Pope Benedict XVI has not been so.


The first reports were about a shameful priest in Germany three decades ago. I weighed in on that coverage last week.

The second story, sprayed all over the New York Times this week, and predictably copied by the world’s press, is groundless. (I am grateful for Father Raymond de Souza’s excellent piece posted at National Review Online which goes through the story point by point.)

The report accuses Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of preventing a priest whose sins and crimes can only be described as diabolical, one Lawrence Murphy, from facing proper penalties in the Church for the serial abuse of deaf minors.

While the report on the nauseating abuse is bitterly true, the insinuation against Cardinal Ratzinger is not, and gives every indication of being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict.

Here’s a summary of the key points:

•» The New York Times relied on tort lawyers who currently have civil suits pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the Holy See, who are aggressively supporting the radical measure right now before the Wisconsin legislature to abrogate the statute of limitations on civil cases of abuse, and who have high financial interest in the matter being reported. Hardly an impartial source…
•» The documentation that allegedly supports these sensational charges is published on the website of the New York Times; rather than confirming their theory, the documents instead show that there is no evidence at all that Cardinal Ratzinger ever blocked any decision about Murphy. Even a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, calls this charge “unfair” in his column of March 29.
•» We also find on the website a detailed timeline of all the sickening information about Murphy, data not “uncovered” by any reporter but freely released by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee a number of years back, and thoroughly covered at that time by the local media in Milwaukee.

One wonders why this story, quite exhaustively reported in the past, rose again this very week. It is hardly “news.” One might therefore ask: Why is this news now? The only reason it is news at all is because of the implication that Cardinal Ratzinger was involved. Yet the documentation does not support that charge, and thus they should have no place in a putatively respectable newspaper.

Nothing in this non-news merits the tsunami of headlines, stories, and diatribes against the Church and this Pope that we have endured this past week.

There was legitimate news last week that should have received much more attention than it did. It was the annual independent audit report on American dioceses on compliance with our own tough Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. For those who profess to be so interested in the welfare of the young, the news should have been trumpeted as stunning progress.

Catholics deeply disturbed by lurid tales of wicked behavior twenty or thirty years ago might have been surprised to discover:

•» The Church has had in place strict protocols and preventative measures to stop this from happening again. Last week’s audit reported that six million children in our schools and religious education programs underwent safe environment training – that’s 96% of the children in our care. Background evaluations were completed on two million priests, deacons, seminarians, educators, employees and volunteers.
•» Last week’s audit reported that there were six (6) credible allegations of sexual abuse of current minors for the entire year, in a Church of more than 60 million members. Though one would be too many, the percent is dramatically lower than experts tell us is the sad national average, and is only known because the Church is transparent in reporting.
•» In the spirit of no good deed goes unpunished, the false allegations of last week have obscured the good work that the Cardinal Ratzinger did at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and as Pope.

Beginning in 2001, as ably described by respected journalist John Allen [Archbishop Dolan, please don't be duped! - even if Allen has correctly pointed out through the years the deliberate distortion of the 1962 and 2001 CDF documents by Church detractor and carrion-circling vulture lawyers], and also mentioned recently by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Cardinal Ratzinger brought about a profound change in how sexual abuse cases were handled.

The details are many, but the effect was clear. It became easier to remove priests who have committed these crimes from ministry very quickly, and often, dismissed from the priesthood altogether.

Since his election, Pope Benedict has repeatedly demonstrated that even high-ranking priests are to be held accountable, and has not minced words about the failures of his brother bishops – both here in the United States and just last week, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

This failure to report in similar detail today’s successes and yesterday’s failures suggests the bias I wrote about last fall. This is also about simply telling the truth, or more to the point, about peddling falsehoods to destroy the Holy Father’s good name. It needs to be called what it is – scandalous.

Let me be upfront: I confess a bias in favor of the Church and her Pope.

I only wish some others would admit a bias on the other side.

A blessed Holy Week.




Since I do not willingly search out what the New York Times has to say about Benedict XVI these days, I may perhaps be forgiven for not seeing this Op-Ed piece that appeared on Palm Sunday in that newspaper - the second one after John Allen's that they have published since their one-two punch last week against the Holy Father.


A time for contrition
by ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: March 28, 2010

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your Eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?”

The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your Majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the Church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

wo centuries later, the clergy has taken another shot at it. What the American and Irish churches have endured in the last decade and what German Catholics find themselves enduring today is all part of the same grim story: the exposure, years after the fact, of an appalling period in which the Catholic hierarchy responded to an explosion of priestly sex abuse with cover-ups, evasions and criminal negligence.

Now the scandal has touched the Pope himself. There are two charges against Benedict XVI: first, that he allowed a pedophile priest to return to ministry while archbishop of Munich in 1980; and second, that as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1990s, he failed to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had abused deaf children 30 years before.

The second charge seems unfair. The case was finally forwarded to the Vatican by the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, more than 20 years after the last allegation of abuse. With the approval of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the statute of limitations was waived and a canonical trial ordered. It was only suspended because the priest was terminally ill; indeed, pre-trial proceedings were halted just before he died.

But the first charge is more serious. The Vatican insists that the crucial decision was made without the future Pope’s knowledge, but the paper trail suggests that he could have been in the loop. At best, then-Archbishop Ratzinger was negligent. At worst, he enabled further abuse.

For those of us who admire the Pope, either possibility is distressing, but neither should come as a great surprise. The lesson of the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit in the scandal.


[While I understand that Douthat is trying to be 'objective' here (if only to insure that the Times will continue allowing him to write for them), I still maintain that, regardless of what the culture of the Church was in 1980, Joseph Ratzinger would never have knowingly approved or condoned the appointment of a sex offender undergoing therapy to pastoral duties which involve contact with the young. Nothing in his record shows that he would have compromised a moral judgment just because 'it was SOP at the time'!

Absent any evidence that he knew the priest was given pastoral assignments, the only fair accusation one can make is he should have known because he should have at some point tried to find out what happened to the priest who came for therapy to Munich. And we can say that in hindsight now, only because the priest subsequently went on to commit another offense(s) for which he was convicted. If Father Had kept a spotless record (at least what is known) after he was assigned to Munich, no one would have cared what Archbishop Ratzinger knew or did not know at the time.]


From diocese to diocese, the same cover-ups and gross errors of judgment repeated themselves regardless of who found themselves in charge. Neither theology nor geography mattered: the worst offenders were Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles — a conservative and a liberal, on opposite ends of the country.

This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the Church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the Church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.

In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s over-emphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.)

But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished. [As terrible and ultimately disastrous as that culture was, none of it invalidates the blame that 'conservatives' place on the moral relativism that has afflicted the West since the 1960s, in parallel to the theological relativism that was a consequence of Vatican II.

Priests with pedophile tendencies may never have been so ready to forget their vows and to indulge their lusts if the cultural Zeitgeist was not proclaiming to one and all that there could be no restrictions whatsoever on sexual practice, while the false spirit-of-Vatican-II prophets were preaching that priestly celibacy should be abolished and that Vatican-II meant the Catholic Church was better off adapting its liturgy and its most sacrosanct practices to what Protestants have been doing since the Reformation.]


What’s more, it was a conservative hierarchy’s bunker mentality that prevented the Vatican from reckoning with the scandal. In a characteristic moment in 2002, a prominent cardinal told a Spanish audience that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the Church.” That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI.

[ In the light of what is happening today, what did he say then that was not true? He never said the abuses did not happen. He said they involved a small number of priests - which was true then and more so now - and then pointed out how the media was using it as a campaign against the Church. Which they were, and are.]

Since then, he’s come to grips with the crisis in ways that his predecessor did not: after years of drift and denial under John Paul II, the Vatican has taken vigorous steps to promote zero tolerance, expedite the dismissal of abusive priests and organize investigations that should have happened long ago.

Because of Benedict’s recent efforts, and the efforts of clerics and laypeople dating back to the first wave of revelations in the 1980s, Catholics can reasonably hope that the crisis of abuse is a thing of the past.

But the crisis of authority endures. There has been some accountability for the abusers, but not nearly enough for the bishops who enabled them. And now the shadow of past sins threatens to engulf this papacy.

Popes do not resign. But a Pope can clean house. And a Pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s darkest eras. [And what has Benedict XVI shown in word and deed since he became Pope but contrition for this scourge visited by a tiny handful on the Mystical Body of Christ?]

This is Holy Week, when the first Pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.

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In London, Archbishop speaks
at Chrism Mass on media assault




Archbishop Vincent Nichols, celebrated the annual Chrism Mass at Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday 30 March 2010 in the presence of over 300 priests and 1,000 people from the Diocese of Westminster.

The Chrism Mass sees the blessing of the three Holy Oils: the Oil of Catechumens, the Oil of the Blessing of the Sick and the Oil of Chrism. These are used during the sacraments.

The blessing of the Holy Oils is one of the most ancient ceremonies in the Church. It is always celebrated in the Cathedral by the bishop surrounded by the priests, deacons, religious and lay people from his diocese.

Before the Final Blessing, Archbishop Nichols made the following remarks:

Just before we end Mass today, I would like to add a few words about the widespread reports of child abuse in the Catholic Church and all the accompanying comment.

First, and most importantly, we think of those who have been damaged by childhood abuse with all its lasting effects. We must readily express our sorrow and apologies. We are properly and shocked and shamed by each and all such acts which are a dreadful breaking of trust. We are also firmly resolved to continue all our work of safeguarding.

Secondly, attempts to implicate Pope Benedict are unworthy. Every time you read that the 2001 document from the Holy See imposed a duty on bishops to keep these things secret and hidden from public authorities, know that this is simply untrue.

There is nothing in that document to deter or hinder a bishop or a victim from reporting cases to the police. In fact since that time, when the Holy See directly called for greater vigilance and scrutiny, bishops have been urged to take that course of action.


Thirdly, please remember that in the last forty years the vast majority of priests in England and Wales – 99.6% to be precise – have never had such allegations made against them. But even one case is too many.

Every single case is, and always will be, a sin and a scandal, damaging its victims and shaming us all. All of this we commit to the Lord in this Holy Week. From him alone, through his wounds, can come the healing we need.

There is a vivid phrase to recall: Trust comes on foot but leaves on horseback. It is on foot, through our daily actions, that trust is strengthened. We know that. That is what we do. And there is great trust among us – rightly given and received.

So, before the blessing, let me again thank all our priests here today for their goodness and hard work. I appreciate them and assure them of my love and support. I am sure you all do the same!

+ Vincent Nichols




More to the point, here is the admirable reaction of the current
Archbishop of Milwaukee:


Milwaukee archbishop defends the Pope
and extends olive branch to abuse victims

By Annysa Johnson

March 30, 2010


Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki on Tuesday defended Pope Benedict XVI's handling of the clergy sex abuse scandal. And he absolved him of any blame in decisions involving Father Lawrence Murphy, a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys over decades beginning in the 1950s.



"The Holy Father has been firm in his commitment to combat clergy sexual abuse, root it out of the church, reach out to those who have been harmed and hold perpetrators accountable," Listecki told the hundreds who gathered at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist for the annual Chrism Mass, a Holy Week service in which he blessed the oils the church will use for sacraments in the coming year.

Listecki drew applause for a wide-ranging statement in which he apologized for the sex abuse scandal, reached out to victims and spread the blame for the mishandling of the Murphy case, citing Milwaukee church officials, civil authorities and the journalists who first brought victims' stories to light.

He said the church is indebted to "those brave victims" who have come forward to tell their stories, often "after decades of feeling ignored."

"Because of their persistence and perseverance, we know the church has changed," Listecki said. "We owe these victims-survivors our deep gratitude, and we acknowledge our own actions have not always expressed that gratitude adequately."

Benedict has been widely criticized in recent weeks for his handling of clergy sex abuse cases in Europe and Wisconsin in what's been described as the most serious crisis of his papacy.

Documents made public last week as part of a Wisconsin lawsuit show that the Vatican's top doctrinal office, led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, declined to defrock Murphy after being asked by then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland to do so in 1996.

The decision was first reported by the Journal Sentinel in 2008 but drew international attention last week when lawyers in the case released the latest records [???? None of it appeared to be new!] to The New York Times.

Murphy, who died in 1998, worked at St. John's School for the Deaf in West Allis from 1950 to 1974 before being allowed to retire and move to his family's home in the Diocese of Superior. He is the subject of two civil fraud lawsuits now pending against the Milwaukee Archdiocese.

Church and civil authorities have known of the allegations against Murphy at least since the 1970s, though he never was charged. Authorities said no charges were filed because the statute of limitations had lapsed, though victims dispute this in some cases.

In Tuesday's remarks, Listecki did not elaborate on how reporters who covered the story were to blame. And he appeared to extend an olive branch to victims, who complained Monday that they were being vilified by the pope and Catholic hierarchy.

It was unclear, however, whether he had softened his stance against meeting with SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which has been seeking an audience with him. Listecki has said he would meet with individual victims but not the organization, which he sees as having a political agenda.

Mary Guentner of Wauwatosa, who was abused by a Catholic nun in the 1970s, said Listecki was sending a mixed message, first that victims are politicizing the issue, and now they're brave and courageous.

"They're very kind words, but we hope they result in some action," said Guentner, who waited in the receiving line to ask Listecki if he would meet with SNAP as a group.

The few worshippers willing to speak after Mass said they were pleased that Listecki addressed the issue and maintained their faith in the Church and Benedict XVI.

"I love the Church, and I have faith that God will see us through this," said Tom Elmer of Waukesha.

Also defending the Pope Tuesday was Father Thomas Brundage, who served as the presiding judge for the archdiocese in the Murphy case between 1996 and 1998 and is now serving in Anchorage, Alaska.

Writing for the Anchorage Catholic newspaper, Brundage said one of the documents widely attributed to him in some media accounts was not written by him and that he did not recognize it.

Peter Isely of SNAP said the document was written by Superior Bishop Raphael Fliss and that the first page, which would have indicated that, appears to have been missing when lawyers provided the documents to The New York Times.


Here is the full text of Archbishop Listecki's remarks to his congregation at yesterday's Chrism Mass:





Dear Friends,

This Lent throughout the archdiocese, we celebrated a Season of Mercy, acknowledging our sinfulness and our need to reconcile with our God. This Season of Mercy is a stark recognition of the presence of sin in our world, in our Church, amongst our people, and, yes, within priests and bishops. That sin has never been more present to us as a Church than through the sin and crime of clergy sexual abuse.

As a bishop, a priest, and as a man of faith, I apologize to anyone who has been a victim of clergy sexual abuse. This crime, this sin, this horror, should never occur, especially by a priest. Those who committed these crimes and those, including some bishops, who didn’t do everything in their power to stop it, go against everything the Church and the priesthood represent. For those actions, I offer my sincere apology.

So many people have suffered – first and foremost victims and their families. Because of the actions of the few priests who committed these crimes, all of us continue to suffer today.

This past week our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI has come under criticism for the way he has handled past cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors, including a case here involving Lawrence Murphy. The allegations against him, as well as the facts supporting him, are widely available.

The Holy Father does not need me to defend him or his decisions. I believe, and history will confirm that his actions in responding to this crisis, swiftly and decisively and his compassionate response to victims/surviovrs, speak for themselves.

The Holy Father has been firm in his commitment to combat clergy sexual abuse; root it out of the Church; reach out to those who have been harmed; and hold perpetrators accountable. He has been a leader, meeting with victims/survivors and chastising bishops for their lack of judgment and leadership.


Mistakes were made in the Lawrence Murphy case. The mistakes were not made in Rome in 1996, 1997 and 1998. The mistakes were made here, in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, in the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, by the Church, by civil authorities, by Church officials, and by bishops. And for that, I beg your forgiveness in the name of the Church and in the name of this Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

Because of those who have come forward -- those who have been harmed in a most egregious way; those who have been relentless in their criticism of the Church; those who have pushed and prodded – some say even forced -- the Church to change; those brave victims-survivors who have had the courage to come forward and publicly tell their story even after decades of feeling ignored -- because of their persistence and perseverance, we know the Church HAS changed.

We owe these victims/survivors our deep gratitude and we acknowledge our own actions have not always expressed that gratitude adequately.

We know that today the policies and procedures in place in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and across the United States, ensures to the best of our God-given ability, that no priest with a substantiated allegation of sexual abuse of a minor can ever serve as a priest again in our Church.

Still, we know it is not words, but actions that will demonstrate our resolve. And, in some ways, regardless of what I say, tonight or any other time, our critics will say it is not enough. But that cannot and will not prevent me from making every possible effort at moving forward toward healing and resolution with those who have been harmed, and, determined, to make sure nothing like this can ever happen again.

To you gathered here tonight – our pastors, priests, deacons and lay ecclesial ministers – through your vigilance at our parishes and schools, we now have in place the mechanisms to effectively combat the scourge of child sexual abuse. Through the formation and training of our safe environment initiative, we know that you, in your parishes, schools and institutions, have put in place the necessary safeguards and practices to ensure our children are protected. Thank you. Remain vigilant.

Even though some do not want to hear it or accept it as truth, mistakes were made by law enforcement, medical professionals -- even reporters who helped bring initial stories to light and grappled with how to deal with perpetrators. We have ALL learned so much.

We cannot deny the past, but because of all of it, during these past years we have become a more prudent Church. We have taken significant steps to purge this abuse from our Church and even from the larger society. We hope and pray our actions have become a model for WHAT TO DO after decades of what NOT to do.

We are a Sacramental Church. Tonight, in this holiest of weeks, we consecrated the holy oil of the sick. This oil will be used this next year for anointing and healing throughout our archdiocese. Healing we all need.

So, tonight, my dear brothers and sisters, as we renew our commitment to love and serve Jesus Christ and his Church, may we

May God bless you.



God bless the archbishop, his diocese, and the victims of abuse. And may the Holy Spirit of eternal Truth and Logos prevail on those who wish the Church and our Pope ill!


Yet another profile in courage:


Brooklyn Bishop calls on his priests
and parishioners to besiege the Y Times'


March 30, 2010


In his homily to the priests and people of the Diocese of Brooklyn, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, called upon the priests and people of the Diocese of Brooklyn to stand up with him and “besiege The New York Times. Send a message loud and clear that the Pope, our Church, and bishops and our priests will no longer be the personal punching bag of The New York Times.”

Bishop DiMarzio’s spirited defense of the Holy Father was based on the decision of The New York Times editors to, “Omit significant facts,” and ignore the reality that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Ratzinger headed up, did not have competency over Canonical Trials in 1996.

Moreover, Bishop DiMarzio continued “…the priest in question, Father Murphy was in the midst of a Canonical Trial. He died before a verdict was rendered.”

Reflecting on the timing of the stories, DiMarzio stated “Two weeks of articles about a story from many decades ago, in the midst of the Most Holy Season of the Church year is both callous and smacks of calumny!” He continued “This evening, I am asking you to join me making your displeasure known to the editors by letters or emails.”

Bishop DiMarzio reminded the priests, “Sanctity is what we are asked to aspire to; to become perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, as Jesus invited us.”

He encouraged them to take as their model John Vianney, the 19th Century French Saint who was proclaimed the patron of all priests by Pope Benedict XVI.

The Chrism Mass is a celebration of the institution of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. During the ceremony approximately 400 priests will renew their priestly promises of fidelity to a simple life, celibacy, and obedience. Unique at this Mass, is the blessing of the sacred oils for use in the administration of the Sacraments throughout the Diocese.



Cardinal Mahony praises Pope’s
swift response to LA abuse cases



Los Angeles, Calif., Mar 31, 2010 (CNA).- Responding to controversial media reports about Pope Benedict’s handling of abusive clergy, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, has praised “without hesitation” the future Pope’s quick and helpful response to allegations in the California archdiocese.

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the future Pontiff responded “quickly and affirmatively” to all requests for assistance from prelates in the United States during the year 2002 with reports about the American sexual abuse scandal.

Cardinal Ratzinger and the CDF responded “swiftly” and advised how to proceed in cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Cardinal Mahony wrote on his blog.

“We never had delays or a lack of proper response,” the cardinal continued. He noted that then-Cardinal Ratzinger responded quickly and approvingly whenever he proposed a certain priest be laicized and no longer able to serve as a priest.

Recently the New York Times and other outlets have published reports questioning the case of a priest who sexually abused more than 200 students at a Milwaukee school for the deaf. The reports claimed the priest was “protected” from laicization in the 1990s by the CDF.

The accuracy of those reports has been challenged by figures like Fr. Thomas Brundage, the judicial vicar who oversaw the case. He said the reports are based on an incorrect letter from an archbishop and also do not understand that the Roman Rota, not the CDF, handled cases of sexual abuse until 2001.

Cardinal Mahony’s praise for Cardinal Ratzinger’s work continued:

“Without the proactive and helpful assistance of Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation over these years, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles would never have been able to move forward aggressively to remove priests from ministry who were proved to be guilty of the sexual abuse of minors.”

Without the CDF’s insights, the cardinal added, “many guilty priests would still be considered priests in our Church.”

Cardinal Mahony expressed gratitude towards the present prefect and staff of the CDF, saying they continue with the same visions and policies Cardinal Ratzinger set before he became Pope.

Those procedures and policies have helped the Archdiocese of Los Angeles resolve cases to “make certain that the Church is a safe place for all peoples, especially children and young people,” the cardinal wrote on his blog.


Here is the Cardinal's blog in full:




THANK YOU, CARDINAL RATZINGER

While I have no personal information on some of the specific allegations against our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, when he served the Church of Munich in Germany, I am able to assert without hesitation the action steps which he undertook in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when he served as Prefect of that Congregation.

Beginning in that dark year of 2002, the then Cardinal Ratzinger responded quickly and affirmatively to all of our requests for assistance here in the United States.

Recall that Canon 1324, par. 4, states that in Canon Law a minor is a person under the age of 16 years. However, in the civil laws of the United States, a minor is deemed to be a person under the age of 18 years. After we brought this gap to the attention of Cardinal Ratzinger, the canonical age was also raised to 18 years to accommodate civil law in our country and in other countries.

With respect to the processes of dealing with cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests in our Archdiocese, Cardinal Ratzinger and his Congregation responded swiftly and gave us advice on how to proceed with each of these cases. We never had delays or a lack of proper response.

Whenever I proposed that a certain priest be returned to the lay state and no longer serve as a priest, the Congregation responded quickly and in accord with my recommendations.

Whether the priest petitioned himself for a return to the lay state, or whether I insisted upon his return to the lay state, Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation responded in favor of the Church, not of the priest individually.

Without the proactive and helpful assistance of Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation over these years, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles would never have been able to move forward aggressively to remove priests from ministry who were proved to be guilty of the sexual abuse of minors.

The Congregation continues forward with the same vision and policies of then Cardinal Ratzinger, and I am grateful to the present Prefect and staff of the Congregation for their proactive efforts to assist us in our local Dioceses and Archdioceses to remove from active ministry any priest or religious found guilty of the sexual abuse of minors.

We have had a large number of former priests and religious returned to the lay state under the auspices of Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Without those insights by the Congregation, many guilty priests would still be considered priests in our Church. That is no longer the case.

All of the procedures and processes which Cardinal Ratzinger implemented over the years have helped me and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles resolve many unfortunate cases in a manner to make certain that the Church is a safe place for all peoples, especially children and young people
.




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GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY

The Holy Father held his regular General Audience in St. Peter's Square today, Wednesday in Holy Week, to speak on the significance of the Easter Triduum. Here is how he synthesized the catechesis in English:


Tomorrow the Church begins her celebration of the Easter Triduum, a time devoted to silent prayer and contemplation of the mystery of the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection.

The liturgies of these days invite us to ponder Christ’s saving sacrifice and his promise of new life. In this Year for Priests, the Holy Thursday Chrism Mass, at which priests renew the promises made on the day of their ordination, will take on a particular significance. May priests everywhere be conformed ever more closely to Christ as heralds of his message of hope, reconciliation and peace!

The Mass of the Lord’s Supper, celebrated the evening of Holy Thursday, recalls the institution of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Holy Orders.

The liturgy of Good Friday, in which we enter into the mystery of Christ’s redemptive death, invites us to contemplate the deep relationship between the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Calvary.

Following the great silence of Holy Saturday, the Easter Vigil proclaims the resurrection of Christ and his victory over sin and death. May the joy of the resurrection even now fill our hearts as we prepare to celebrate the great events of the Lord’s passover from death to the fullness of life.


's Salvatore Izzo reports (in translation):

Smiling and relaxed, Benedict XVI this morning made the rounds in an open Popemobile among the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square for the General Audience.

A crowd of some 30,000 faithful greeted him with great warmth and enthusiasm - their number more than double the 11,000 tickets given out by the Pontifical Household for today's event.










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

Dear brothers and sisters,

We are living through the holy days which invite us to meditate on the central events of our redemption, the essential nucleus of our faith.

Tomorrow is the start of the Paschal Triduum, fulcrum of the entire liturgical year, during which we are called to silence and prayer in order to contemplate the mystery of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord.

In their homilies, the Fathers of the Church often referred to these days which, as St. Athanasius observed in one of his Paschal Letters, introduce us "to that time of a new beginning, the day of the Holy Passover, in which the Lord immolated himself" (Lett. 5, 1-2: PG 26, 1379).

Therefore I call on you to live these days intensely so that they may decisively orient life for each one towards a generous and convinced adherence to Christ who died and resurrected for us.

Tomorrow, the Holy Mass of Chrism, the morning prelude to Maundy Thursday, will see all priests joining their bishop. In the course of a significant Eucharistic celebration, which usually takes place in the diocesan Cathedral, the oils for the sick, the catechumens and Chrism will be blessed.

Moreover, the bishop and priests will renew the priestly promises they made on their day of ordination. This gesture takes on a special significance during this Year for Priests which I decreed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of the Holy Curate of Ars.

To all priests, I wish to reiterate the wish I formulated at the end of the letter proclaiming the Year for Priests: "With the example of the Holy Curate of Ars, let yourselves be conquered by Christ, that you yourselves may be, in the world today, messengers of hope, of reconciliation and of peace".

Tomorrow afternoon, we will celebrate the institution of the Eucharist. The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians, confirmed the first Christians in the truth of the Eucharistic mystery, communicating to them what he himself had learned:

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." (1Cor 11,23-25).


These words manifest Christ's intention with clarity: under the species of bread and wine, He makes himself present in a real way, with the body that would give and the blood that he would shed as a sacrifice of the New Covenant.

At the same time, he constituted the Apostles and their successors as ministers of this Sacrament, which he hands to his Church as supreme proof of his love.

With an evocative ritual, we will also recall the gesture of Jesus who washed the feet of the Apostles (cfr Jn 13,1-25). This act became, for the evangelist, the representation of Jesus's entire life, revealing his love to the very end, an infinite love, which can qualify man for communion with God and make him free.

At the end of the liturgy of Maundy Thursday, the Church places the Most Blessed Sacrament in a specially prepared place which represents the solitude of Gethsemane and the mortal anguish of Jesus. Before the Sacrament, the faithful contemplate Jesus in his hour of solitude and pray that all the solitudes of the world may end.

This liturgical course is, among other things, an invitation to seek intimate communion with the Lord in prayer, to be able to recognize Jesus in all persons who are alone, to keep vigil with him, and to learn to proclaim the light of one's own life.

On Good Friday, we will commemorate the passion and death of our Lord. Jesus wished to offer his life in sacrifice for the remission of the sins of mankind, choosing for this the most cruel and humiliating death: crucifixion.

There is an inseparable connection between the Last Supper and the death of Jesus. In the first, Jesus offers his Body and his Blood - his earthly existence , his very self, anticipating his death and transforming it to an act of love.

Thus death, which by its nature is the end, the destruction of every relationship, he makes it into the act of communicating himself, the instrument of salvation and proclamation of the triumph of love.
In this way, Jesus becomes the key for understanding the Last Supper which anticipates the transformation of violent death into voluntary sacrifice, into an act of love that redeems and saves the world.

Holy Saturday is characterized by a great silence. The Churches are stripped of adornment and no particular liturgy is prescribed. In this time of waiting and hope, believers are invited to prayer, to reflection, to repentance, even through the sacrament of Reconciliation, in order to be able to take part, intimately renewed, in the celebration of Easter.

On the night of Holy Saturday, during the solemn Easter Vigil, 'mother of all vigils', this silence will be broken by singing Alleluia, which announces the resurrection of Christ and proclaims the victory of light over shadows, life over death.

The Church will rejoice in its encounter with the Lord, entering Easter Sunday which the Lord will inaugurate by resurrrecting from the dead.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us prepare ourselves to live intensely this Paschal Triduum that is imminent, in order to always be profoundly into the Mystery of Christ, who died and rose again for us.

May the Most Blessed Virgin accompany us in this spiritual itinerary. She who followed Jesus in his Passion and was present at the foot of the Cross, introduces us to the Paschal mystery so that we may experience the joy and the peace of the Resurrected Lord.

With these sentiments, I extend my most heartfelt wishes for a blessed Easter to all of you, to your communities and all those who are dear to you.









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The New York Times and Pope Benedict XVI:
By Cardinal William J. Levada
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

In our melting pot of peoples, languages and backgrounds, Americans are not noted as examples of “high” culture. But we can take pride as a rule in our passion for fairness. In the Vatican where I currently work, my colleagues – whether fellow cardinals at meetings or officials in my office – come from many different countries, continents and cultures. As I write this response today (March 26, 2010) I have had to admit to them that I am not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness.

I say this because today’s Times presents both a lengthy article by Laurie Goodstein, a senior columnist, headlined “Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest,” and an accompanying editorial entitled “The Pope and the Pedophilia Scandal,” in which the editors call the Goodstein article a disturbing report (emphasis in original) as a basis for their own charges against the Pope. Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.

In her lead paragraph, Goodstein relies on what she describes as “newly unearthed files” to point out what the Vatican (i.e. then Cardinal Ratzinger and his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) did not do – “defrock Fr. Murphy.” Breaking news, apparently. Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Fr. Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims.”

But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Fr. Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that Church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”? By her own account it seems clear that criminal authorities had been notified, most probably by the victims and their families.

Goodstein’s account bounces back and forth as if there were not some 20 plus years intervening between reports in the 1960 and 70’s to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and local police, and Archbishop Weakland’s appeal for help to the Vatican in 1996. Why? Because the point of the article is not about failures on the part of church and civil authorities to act properly at the time. I, for one, looking back at this report agree that Fr. Murphy deserved to be dismissed from the clerical state for his egregious criminal behavior, which would normally have resulted from a canonical trial.

The point of Goodstein’s article, however, is to attribute the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of to diocesan decisions at the time. She uses the technique of repeating the many escalating charges and accusations from various sources (not least from her own newspaper), and tries to use these “newly unearthed files” as the basis for accusing the pope of leniency and inaction in this case and presumably in others.

It seems to me, on the other hand, that we owe Pope Benedict a great debt of gratitude for introducing the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors. These efforts began when the Pope served as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and continued after he was elected Pope. That the Times has published a series of articles in which the important contribution he has made – especially in the development and implementation of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, the Motu proprio issued by Pope John Paul II in 2001 – is ignored, seems to me to warrant the charge of lack of fairness which should be the hallmark of any reputable newspaper.

Let me tell you what I think a fair reading of the Milwaukee case would seem to indicate. The reasons why church and civil authorities took no action in the 1960’s and 70’s is apparently not contained in these “newly emerged files.” Nor does the Times seem interested in finding out why. But what does emerge is this: after almost 20 years as Archbishop, Weakland wrote to the Congregation asking for help in dealing with this terrible case of serial abuse. The Congregation approved his decision to undertake a canonical trial, since the case involved solicitation in confession – one of the graviora delicta (most grave crimes) for which the Congregation had responsibility to investigate and take appropriate action.

Only when it learned that Murphy was dying did the Congregation suggest to Weakland that the canonical trial be suspended, since it would involve a lengthy process of taking testimony from a number of deaf victims from prior decades, as well as from the accused priest. Instead it proposed measures to ensure that appropriate restrictions on his ministry be taken. Goodstein infers that this action implies “leniency” toward a priest guilty of heinous crimes. My interpretation would be that the Congregation realized that the complex canonical process would be useless if the priest were dying. Indeed, I have recently received an unsolicited letter from the judicial vicar who was presiding judge in the canonical trial telling me that he never received any communication about suspending the trial, and would not have agreed to it. But Fr. Murphy had died in the meantime. As a believer, I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.

Goodstein also refers to what she calls “other accusations” about the reassignment of a priest who had previously abused a child/children in another diocese by the Archdiocese of Munich. But the Archdiocese has repeatedly explained that the responsible Vicar General, Mons. Gruber, admitted his mistake in making that assignment. It is anachronistic for Goodstein and the Times to imply that the knowledge about sexual abuse that we have in 2010 should have somehow been intuited by those in authority in 1980. It is not difficult for me to think that Professor Ratzinger, appointed as Archbishop of Munich in 1977, would have done as most new bishops do: allow those already in place in an administration of 400 or 500 people to do the jobs assigned to them.

As I look back on my own personal history as a priest and bishop, I can say that in 1980 I had never heard of any accusation of such sexual abuse by a priest. It was only in 1985, as an Auxiliary Bishop attending a meeting of our U.S. Bishops’ Conference where data on this matter was presented, that I became aware of some of the issues. In 1986, when I was appointed Archbishop in Portland, I began to deal personally with accusations of the crime of sexual abuse, and although my “learning curve” was rapid, it was also limited by the particular cases called to my attention.

Here are a few things I have learned since that time: many child victims are reluctant to report incidents of sexual abuse by clergy. When they come forward as adults, the most frequent reason they give is not to ask for punishment of the priest, but to make the bishop and personnel director aware so that other children can be spared the trauma that they have experienced.

In dealing with priests, I learned that many priests, when confronted with accusations from the past, spontaneously admitted their guilt. On the other hand, I also learned that denial is not uncommon. I have found that even programs of residential therapy have not succeeded in breaking through such denial in some cases. Even professional therapists did not arrive at a clear diagnosis in some of these cases; often their recommendations were too vague to be helpful. On the other hand, therapists have been very helpful to victims in dealing with the long-range effects of their childhood abuse. In both Portland and San Francisco where I dealt with issues of sexual abuse, the dioceses always made funds available (often through diocesan insurance coverage) for therapy to victims of sexual abuse.

From the point of view of ecclesiastical procedures, the explosion of the sexual abuse question in the United States led to the adoption, at a meeting of the Bishops’ Conference in Dallas in 2002, of a “Charter for the Protection of Minors from Sexual Abuse.” This Charter provides for uniform guidelines on reporting sexual abuse, on structures of accountability (Boards involving clergy, religious and laity, including experts), reports to a national Board, and education programs for parishes and schools in raising awareness and prevention of sexual abuse of children. In a number of other countries similar programs have been adopted by Church authorities: one of the first was adopted by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in response to the Nolan Report made by a high-level commission of independent experts in 2001.

It was only in 2001, with the publication of Pope John Paul II’s Motu proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (SST), that responsibility for guiding the Catholic Church’s response to the problem of sexual abuse of minors by clerics was assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This papal document was prepared for Pope John Paul II under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Contrary to some media reports, SST did not remove the local bishop’s responsibility for acting in cases of reported sexual abuse of minors by clerics. Nor was it, as some have theorized, part of a plot from on high to interfere with civil jurisdiction in such cases. Instead, SST directs bishops to report credible allegations of abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is able to provide a service to the bishops to ensure that cases are handled properly, in accord with applicable ecclesiastical law.

Here are some of the advances made by this new Church legislation (SST). It has allowed for a streamlined administrative process in arriving at a judgment, thus reserving the more formal process of a canonical trial to more complex cases. This has been of particular advantage in missionary and small dioceses that do not have a strong complement of well-trained canon lawyers. It provides for erecting inter-diocesan tribunals to assist small dioceses. The Congregation has faculties allowing it derogate from the prescription of a crime (statute of limitations) in order to permit justice to be done even for “historical” cases. Moreover, SST has amended canon law in cases of sexual abuse to adjust the age of a minor to 18 to correspond with the civil law in many countries today. It provides a point of reference for bishops and religious superiors to obtain uniform advice about handling priests’ cases. Perhaps most of all, it has designated cases of sexual abuse of minors by clerics as graviora delicta: most grave crimes, like the crimes against the sacraments of Eucharist and Penance perennially assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This in itself has shown the seriousness with which today’s Church undertakes its responsibility to assist bishops and religious superiors to prevent these crimes from happening in the future, and to punish them when they happen. Here is a legacy of Pope Benedict that greatly facilitates the work of the Congregation which I now have the privilege to lead, to the benefit of the entire Church.

After the Dallas Charter in 2002, I was appointed (at the time as Archbishop of San Francisco) to a team of four bishops to seek approval of the Holy See for the “Essential Norms” that the American Bishops developed to allow us to deal with abuse questions. Because these norms intersected with existing canon law, they required approval before being implemented as particular law for our country. Under the chairmanship of Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and currently President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, our team worked with Vatican canonical experts at several meetings. We found in Cardinal Ratzinger, and in the experts he assigned to meet with us, a sympathetic understanding of the problems we faced as American bishops. Largely through his guidance we were able to bring our work to a successful conclusion.

The Times editorial wonders “how Vatican officials did not draw the lessons of the grueling scandal in the United States, where more than 700 priests were dismissed over a three-year period.” I can assure the Times that the Vatican in reality did not then and does not now ignore those lessons. But the Times editorial goes on to show the usual bias: “But then we read Laurie Goodstein’s disturbing report . . .about how the pope, while he was still a cardinal, was personally warned about a priest … But church leaders chose to protect the church instead of children. The report illuminated the kind of behavior the church was willing to excuse to avoid scandal.” Excuse me, editors. Even the Goodstein article, based on “newly unearthed files,” places the words about protecting the Church from scandal on the lips of Archbishop Weakland, not the pope. It is just this kind of anachronistic conflation that I think warrants my accusation that the Times, in rushing to a guilty verdict, lacks fairness in its coverage of Pope Benedict.

As a full-time member of the Roman Curia, the governing structure that carries out the Holy See’s tasks, I do not have time to deal with the Times’s subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting of Goodstein’s “disturbing report.” But about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.

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I just came across this excellent and engrossing piece written by Cardinal Levada, apparently right after the NYT article on the Murphy case came out. It's published in the weekly diocesan newspaper of San Francisco, datelined March 30. But I am wondering why Cardinal Levada did not also copy furnish this right away to L'Osservatore Romano and Avvenire, at the very least, who would certainly have used it in full (and which the Italian media would then have reported on) - and still can and should; and to all the other editorial newsrooms of the world, who might have used some of it if only because it comes from Cardinal Levada.

I can almost bet that he might have sent it to the New York Times itself but they 'rejected' it as unfit for publication, the same way they rejected Archbishop Dolan's letter last October protesting anti-Catholicism in the media.

The essay is equally admirable for what Cardinal Levada says of his own personal experience with dealing with the sex abuse problem as a US bishop. Please, please, somebody do something about getting the widest possible circulation of Cardinal Levada's essay as well as Fr. Brundage's statement!






Cardinal Levada to NY Times:
Reconsider 'attack mode'
against Pope Benedict

By Cardinal William J. Levada
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

March 30th, 2010


In our melting pot of peoples, languages and backgrounds, Americans are not noted as examples of “high” culture. But we can take pride as a rule in our passion for fairness.

In the Vatican where I currently work, my colleagues – whether fellow cardinals at meetings or officials in my office – come from many different countries, continents and cultures.

As I write this response today (March 26, 2010) I have had to admit to them that I am not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness.

I say this because today’s Times presents both a lengthy article by Laurie Goodstein, a senior columnist, headlined “Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest,” and an accompanying editorial entitled “The Pope and the Pedophilia Scandal,” in which the editors call the Goodstein article a disturbing report as a basis for their own charges against the Pope.

Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.

In her lead paragraph, Goodstein relies on what she describes as “newly unearthed files” to point out what the Vatican (i.e. then Cardinal Ratzinger and his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) did not do – “defrock Fr. Murphy.” Breaking news, apparently.

Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Fr. Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the Church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims.”

But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Fr. Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that Church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”? By her own account it seems clear that criminal authorities had been notified, most probably by the victims and their families.

Goodstein’s account bounces back and forth as if there were not some 20 plus years intervening between reports in the 1960s-1970s to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and local police, and Archbishop Weakland’s appeal for help to the Vatican in 1996.

Why? Because the point of the article is not about failures on the part of Church and civil authorities to act properly at the time. I, for one, looking back at this report agree that Fr. Murphy deserved to be dismissed from the clerical state for his egregious criminal behavior, which would normally have resulted from a canonical trial.

The point of Goodstein’s article, however, is to attribute the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of to diocesan decisions at the time. She uses the technique of repeating the many escalating charges and accusations from various sources (not least from her own newspaper), and tries to use these “newly unearthed files” as the basis for accusing the Pope of leniency and inaction in this case and presumably in others.

It seems to me, on the other hand, that we owe Pope Benedict a great debt of gratitude for introducing the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors. These efforts began when the Pope served as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and continued after he was elected Pope.

That the Times has published a series of articles in which the important contribution he has made – especially in the development and implementation of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, the Motu proprio issued by Pope John Paul II in 2001 – is ignored, seems to me to warrant the charge of lack of fairness which should be the hallmark of any reputable newspaper.

Let me tell you what I think a fair reading of the Milwaukee case would seem to indicate. The reasons why church and civil authorities took no action in the 1960s and 70s is apparently not contained in these “newly emerged files.” Nor does the Times seem interested in finding out why.

But what does emerge is this: after almost 20 years as Archbishop, Weakland wrote to the Congregation asking for help in dealing with this terrible case of serial abuse. The Congregation approved his decision to undertake a canonical trial, since the case involved solicitation in confession – one of the graviora delicta (most grave crimes) for which the Congregation had responsibility to investigate and take appropriate action.

Only when it learned that Murphy was dying did the Congregation suggest to Weakland that the canonical trial be suspended, since it would involve a lengthy process of taking testimony from a number of deaf victims from prior decades, as well as from the accused priest. Instead it proposed measures to ensure that appropriate restrictions on his ministry be taken.

Goodstein infers that this action implies “leniency” toward a priest guilty of heinous crimes. My interpretation would be that the Congregation realized that the complex canonical process would be useless if the priest were dying.

Indeed, I have recently received an unsolicited letter from the judicial vicar [this would be Fr. Brundage] who was presiding judge in the canonical trial telling me that he never received any communication about suspending the trial, and would not have agreed to it. But Fr. Murphy had died in the meantime.

As a believer, I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.

Goodstein also refers to what she calls “other accusations” about the reassignment of a priest who had previously abused a child/children in another diocese by the Archdiocese of Munich.

But the Archdiocese has repeatedly explained that the responsible Vicar General, Mons. Gruber, admitted his mistake in making that assignment. It is anachronistic for Goodstein and the Times to imply that the knowledge about sexual abuse that we have in 2010 should have somehow been intuited by those in authority in 1980.

It is not difficult for me to think that Professor Ratzinger, appointed as Archbishop of Munich in 1977, would have done as most new bishops do: allow those already in place in an administration of 400 or 500 people to do the jobs assigned to them.

As I look back on my own personal history as a priest and bishop, I can say that in 1980 I had never heard of any accusation of such sexual abuse by a priest. It was only in 1985, as an Auxiliary Bishop attending a meeting of our U.S. Bishops’ Conference where data on this matter was presented, that I became aware of some of the issues.

In 1986, when I was appointed Archbishop in Portland, I began to deal personally with accusations of the crime of sexual abuse, and although my “learning curve” was rapid, it was also limited by the particular cases called to my attention.

Here are a few things I have learned since that time:
- Many child victims are reluctant to report incidents of sexual abuse by clergy.
- When they come forward as adults, the most frequent reason they give is not to ask for punishment of the priest, but to make the bishop and personnel director aware so that other children can be spared the trauma that they have experienced.

In dealing with priests, I learned that many priests, when confronted with accusations from the past, spontaneously admitted their guilt. On the other hand, I also learned that denial is not uncommon.

I have found that even programs of residential therapy have not succeeded in breaking through such denial in some cases. Even professional therapists did not arrive at a clear diagnosis in some of these cases; often their recommendations were too vague to be helpful.

On the other hand, therapists have been very helpful to victims in dealing with the long-range effects of their childhood abuse. In both Portland and San Francisco where I dealt with issues of sexual abuse, the dioceses always made funds available (often through diocesan insurance coverage) for therapy to victims of sexual abuse.

From the point of view of ecclesiastical procedures, the explosion of the sexual abuse question in the United States led to the adoption, at a meeting of the Bishops’ Conference in Dallas in 2002, of a “Charter for the Protection of Minors from Sexual Abuse.”

This Charter provides for uniform guidelines on reporting sexual abuse, on structures of accountability (Boards involving clergy, religious and laity, including experts), reports to a national Board, and education programs for parishes and schools in raising awareness and prevention of sexual abuse of children.

In a number of other countries similar programs have been adopted by Church authorities: one of the first was adopted by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in response to the Nolan Report made by a high-level commission of independent experts in 2001.

It was only in 2001, with the publication of Pope John Paul II’s Motu proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (SST)***, that responsibility for guiding the Catholic Church’s response to the problem of sexual abuse of minors by clerics was assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This papal document was prepared for Pope John Paul II under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Contrary to some media reports, SST did not remove the local bishop’s responsibility for acting in cases of reported sexual abuse of minors by clerics. Nor was it, as some have theorized, part of a plot from on high to interfere with civil jurisdiction in such cases.

Instead, SST directs bishops to report credible allegations of abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is able to provide a service to the bishops to ensure that cases are handled properly, in accord with applicable ecclesiastical law.


Here are some of the advances made by this new Church legislation (SST).
- It has allowed for a streamlined administrative process in arriving at a judgment, thus reserving the more formal process of a canonical trial to more complex cases. This has been of particular advantage in missionary and small dioceses that do not have a strong complement of well-trained canon lawyers.
- It provides for erecting inter-diocesan tribunals to assist small dioceses.
- The Congregation has faculties allowing it derogate from the prescription of a crime (statute of limitations) in order to permit justice to be done even for “historical” [old] cases.
- Moreover, SST has amended canon law in cases of sexual abuse to adjust the age of a minor to 18 to correspond with the civil law in many countries today.
- It provides a point of reference for bishops and religious superiors to obtain uniform advice about handling priests’ cases.
- Perhaps most of all, it designated cases of sexual abuse of minors by clerics as graviora delicta: most grave crimes, like the crimes against the sacraments of Eucharist and Penance perennially assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

This in itself has shown the seriousness with which today’s Church undertakes its responsibility to assist bishops and religious superiors to prevent these crimes from happening in the future, and to punish them when they happen.

Here is a legacy of Pope Benedict that greatly facilitates the work of the Congregation which I now have the privilege to lead, to the benefit of the entire Church.

After the Dallas Charter in 2002, I was appointed (at the time as Archbishop of San Francisco) to a team of four bishops to seek approval of the Holy See for the “Essential Norms” that the American Bishops developed to allow us to deal with abuse questions.

Because these norms intersected with existing canon law, they required approval before being implemented as particular law for our country. Under the chairmanship of Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and currently President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, our team worked with Vatican canonical experts at several meetings.

We found in Cardinal Ratzinger, and in the experts he assigned to meet with us, a sympathetic understanding of the problems we faced as American bishops. Largely through his guidance we were able to bring our work to a successful conclusion.

The Times editorial wonders “how Vatican officials did not draw the lessons of the grueling scandal in the United States, where more than 700 priests were dismissed over a three-year period.”

I can assure the Times that the Vatican in reality did not then and does not now ignore those lessons. But the Times editorial goes on to show the usual bias: “But then we read Laurie Goodstein’s disturbing report . . .about how the Pope, while he was still a cardinal, was personally warned about a priest … But Church leaders chose to protect the church instead of children. The report illuminated the kind of behavior the church was willing to excuse to avoid scandal.”

Excuse me, editors. Even the Goodstein article, based on “newly unearthed files,” places the words about protecting the Church from scandal on the lips of Archbishop Weakland, not the Pope. It is just this kind of anachronistic conflation that I think warrants my accusation that the Times, in rushing to a guilty verdict, lacks fairness in its coverage of Pope Benedict.

As a full-time member of the Roman Curia, the governing structure that carries out the Holy See’s tasks, I do not have time to deal with the Times’s subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting of Goodstein’s “disturbing report.”

But about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a Pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.


P.S. Since our posts are one minute apart, apparently David posted the same piece while I was working on my typological enhancements and comments, but I will retain this post anyway.


P.P.S. One other comment on Cardinal Levada's essay. It is very strange, to say the least, for the Prefect of the CDF, of all people, to refer only to the 2001 motu proprio Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, without any mention at all of its implementing instructions, De delictis gravioribus, issued by Cardinal Ratzinger!


NB: The Vatican has now posted Cardinal Levada's statement on the resource site www.resources.va
[It's not very convenient to locate this site unless you remember its name! Why could it not have been placed inside the main Vatican web site???? It's rather self-defeating for the purpose it was set up if people don't know where to find it.]

And the Times has condescended to write a story based on Cardinal Levada's statement but very egregiously avoids any reference to the systematic dismantlement of their March 25 story on the Murphy case by the church vicar who handled the canonical proceedings! As far as I know, they have not acknowledged Fr. Brundage's statement at all!


Vatican official defends
Pope’s handling of case

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: March 31, 2010


ROME — The head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office sought Wednesday to rebut criticism that top Vatican officials, including the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI, had mishandled the case of a Wisconsin priest who sexually abused scores of deaf boys.

In a statement posted on the Vatican’s Web site, Cardinal William J. Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, criticized an article in The New York Times that raised questions about why the Vatican had not defrocked the priest, Father Lawrence C. Murphy, despite calls for action on his case from American bishops.

“It seems to me, on the other hand, that we owe Pope Benedict a great debt of gratitude for introducing the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors,” Cardinal Levada wrote in the lengthy statement.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope in 2005, was the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office when Father Murphy’s case was referred there.

Cardinal Levada’s statement also criticized editorials and editorial columns published by The Times that were critical of the Pope’s handling of the sexual abuse scandal roiling the Catholic Church. He said the Times’s coverage had been “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness.”

Cardinal Levada did say, however, that Father Murphy should have been removed from the priesthood in light of evidence that he molested as many as 200 boys at a renowned Wisconsin school for the deaf, where he worked from 1950 to 1974.

“I, for one, looking back at this report agree that Fr. Murphy deserved to be dismissed from the clerical state for his egregious criminal behavior, which would normally have resulted from a canonical trial,” Cardinal Levada said in the statement.

According to documents that have emerged as part of lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Church officials began a secret canonical trial against Father Murphy, but stopped the proceedings in 1998 after Father Murphy wrote personally to the future Pope, saying his health was poor and he wanted “to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood.” He died that year.

Criminal and civil authorities never pursued charges against Father Murphy, and three archbishops in Milwaukee failed to report the abuse allegations to the authorities.

Cardinal Levada said Wednesday that pursuing a canonical trial against Father Murphy “would be useless if the priest were dying.”

In addition, the cardinal said that the judicial vicar who had been presiding over the case had recently written a letter saying that “he never received any communication about suspending the trial, and would not have agreed to it.”


As the Catholic Church grapples with a sexual abuse scandal building in several countries across Europe, Pope Benedict has come under scrutiny for how he and his subordinates handled sexual abuse allegations against priests while he served as an archbishop in Germany, and later, as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

In 1980, when the Pope was archbishop of Munich, he approved the transfer of an abusive priest to therapy. [AS USUAL - A FACTUAL ERROR! How difficult can it be to get the story right about this???][/COLORE} The priest went on to molest other boys after he returned to pastoral work in a different parish.

On Wednesday, Cardinal Levada said that although Father Murphy never faced judgment in a criminal or canonical court, the priest had not evaded it altogether.

“As a believer,” he wrote, “I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.”


And now, Benedict XVI is also to blame for the alleged misbehavior of people he knows! Consider this absurd exploitative headline from the UK Daily Telegraph:


The supposed link is this:

As a young cleric, Bishop Mixa, 68, [Walter Mixa, Archbishop of Augsburg] was friendly with the then Cardinal Ratzinger in Germany and his conservative views made him a favourite when he became pontiff. He is part of a conservative group in Bavaria that has backed the Pope's more controversial decisions.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/7541632/German-bishop-accused-of-hitting-children-with-carpet-beater.html

I've thought from the start that the muckrakers have probably been busy trying to get anything they can on Monsignors Josef Clemens and Georg Gaenswein [as well as Cardinals Meisner of Cologne, a true intimate of B16, and probably Archbishop Mueller of Regensburg] - but failing to dredge up anything so far, here's Mons. Mixa instead!


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/04/2010 04:48]
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The New York Times has seriously screwed up its coverage of the Pope and the child abuse scandals
By Damian Thompson: March 31st, 2010

It’s pretty clear now that The New York Times has screwed up its coverage of Pope Benedict XVI and the child abuse scandals. In fact, I doubt it could have done a worse job if it had brought back Jayson Blair to report the story.

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, this week laid into the NYT in Catholic San Francisco Online. I’m not a huge fan of Levada, and reckon he’ll be moving on shortly, but he’s spot on about the Old Gray Lady. So is Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who received a standing ovation in St Patrick’s Cathedral when, without mentioning the paper by name, he attacked it from the sanctuary on Sunday. Dolan long ago worked out that the NYT has an insidious anti-Catholic slant, and has not been afraid to say so in the past.

Meanwhile, I hope you’ve had a chance to read the devastating expose of the media’s methods by the canonical judge in charge of the Wisconsin case, which I reproduced in a blog post yesterday.

Levada asks the NYT to “reconsider its attack mode”. Can’t see that happening: certain columnists, reporters and executives are just too blinded by hatred of this Pope. I don’t normally wish unemployment on fellow journalists – even snooty and snarling PC ones from the Big Apple – but if the paper folded tomorrow I reckon I could contain my grief. Couldn’t you?

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U.S. Bishops voice concern for victims
victims of clergy sexual abuse and
thank the Pope for his Leadership




WASHINGTON, March 31 - The U.S. bishops March 30 voiced concern for victims of child sexual abuse by clerics and praised Pope Benedict XVI for leadership in dealing with the sin and crime of child sexual abuse.

“We know from our experience how Pope Benedict is deeply concerned for those who have been harmed by sexual abuse and how he has strengthened the Church’s response to victims and supported our efforts to deal with perpetrators,” the bishops said. “We continue to intensify our efforts to provide safe environments for children in our parishes and schools. Further, we work with others in our communities to address the prevalence of sexual abuse in the larger society.”

The bishops’ comments came in a statement issued by the Executive Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: Cardinal Francis George, OMI, of Chicago, president; Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Arizona, vice-president; Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, treasurer; Bishop George Murry, SJ of Youngstown, Ohio, secretary; and Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Paterson, New Jersey, elected member.

The complete statement follows.




On behalf of the Catholic bishops of the United States, we, the members of the Executive Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, write both to express our deep concern for those harmed by the crime and sin of sexual abuse by clergy and to express our profound gratitude for the assistance that Pope Benedict XVI has given us in our efforts to respond to victims, deal with perpetrators and to create safe environments for children.

The recent emergence of more reports of sexual abuse by clergy saddens and angers the Church and causes us shame. If there is anywhere that children should be safe, it should be in their homes and in the Church.

We know from our experience how Pope Benedict is deeply concerned for those who have been harmed by sexual abuse and how he has strengthened the Church’s response to victims and supported our efforts to deal with perpetrators.

We continue to intensify our efforts to provide safe environments for children in our parishes and schools. Further, we work with others in our communities to address the prevalence of sexual abuse in the larger society.

One of the most touching moments of the Holy Father’s visit to the United States in 2008 was his private conversation with victims/survivors at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington.

Pope Benedict heard firsthand how sexual abuse has devastated lives. The Holy Father spoke with each person and provided every one time to speak freely to him. They shared their painful experiences and he listened, often clasping their hands and responding tenderly and reassuringly.

With the support of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, we bishops have made a vigorous commitment to do everything in our power to prevent abuse from happening to children.

We live out this commitment through the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which calls us to respond with compassion to victims/survivors, to work diligently to screen those working with children and young people in the Church, to provide child abuse awareness and prevention education, to report suspected abuse to civil law enforcement, and to account for our efforts to protect children and youth through an external annual national audit.

As we accompany Christ in His passion and death during this Holy Week, we stand with our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI in prayer for the victims of sexual abuse, for the entire Church and for the world.

Cardinal Francis George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago
President

Bishop Gerald Kicanas
Bishop of Tucson
Vice-President

Bishop George Murry, SJ
Bishop of Youngstown
Secretary

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz
Archbishop of Louisville
Treasurer

Bishop Arthur Serratelli
Bishop of Paterson
Elected Member



NB: Since my original post this morning on Archbishop Nichols In London and Archbishop Listecki in Milwaukee, I have since added similar statements of individual support by Bishop De Marzio of Brooklyn and Cardinal Mahony of LA to the post.

BTW, I am mystified why it took so long for the US bishops to come out with this statement! And yet, it ostentatiously makes no reference at all to the media campaign of disinformation now driven, fueled and pumped up primarily by the US media!


PPS#2 - The New York Times has now posted an article based on Cardinal Levada's statement - and I have added it to my original post above on the cardinal's statement.... Of course, we do not know if the article will appear in the print edition of the newspaper at all, and if so, on what page???





'Fairness for the Pope':
Editorial in a New York paper!


Now, this one really surprised me! I hardly look at the Daily News because it's too liberal for my taste, but I take my hat off to them today for being probably the first and only MSM newspaper in the United States - or anywhere else, for that matter - to come out with an editorial in support of the Pope, even if it has to do only with the Murphy case:



It has become an increasingly prevailing belief that as a cardinal, before he ascended to the papacy, Pope Benedict enabled a pedophile priest to do enormous harm. This is false.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd took the accusations against the Pope, whose given name is Joseph Ratzinger, to their most extreme. She wrote:

"Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed 'God's Rottweiler' when he was the church's enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys."

Again, and with certainty: This is false.

There is much to criticize in the Catholic Church's abysmal failure for decades to take action against priests who engaged in sexual abuse. That history tends to lend credence to reports that the hierarchy has either turned a blind eye or engaged in coverups.

Maybe even the Pope.

While the Murphy case does exemplify the Church at its worst, the grievous sins in this matter cannot be laid to Pope Benedict.

For 24 years starting in 1950, Murphy served as a priest at a school for deaf boys in Milwaukee. He was first accused of molesting students in the 1950s, and he was trailed by similar accounts until the church forced him onto "temporary sick leave." His superiors did not report Murphy to the police or take further internal action.

Those crimes, dating back half a century, took place decades before Ratzinger rose to high church positions in Europe. He could not have ignored repeated warnings, nor could he have looked away. He was not on the scene at all.

Murphy next surfaces in 1996, 22 years after his last reported offense. Amid the scandals that swamped the church, some of Murphy's victims pressed the archbishop of Milwaukee to take action. He wrote to Ratzinger, who had by then risen to head the Vatican's Congregation for the Defense of the Faith.

The letter, one of only two in the files bearing Ratzinger's name, asked for advice on how to proceed. Ratzinger did not respond. The archbishop brought charges nonetheless.

Ratzinger's deputy then approved bringing charges that could lead to defrocking Murphy. And the Vatican kept the case alive by waiving its own internal statute of limitations on pressing cases against priests.

In June, 1998, Murphy wrote to Ratzinger, citing the fact that he had suffered strokes and asking to live out his days. Ratzinger's deputy suggested letting Murphy accept banishment, a step short of full defrocking, if he admitted guilt and expressed remorse. The Wisconsin bishop who had taken the case refused.

In August 1998, two weeks before Murphy's impending death, the archbishop of Milwaukee reported to Rome that he had suspended the trial and would try to get letters of apology from Murphy. The suspension order was never conveyed to the priest that headed the trial panel. He says he would have fought such a command and that Murphy died while charges were still pending.

What exactly did then-Cardinal Ratzinger do wrong? His office approved the trial and waived the statue of limitations. Those are not the makings of a coverup.

At the same time, it's fair game to debate whether his office should have considered for a moment a plea deal, even on the verge of Murphy's death. But that's a far cry from vilifying Benedict as a man who took no action in the face of Murphy's evil or many years later tried to paper it over.



This editorial can be appreciated so much more because the Daily News is published by a prominent Jewish liberal, Mort Zuckerman, who has occasionally written articles himself in other magazines and newspapers. Thank you, Mr. Zuckerman and the Daily News!

Perhaps NYT's in-house Catholic Op-Ed columnist Ross Douthat was 'prudent' not to write anything that would lose him his gig (that he has held at the Times since April 2009). if it gives him the chance to have useful information published in the Times that would otherwise never come out in their pages. This was a two-part article from yesterday and today, which I am posting here because it is germane to the issue, but which I will also post in REFERENCES later...


The pattern of priestly sex abuse


March 30-31, 2010


Reproduced below is a chart from the John Jay Report on sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood, commissioned by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, showing the number of credible accusations of abuse across the last half-century.

It’s part of the basis for my column’s claim [See 3/28/10 Op-Ed piece by Douthat posted earlier on this page] that something in the moral/cultural/theological climate of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged a spike in sexual abuse, and also for my assertion that we’ve since seen the church come to grips with the problem, at least in the United States.



It’s important to note that most of these incidents were reported in the 1990s and 2000s, years after they took place. This raises the question of whether the low numbers for the 1950s reflect a real difference between the rate of abuse in the Eisenhower era and the rate in the decades that followed, or whether it’s just that fewer of the victims from the ’50s have come forward with their stories, because of advanced age, greater shame, etc.

There’s no way to be completely certain about this, and clearly there was abuse in the Church, and horrid cover-ups as well, going back decades and centuries and more. But the John Jay data suggest that something significant really did shift, and escalate, in the years around the sexual revolution.

For one thing, the rate of so-called “short term” incidents — cases where the priest’s abusive behavior reportedly lasted less than a year — remained relatively constant from the 1050s through the first decade of the 21st century.

The prevalence of longer-term abuse, on the other hand, followed the same pattern as the overall data, going way up in the ’60s and ’70s and then dropping off after 1980 (see pp. 39 of this report for the graph).

The same discrepancy appears when you look at the type of molestation: male-on-female versus male-on-male, and true pedophilia versus so-called “ephebophilia” (the abuse of pubescent teenagers). To quote from the National Review Board report, which analyzed the John Jay data:

The incidence of sexual molestation of a minor under eleven years of age did not vary as greatly throughout the period as did the molestation of older children. In addition, the incidence of abuse of females did not change as dramatically as did the incidence of the abuse of males. There was, however, a more than six-fold increase in the number of reported acts of abuse of males aged eleven to seventeen between the 1950s and the 1970s.


If the abuse in the 1950s (and earlier) followed roughly the same pattern as the abuse in the 1970s, and just remains more underreported today, you would expect the ratios of different types of abuse — long-term versus short-term, male versus female, pedophilic versus ephebophilic — to remain relatively constant across the decades.

But they don’t: Instead, the post-1960 period shows a dramatic increase in reports of long-term sexual misconduct with teenage boys, and a substantially smaller increase in other types of abuse.

This data informs the conservative Catholic argument that the post-Vatican II exodus of straight men from religious life and the spread of a sexually-active gay subculture within the priesthood is the abuse scandal’s “elephant in the sacristy.”

Liberal Catholics might counter that the priesthood has always been disproportionately homosexual, and that the sexual revolution probably just encouraged psychologically healthy gay priests to give up on the Church entirely, leaving behind a clerical population tilted toward repression, self-loathing and the dysfunctions of the closet. [Again, may I point out that a sweeping statement like that is a terrible injustice to the overwhelmingly majority of the world's 400,000 priests who do try to live up to their vows

Whichever narrative you prefer, though, it’s hard to deny that something changed in the 1960s, and not for the better.

A few follow-ups on the previous post. First, I would invite readers who are skeptical of the data pattern shown in the chart I reproduced to read the entire John Jay Report, as well as the National Review Board report that accompanied it, and (especially) the statistical addendum that John Jay put out in 2006. These are impressively thorough documents, and you may find that many of your objections are addressed in their pages.

Where a subject like this is concerned, no statistical assessment is going to be completely dispositive, but I am persuaded that the John Jay/N.R.B. portrait of the pattern of abuse — the rise from the late ’50s till 1980, and the drop-off since — is as rigorous as one can hope for at the moment. (In addition, the National Review Board report does an impressive job of addressing many of the cultural issues related to the crisis in an evenhanded and non-hysterical way.)

Second, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m blaming “Vatican II” for the crisis in the Church. I think that the Second Vatican Council was a necessary response to a changing world, and I support nearly all of its reforms. [But no one is blaming Vatican-II itself for anything - the blame is and has always been on the rampant and arrogant misinterpretation of the Council's letter and spirit by the progressivists - than whom no one was ever more 'triumphalist' than they and smug about their 'ascendancy' in the Church until Benedict XVUI became Pope!]

The confused aftermath of the Council did offer a certain amount of license to people who wanted to believe that everything was up for grabs, morally and theologically speaking — but given the temper of the times, it’s easy to imagine the same patterns repeating themselves in a world where the Church modernized gradually, rather than suddenly.

Nor do I want to give the impression that I think the permissive temper of the times was the only factor driving sex abuse rates higher. To take but one example, the surge of candidates for the priesthood in the late 1950s seems to have led to real formation problems, with young, often teenage men being ushered swiftly into the clerical state without adequate attention to maturity, psychological well-being, etc. (Again, the National Review Board report has a lot of good discussion on this and other fronts.)

Finally, I want to express mild bafflement at the large number of readers who seem to find it impossible to believe that the atmosphere of the sexual revolution could have had anything whatsoever to do with the surge in clerical sex abuse.

I understand the intuitive appeal, in an age that looks askance at older ideas about chastity and virtue, of the idea that the scandal is just an illustration of the warping effect of clerical celibacy.

But look — the sexual revolution was, well, a revolution: There was liberation, but there was also chaos, confusion and rampant misbehavior. All kinds of indicators went soaring in that era.

Divorce rates went up. Out-of-wedlock birth rates went up. Abortion rates went up. Rates of rape and sexual assault went up. Syphilis and gonorrhea infection rates went up. Etc. And most of these indicators followed roughly the same pattern that you see in the John Jay data on priest sex abuse: A spike in the ’60s and ’70s, followed by stabilization and/or decline in the ’80s and ’90s.

Maybe this is just a coincidence; maybe the broader culture didn’t have any effect on the Catholic Church’s sex abuse rates, and the whole problem would have gone away if the church had just let its priests get married. But that seems like an awfully convenient way of looking at the problem.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/03/2010 23:15]
01/04/2010 09:29
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carpet beater
Of course this is the latest stunt by the wonderful tabloid SZ.
Discussion has erupted and the wrath/focus has turned to Mons. Mixa.
The allegations were forcefully denied by his press secretary and legal steps on the grounds of false allegations/defamation are being considered. Legally the cases can't be touched - they're too old.

I wonder what people would say if Mons. Schick would have been accused of disciplining children in that way.... most likely: nothing. He's not high profile enough and nobody would give a damn.

Sure! Cardinal Ratzinger can be blamed for alleged misconduct of a simple Priest, who turns out to become an outspoken defender of conservative values. They're getting a bit too desperate.

The victims are asking of an apology.
Again!! In this case, all parents of children 30+ apologize!! All teachers, all football coaches andandand...


I remember being threatened by my mom with the carpet beater. I remember reading about the childhood of a certain Holy Father, who had been chased by his mother with the carpet beater, after getting into a brawl with his brother.


If they dare to attack Mons. Clemens in any way, we actually might have an outburst of Papal fury (in his particular, Joseph Ratzinger way). I think that would be a big no-no in Papa's eyes.

01/04/2010 14:23
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MAUNDY THURSDAY, April 1


Extreme right: St Bruno of Chartreuse and St Hugh.
ST. HUGUES (Hugh) DE GRENOBLE (France 1052-1132), Bishop, Reformer


OR today.


Illustration: Washing of the feet, from a 13th-cent. Syrian evangelarium.
At the General Audience, the Holy Father explains the significance of the Easter Triduum liturgies:
'The days that orient our life'
Other Page 1 stories: An essay on the washing of the feet in the Syro-occidental tradition; G20 nations urged to consider global financial reform when they meet next in Toronto; the world's largest particle accelerator successfully fires off at European nuclear researh center (CERN) in Geneva.


THE POPE'S DAY

Mass of the Chrism at St. Peter's Basilica

Mass of the Last Supper at St. John Lateran
01/04/2010 19:12
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points us to support for the Pope from an unlikely source - an editorial in Pravda online, which is available in English translated from Portuguese. I have taken the liberty of smoothing out the English idiom and omitting some statements that are not relevant to the argument.


To confuse the wood with the trees ...
Adapted from

March 30, 2010


Much of the news coming out, in the effort to disguise ideological propaganda, contains the fundamental error of mistaking the wood with the trees ... especially when the aim is to denigrate. That is, from an isolated case, preferably rough outlines, then generalized in order to induce the reader to think that the whole is of the same nature.

This generalization obviously has ideological connotations and follows a political agenda that seeks to deconstruct traditional society and all its secular institutions and to impose a New World Order after the manner of the sinister interests of the international oligarchy, the same ones that handle the financial markets and through them, largely control the global economy.

We refer to cases of pedophilia within the ranks of the Catholic Church recently publicized by international news agencies.

Indeed recent reports of pedophilia involving priests raise suspicion about their validity, even among non-Catholics like us. Although disagreeing with the doctrine of the Catholic Church in some respects, we recognize the importance of their role in our history to defend the ethical values that shape our Judeo-Christian culture and their social merit, on behalf of those who have been victims of the usury and greed of the international oligarchy - which is after all more interested in destroying Catholicism and religion in general, as they constitute a serious obstacle to achieving its goal, which is to reduce mankind to the status of robotic slaves.

We emphasize beforehand that it we are not defending pedophilia, that by defending the Catholic Church we are not justifying the actions of dishonorable men who have forgotten all of their most basic obligations as priests, as well as respect for others, especially the weak, as is an orphan who does not have the affection of a true family.

One aspect that makes us suspicious of the "good faith" of these stories is that they focus exclusively on cases of pedophilia of Catholic clergy, when we know that addiction cuts across all religions and organizations. We find it in all social strata and even within families.

The pedophile is in principle someone very close to the victim and who has their confidence, that is, not a stranger ... and may even be a father, uncle, etc..

When it is argued that priests are more prone to abuse because the celibacy that is required of them raises the level of temptation toward sexual abuse, it seems to be forgotten that pedophile offenders are not always single and are often seen as "good" heads of the family, so the person apparently seems normal.

Another detail that suggests that a campaign of demoralization of the Catholic Church is underway is that news of pedophilia by some of its priests appears like mushrooms sprouting every morning, giving the impression that the number of victims and pedophiles are as many as a hive of bees. In fact, although the victims are many, but the alleged abusers are only a tiny minority of priests.

If we take into account the statistics in the USA, the number of victims in Catholic institutions compared with others, particularly in secular schools where it is much higher, the ratio is 1 to 157, during the period from 1950 to 2002. The numbers also show that as child abuse is an extensive social phenomenon that is not restricted to a specific sector of society.

The case of the Casa Pia de Lisboa should also be pointed out. The Portuguese government orphanage - founded in the late eighteenth century, by the Manager of Police, a man who had the confidence of the Marquis of Pombal - has been exposed as 'a case of pedophilia in progress. More suspects have been accused of sexual abuse of minors than in all the cases mentioned recently in the media to tarnish the image of the Catholic Church

Ten defendants have now been indicted by the public prosecution service. It is said that the "sexual binge" at the Institute involves many people, some 'quite big', going back to the 1980s. Many of the victims, now adults, are not willing to go through the torment of police investigations and still less the public shame that they were involved in the scandal at all.

In fact, in these cases, not all complaints are genuine. There are those who take advantage to extort money, for instance. It may be difficult to ascertain how much is true and where lies begin.

The fury of the anti-clerical secular lobby has gone as far as to revive old cases like that of Father Lawrence Murphy, back in 1975, to address the current Pope insidiously and in this way, the Roman Catholic Church itself.

On March 25, the New York Times published an article that accused Benedict XVI of covering up for a priest from Milwaukee in 1995 when the Pope was still Cardinal and responsible for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It must be motivated by a very strong hatred of Catholicism to raise this issue 35 years later...

The complaint is all the more insidious since the primary function of this body [CDF} is to monitor doctrinal deviations and heresies, so nothing to do with acts that violate the chastity of the clergy. [The writer obviously does not know that since 2001, the CDF was also given jurisdiction for the canonical investigation and adjudication of sexual crimes against minors by the clergy.]

[There follows a brief paragraph about the case which has some facts wrong.]

We do not believe that the New York newspaper was unaware of the facts. [No, they were not - as shown by the documents that they themselves posted to 'support' their case. But they chose to ignore facts that do not fit the narrative dictated by their agenda - shamelessly brazen in their certainty that few readers would bother to check out the documents and simply take the reporter's word for it. When journalism was still an honorable profession and not so thorougly corrupted by ideology and a sense of power, that might have been OK. But not now. There ought to have been a blizzard of protests from readers expressing their indignation at the lack of correspondence between the story reported and the actual documents - because the blatant untruth is an insult to common intelligence!]

But from here, one can only conclude that bad faith exists and a defamatory smear campaign has been articulated against the world Catholic hierarchy.

And it is understandable. The current Pontiff, consistent with the principles of the Catholic Church, has shown tenacious resistance to unnatural and divisive proposals by secular elements seeking to impose their vision of a sexist, hedonistic society, reducing man to his animal nature, to deny its spiritual dimension.

These elements, usually organizations, obviously have not arisen by "spontaneous generation," nor do they live on air ... They have been created and are supported by the cunning of supposedly philanthropic foundations like the Rockefeller family, whose financial interests are linked to a wide range of economic sectors ranging from banking, oil, pharmaceuticals, military industry, etc., and global media which carry out an agenda dictated by the global elite to which they belong... [The writer indulges his own propaganda here and in a subsequent paragraph which I will omit.]

Therefore, there is an intention in this kind of reporting that goes far beyond the desire to inform - if the same phenomenon is not reported for other institutions.

Further, a balanced assessment of the responsibility for pedophilia among Catholic priests should note the outcome of canonical and civil cases actually brought against these clerics, and not simply advertise the accusations, which may not all be genuine, as we all know in processes of this kind.



[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/03/2013 15:24]
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