BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

See preceding page for earlier 4/7/10 entries.






A vast sex and money scandal
threatens the Vatican
But, once again, Ratzinger emerges as the campaigner against 'filth'

April 6, 2010

If you visit the website of the National Catholic Reporter you will find a story of Vatican skulduggery to make you gasp. It involves the Legionaries of Christ, a priestly order founded by the late Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, a Mexican paedophile priest who used its money to pay off his young male victims and the mothers of his illegitimate children. This much we knew.

But the NCR, an American paper whose Leftist bias usually rules it out as a source of impartial information, has done some digging into the finances of the Legionaries and their lay arm, Regnum Christi, and uncovered wrongdoing on an astonishing scale. Maciel did not rip off the Church. On the contrary, as Jason Berry reports:

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Maciel [who died in disgrace aged 87 in 2008] left a trail of wreckage among his followers. Moreover, in a gilded irony for Benedict – who prosecuted him despite pressure from Maciel’s chief supporter, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006 – Maciel left an ecclesiastical empire with which the church must now contend. The Italian newsweekly L’espresso estimates the Legion’s assets at 25 billion euros, with a $650 million annual budget, according to The Wall Street Journal. The order numbered 700 priests and 1,300 seminarians in 2008. On March 15 of this year, five bishops, called visitators, from as many countries, delivered their reports to the pope after a seven-month investigation. A final report is expected by the end of April.

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Twenty-five billion euros! This old pervert was the most effective fundraiser in the history of the Church – and the most crooked since Judas Iscariot.

[This is not the first time that an American media organization has written about the extent of Maciel's double life, corruption and bribery. I am positive I posted one such eye-opening story in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread at the time the Pope first ordered an apostolic visitation of the Legionaries. I will check it out...

P.S. I have checked it out and it turns out the article was by the very same Jason Berry who wrote about it recently for National Catholic Reporter, but this goes back to last July 2009:
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8593...

This is a shocking mess for Pope Benedict XVI to sort out. Yet, in the case of Maciel, he can do so with a clear conscience, unlike so many of the grasping idiots who surrounded his predecessor, Pope John Paul II (who, it must be said, was too old and ill to comprehend the charges against Maciel that were beginning to surface at the end of his papacy).

The NCR can’t stand Pope Benedict, but it does reveal that Cardinal Ratzinger refused the “donations” (charitable bribes) that the Legion sucessfully pressed on other senior Vatican clergy, sometimes to gain access to John Paul II:

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In 1997 [Ratzinger] gave a lecture on theology to Legionaries. When a Legionary handed him an envelope, saying it was for his charitable use, Ratzinger refused. “He was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said.

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A few years later, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who ignored John Paul’s wishes and moved against against Maciel, to the fury of the latter’s allies, who included Cardinal Angelo Sodano and John Paul’s secretary, Msgr (now Cardinal) Stanislaw Dziwisz.

In 2004, John Paul – ignoring the canon law charges against Maciel – honored him in a Vatican ceremony in which he entrusted the Legion with the administration of Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Center, an education and conference facility. The following week, Ratzinger took it on himself to authorize an investigation of Maciel.

The Vatican’s old boy network tried to do what it did in the case of the pervert Cardinal Groer of Vienna in the late 1990s, when Cardinal Ratzinger was blocked from instituting a thorough investigation.

But in 2005, as more allegations surfaced against the Legion – many of whose leaders were almost as rotten as their founder, though ordinary members were unaware of this – Ratzinger was elected Pope. [Perhaps the worst crime by Maciel's closest collaborators, who have run his congregation since he retired, was that until two weeks ago, they insisted that Maciel had done no wrong and could do no wrong, although from all accounts, they knew about much about his double life, and certainly almost all about his finances and active bribery of some members of the Church hierarchy.]

In 2006, he punished the very frail, drug-addicted Maciel by sending him into exile in disgrace – a not unreasonable decision, since the old man wouldn’t have lived long enough to face a criminal trial lasting years. He then ordered the most thorough investigation of a Catholic organisation in the Church’s history, scheduled to conclude this month. [Already concluded, but pending release of the final report.]

Meanwhile, the stonewalling by the Legion’s Vatican defenders continues. [Not exactly. In their recent statement, they finally admitted - and rather bluntly - that Maciel's life was not at all a model to present to their members!] This is what Benedict XVI is up against in his campaign to root out corruption from the Church and bring horribly delayed justice to the victims of abuse.

His reforms – which are in a subtle way connected to his renovation of Catholic worship – will take up the rest of his pontificate. But I think he may have guessed as much when he accepted the decision of the conclave five years ago. And what a good decision it was.

Wednesday, April 7

ST. JEAN-BAPTISTE DE LA SALLE (France, 1651-1719)
Priest, Founder of Christian Brothers, Patron Saint of Teachers
A member of the nobility, De La Salle started preparing for the priesthood when he was ll, but the early death
of his parents delayed his training because he took care of his younger siblings. He was finally ordained when
he was 27, pursuing further theological studies in Paris. A chance involvement with a friend's plan to set up
a school for poor boys led him to realize that this was his particular mission. He left his position as Canon
of Rheims Cathedral, gave away his fortune, and dedicated himself to that mission. In 1681, he founded the
Institute of Brothers of the Christian School to propagate this mission. In addition to schools for boys, he set
up the first normal school (training school especially for teachers) to institute his teaching methods, and also
became the first to divide pupils into grades. Throughout all this, he encountered difficulties with defections
from his disciples, the opposition of secular schoolmasters who resented his more successful teaching methods,
and the hostility of the Jansenists with their moral rigidity and pessimism. Today, the La Salle Brothers have
quality schools in 84 countries around the world. De La Salle was canonized in 1900, and in 1950, Pius XII
named him patron of schoolteachers.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/040710.shtml


OR for 4/6-4/7/10:

In his Easter message, Benedict XVI thinks of the world's suffering peoples and tells Christians about Easter:
'History has changed because it is now open to the future'

This double issue includes coverage of the Easter Vigil Mass, with its traditional Baptisms, the Easter Sunday Mass itself at St. Peter's Square, as well as the Pope's Angel's Monday 'Regina caeli' in Castel Gandolfo. Page 1 also has an interview with Cardinal Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, about the Church's solidarityy with the Pope. In international news, the Taliban attack on the American consulate in Peshawar. In the inside messages, the Pope's message one year after the earthquake that struck Italy's Abruzzo region last year; more messages of solidarity with the Pope; and the French intellectuals' 'Appeal for the truth'.


THE POPE'S DAY

General Audience in St. Peter's Square - The Holy Father flew in by helicopter from Castel Gandolfo.
In his catechesis to some 40,000 pilgrims, he spoke of the Resurrection as 'God's greatest act
in history'. He also greeted newly-ordained deacons from the Pontifical Irish College in Rome,
a small sign of hope for the Catholics of Ireland.

The 'Passion' of Pope Benedict:
Six accusations, one question
Pedophilia is only the latest weapon aimed against Joseph Ratzinger.
Each time, he is attacked where he most exercises his leadership role.
One by one, the critical points of this pontificate.




ROME, April 7, 2010 – The assault on Pope Benedict XVI with the weapon of the scandal caused by some priests of his Church is a constant of this pontificate.

It is a constant because every time, on a different ground, striking at Benedict XVI means striking at the very man who has worked and is working on that very ground with the greatest foresight, resolve, and success.

The tempest that followed his lecture in Regensburg on September 12, 2006 was the first of the series. Benedict XVI was accused of being an enemy of Islam, and an incendiary proponent of the clash of civilizations. The very man who with singular clarity and courage had revealed where the ultimate root of violence is found - in the idea of God severed from rationality - and had then told how to overcome it.

The violence and even killings that followed his words were sad proof that he was right. But the fact that he had hit the mark was confirmed above all by the progress in dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam that was seen afterward – not in spite of, but because of the lecture in Regensburg – and of which the letter to the Pope from the 138 Muslim intellectuals and the visit to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul were the most evident and promising signs.

With Benedict XVI, the dialogue between Christianity and Islam, and with the other world religions, is proceeding today with clearer awareness about the distinctions by virtue of faith, and the elements that can unite everyone, the natural law written by God in the heart of every man.

A second wave of accusations against Pope Benedict depicts him as an enemy of modern reason, and in particular of its supreme expression, science.

A peak in this hostile campaign was reached in January of 2008, when professors [68 out of over 2000, to be precise!] forced the Pope to cancel a visit to the main university of his diocese, the University of Rome "La Sapienza."

And yet – as previously in Regensburg and then in Paris at the Collège des Bernardins on September 12, 2008 – the speech that the Pope prepared to give at the University was a formidable defense of the indissoluble connection between faith and reason, between truth and freedom: "I do not come to impose the faith, but to call for courage for the truth."

The paradox is that Benedict XVI is a great "illuminist" in an age in which the truth has so few admirers and doubt is in command, to the point of wanting to silence the truth.

A third accusation systematically hurled at Benedict XVI is that he is a traditionalist stuck in the past, an enemy of the new developments brought by Vatican Council II.

His speech to the Roman Xuria on December 22, 2005 on the interpretation of the Council, and his Motu Proprio in 2007 on the liberalization of the ancient rite of the Mass, are thought to be the proofs in the hands of his accusers.

In reality, the Tradition to which Benedict XVI is faithful [as every Pope is sworn to be, and not just out of his personal preference!]is that of the grand history of the Church, from its origins until today, which has nothing to do with a formulaic attachment to the past.

In the speech to the Curia just mentioned, to exemplify the "reform in continuity" represented by Vatican II, the Pope recalled the question of religious freedom. To affirm this completely – he explained – the Council had to go back to the origins of the Church, to the first martyrs, to that "profound patrimony" of Christian Tradition which in recent centuries had been lost, and was found again thanks in part to the criticism of Enlightenment-style reason.

As for the liturgy, if there is an authentic perpetuator of the great liturgical movement that flourished in the Church between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Prosper Guéranger to Romano Guardini, it is precisely Ratzinger himself.

A fourth terrain of attack runs along the same lines as the previous one. Benedict XVI is accused of derailing ecumenism, of putting reconciliation with the Lefebvrists ahead of dialogue with the other Christian confessions.

But the facts say the opposite. Since Ratzinger has been Pope, the journey of reconciliation with the Eastern Churches has taken extraordinary steps forward. Both with the Byzantine Churches that look to the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople, and – most surprisingly – with the Patriarchate of Moscow.

And if this has happened, it is precisely because of the revived fidelity to the grand Tradition – beginning with that of the first millennium – that is one characteristic of this Pope, in addition to being an active animator of the Eastern Churches.

On the side of the West, once again, love of Tradition has caused persons and groups of the Anglican Communion to ask to reenter the Church of Rome.

With the Lefebvrians, what is blocking their reintegration is precisely their attachment to past forms of Church practice and of doctrine erroneously identified only with perennial Tradition. The revocation of the excommunication of their four bishops in January of 2009, did not by itself remedy the state of schism in which they remain, just as in 1964 the revocation of excommunications between Rome and Constantinople did not heal the schism between East and West, but made possible a dialogue aimed at unity.

The four Lefebvrist bishops whose excommunication Benedict XVI lifted included Englishman Richard Williamson, a Holocaust denier and presumed anti-Semite. Worse, in the liberalized ancient rite, the traditional prayer for the Jews on Good Friday asked that Jews "may recognize Jesus Christ as savior of all men."

These facts have helped to feed a persistent protest by strident voices in the Jewish world against the current Pope, which constitute the fifth ground on which he and his Pontificate are being assailed.

The latest weapon utlized by the critics was a passage from the sermon given at Saint Peter's Basilica on Holy Friday, in the Pope's presence, by the preacher of the pontifical household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa. The incriminating passage was a citation from a letter written by a Jew, but in spite of this, the uproar was aimed exclusively at the Pope.

And yet, nothing is more contradictory than to accuse Benedict XVI of hostility to the Jews.

No other Pope before him ever went so far in defining a positive vision of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, while leaving intact the essential division over whether or not Jesus is the Son of God.

In the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth published in 2007 – and expected to be completed weith the publication of the second volume this spring - Benedict XVI wrote splendid pages in this regard, in dialogue with a living American rabbi.

And many Jews effectively see Ratzinger as a friend. But in the international media, it's another matter. There it is almost exclusively "friendly fire"[Friendly fire? Not by any means!] - from Jews attacking the Pope who best understands and loves them.

Finally, a sixth accusation – the one that preoccupies the media world today – is that Joseh Ratzinger "covered up" the scandal of priests who sexually abused children.

Here too, the accusation is against the very man who has done more than anyone, in the Church hierarchy, to heal this scandal. With positive effects that can already be seen. Particularly in the United States, where the incidence of the phenomenon among the Catholic clergy has diminished significantly in recent years.

But where the wound is still open, as in Ireland, it was again Benedict XVI who required the Church of that country to put itself in a penitential state, on a demanding path that he traced out in an unprecedented pastoral letter last March 19.

The fact is that the international campaign against pedophilia has just one target today, the Pope. The media has dug up cases from the past intended to make him appear personally culpable, both when he was archbishop of Munich and when he was prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith - with a Regensburg addendum directed against his brother Georg.


The six grounds of attack against Benedict XVI bring up one question.

Why is this Pope so much under fire, from outside the Church but also from within, in spite of his clear innocence with respect to the accusations?

The beginning of an answer is that he is systematically attacked precisely for what he does, for what he says, for what he is.




The Church and the Pope
getting a bad rap
by MICHAEL GERSON

Published: Wednesday, April 07, 2010


BY any human standard, Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church in America are getting a bad rap in the current outrage over clerical sexual abuse.

Far from being indifferent or having complicity, Joseph Ratzinger when a cardinal was among the first in Rome to take the scandal seriously. During much of his service as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1982-2005), the future Pope had no responsibility for investigating most cases of sexual abuse.

Local bishops were in charge, and some failed spectacularly in their moral duties. It was not until 2001 that Pope John Paul II charged Ratzinger with reviewing every credible case of sexual abuse.

While poring through these documents, Ratzinger’s eyes were opened. The Church became more active in removing abusive priests — described by Ratzinger as “filth” — both through canonical trials and administrative action.

“Benedict,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese of Georgetown University, “grew in his understanding of the crisis. Like many bishops at the beginning, he didn’t understand it. ... But he grew in his understanding because he listened to what U.S. bishops had to say. He in fact got it quicker than other people in the Vatican.” (Well, thank you, Fr. Reese. For once, your prejudice hasn't gotten in the way of speaking teh truth.]

And the Church in America, once in destructive denial, has confronted the problem directly. It is difficult to contend that justice was done in the cases of some prominent offenders and the bishops who protected them. It is also difficult to deny that the Church has made progress with a zero-tolerance policy.

The vast majority of abuse cases took place decades ago. In 2009, six credible allegations of abuse concerning current minors were reported to bishops in the U.S., where the church has 65 million members.

Some will allow none of this to get in the way of a good scandal. Editorial cartoons engage in gleeful anti-clericalism. The implicit charge is that the Catholic Church is somehow discredited by the existence of human depravity.

Most current accusations are not fair by human standards. But the Christian church, in its varied expressions, is not merely accountable to human standards because it is supposed to be more than a human institution.

Apart from the mental, emotional and spiritual harm done to children, this has been the most disturbing aspect of the initial Catholic reaction to the scandal over the last few decades: the reduction of the Church to another self-interested organization. [Which it is, certainly, at one level. But it is above all the mystical Body of Christ - to be defended from inflicting hellish wounds on itself!]

In case after case, Church leaders attempted, and failed, to protect the church from scandal — like a White House trying to contain a bad news story or an oil company avoiding responsibility for a spill.

From one perspective, this is understandable. A Church exists in a real world of donor relations and legal exposure. But, the normal process of crisis management can involve a theological error often repeated in the history of the religion.

It is the consistent temptation of faith leaders — Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Hindu — to practice the religion of the tribe. The goal is to seek the public recognition of their theological convictions and the health of their religious institutions.

For many centuries of Western history, the Christian church vied and jostled with competing interests for influence, pursuing a tribal agenda at the expense of Jews, heretics, infidels and ambitious princes.

The mind-set can be detected, in milder forms, whenever Christian leaders talk of “taking back America for Christ” or pay hush money to avoid scandal for the Church. The tribe must be defended.

But, the religion of the tribe is inherently exclusive, sorting “us” from “them.” It therefore undermines a foundational teaching of Christianity — a radical human equality in need and in grace.

The story of modern Christian history has been the partial, hopeful movement away from the religion of the tribe and toward a religion of humanity — a theology that defends a universal ideal of human rights and dignity, whose triumph benefits everyone.

The Catholic Church has led this transition. Once a reactionary opponent of individualism and modernity, it is now one of the leading global advocates for universal human rights and dignity.

The Catholic Church’s initial reaction to the abuse scandal was often indefensible. Now, through its honesty and transparency, it can demonstrate a commitment to universal dignity — which includes every victim of abuse.

Gerson was one of the principal speechwriters for President George W. Bush.

P.S. Another Bush speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, had this entry in the Washington Post;

Pope Benedict is not like Nixon
By Marc Thiessen

April 6, 2010

In his op-ed yesterday, Timothy Shriver writes:

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The scandal facing Catholics today looks a lot like the Watergate scandal that engulfed the United States in the early 1970s. Then, what started as a crime committed by a few burglars slowly escalated to reveal corruption at the highest levels of authority. The White House counsel, senior advisers and others were punished for their roles. In the end, the President of the United States was implicated and forced to resign. Is the Catholic Church on a similar pathway to the resignation of a Pope?

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The comparison between Pope Benedict XVI and President Nixon is shameful, and it is also wrong.

The obvious flaw in Shriver’s analogy? The break-in at the Watergate complex was not a “third-rate burglary” but part of a political spying operation directed at the highest levels of the Nixon administration. (Indeed, in 2003 Jeb Magruder alleged that Nixon himself personally ordered the break-in.) T

here have been many scurrilous accusations fired at the Holy Father in recent weeks. But I have yet to see anyone claim that Benedict or senior Vatican officials personally ordered the molestation of children by pedophile priests.

Is this what Shriver is suggesting? If not, he needs to correct the record -- and apologize to the Holy Father.



Pope Benedict XVI is an agent of change
by George Weigel
Written specially for

April 6, 2010


Whether the victim is a kidnapped sex slave in Thailand, a trafficked child camel jockey in the Persian Gulf states, or a fifth-grader assaulted in an American elementary school, the fact that children and young people throughout the world are regularly subjected to sexual and physical abuse is a horror that ought to shock the conscience of humanity.

In the United States alone, there are reportedly tens of millions of victims of childhood sexual abuse. In the years between 1991 and 2000, according to Virginia Commonwealth University researcher Charol Shakeshaft, 290,000 students were sexually abused in American public schools. Worse yet, studies indicate that 40 percent to 60 percent of sexual abuse takes place within families — often at the hands of second husbands or live-in boyfriends.

Throughout the world, children seem to be the principal victims of lawlessness, wanton cruelty, the sexual revolution, and the hookup culture that treats sex as a contact sport: one in which everyone, of any age, is a potential player.

Yet amid this global squalor, one institution has begun to come to grips with its past failures to protect the young people in its care. One institution has acknowledged its grave failures in the past. One institution has brought perpetrators of abuse to book. That institution is the Catholic Church.

Far more than the public schools, far more than the teachers' unions, far more than other organizations that regularly work with young people, and far more than countries that turn a blind eye on sex trafficking and childhood prostitution, the Catholic Church has addressed what Pope Benedict XVI has called the "filth" in its own house.

Catholicism has cleaned house in America, where the church is likely the country's safest environment for young people today (there were six credible cases of abuse reported in 2009: six too many, but remarkably low in a community of 68 million members).

Now, the church has begun to scour the Augean stables of Irish Catholicism. A March 20 letter to Irish Catholics from Benedict unsparingly condemned abusers and sharply rebuked bishops who failed to take these problems in hand decades ago and who covered up abuse; no one should doubt that a major shake-up of Catholic leadership in Ireland is coming.

Yet the global story line of the last several weeks is that the Catholic Church is an ongoing global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their enablers, centered in the Vatican.

That the Church has too often failed to address past problems of abusive clergy has been frankly admitted by everyone from Popes John Paul II and Benedict to the U.S. bishops in 2002.

In 2001, the Vatican put in place new measures that enabled the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI) to deal more swiftly and decisively with clerical abusers.

Those procedures are fully operational, and Benedict is determined to make them work — and to change any remaining sectors of the Church that resist dealing with the Church's "filth."

Recent reporting on Catholic sexual-abuse problems, however, has frequently been factually inaccurate and irresponsible.

Prominent news organizations report that Cardinal Ratzinger blocked sanctions against a Milwaukee priest who abused deaf children in his care; that is not true.

Contingent-fee lawyers with a financial stake in abuse cases (and in bringing the Vatican's resource within firing range of U.S. liability law) are cited as credible sources by newspapers that once knew what a disqualified source was.

Vicious editorial cartoons, some perilously reminiscent of Nazi-era anti-Catholic cartooning, abound.

Meanwhile, there is precious little investigative reporting on sexual abuse in public schools, which is demonstrably far greater than in the Catholic Church.

To be sure, the Catholic Church ought to hold itself to a higher moral standard than other similarly situated institutions. But after too long a period of denial, the Catholic Church is now at the forefront of combating the sexual abuse of the young in the United States.

And no one in the Church has done more, over the last decade, to compel the sclerotic institutional culture of the Vatican to face these problems than Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.

These are the facts.

Thus the concern naturally arises, on this Easter, that those who continue to portray Catholicism as a global conspiracy of sexual predators are indulging in the last acceptable prejudice, anti-Catholicism, while aiming at nothing less than the destruction of the Catholic Church's credibility as a global moral teacher.

Weigel, a senior fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church as well as the definitive biogrpahy of John Paul II, Witness to Hope.

Norwegian bishop who retired
in 2009 was an abuser


OSLO, April 7 (Reuters) – The Norwegian Catholic Church and the Vatican acknowledged on Wednesday that a bishop who resigned last year did so after it was discovered that he had sexually abused an altar boy two decades earlier.

The Vatican issued a statement confirming a post on the Web site of Norway's Church about the circumstances behind the resignation last June of Bishop Georg Mueller of Trondheim.

The abuse took place some 20 years ago when Mueller was a priest there.

The case is the latest allegation of child abuse faced by the Catholic Church, following accusations made in Ireland, the U.S., Germany and other countries.

Mueller's is one of the few cases in Europe where a bishop resigned over committing sexual abuse in his past.

Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan, Poland, resigned in 2002 and in 1995 Cardinal Hans Hermann of Vienna stepped down in 1995, both over allegations of sexually abusing seminarians.

In June 2009, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict had accepted Mueller's resignation but it did not specify why. [It did, as the next sentence shows!]

As is its custom, the Vatican at the time cited only Canon (Church) law 401/2, which states that a bishop should offer his resignation to the Pope in cases where he has become "unsuited for the fulfillment of his office."

[Any newsman covering the Vatican should know by now that the official announcements never spell out reasons for retirements or resignations, only the provision of canon law applicable to the individual case - which with the Internet, anyone can look up directly. And if you are a newsman or a parishioner who wants to know exactly how Canon Law Prov. 401/Section 2 applied to the resigning/retiring bishop, then you can ask the Congregation for Bishops or the CDF if you are a Vatican reporter, or the local Church authorities, if you are a local reportere or parishioner. It's not as if the Vatican had done this for the first time expressly to hide the reason for the bishop's resignation/retirement.

This entire story is obviously once again about trying to show that the Vatican, and the Church, and therefore, the Pope, continue to 'cover up' cases of sex abuses by priests.]

The Church in Norway and the Vatican acknowledged the details of the case only after they were reported on Wednesday by the Norwegian daily Adresseavisen.

Mueller, who was born in Germany, was bishop of Trondeim from 1997 to 2009.

The Vatican said Church authorities found out about the abuse in January 2009. Mueller offered his resignation in May of that year and "the Pope quickly accepted it."

The bishop later underwent therapy and is no longer involved in pastoral activity, the Vatican said.

The victim in now in his 30s and has chosen to remain anonymous. The case happened too long ago to lead to a criminal prosecution under Norwegian law.


If 1) a priest or bishop has admitted his culpability, or if an investigation has proven it, and
2) the offender is punished appropriately under canon law and removed from any pastoral responsibilities, and
3) the victim refuses to prosecute for practical reasons,
the Church is under no obligation at all to advertise the case.(What it must do in reparation to the victim is a private matter between them, but it must be done).

But neither does it stop anyone from investigating it. Why should it be blamed for the failure of reporters in Norway to see anything strange about Bishop Mueller's resignation last year and therefore to look into his case if they wanted to (even if it meant subjecting the victim to fresh trauma)????



STATEMENT BY FR. LOMBARDI
Translated from

April 7, 2010


In response to newsmen's questions regarding the case of the ex-bishop of Trondheim (Norway), Mons. Georg Müller, SS.CC., the director of the Vatican Press office has made the following statement:

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I confirm the information given in the commique of the Apostolic Administrator for Trondheim (Norway), Mons. Bernd Eidsvig, about the ex-Bishop Prelate of Trondheim, Mons. Georg Müller, SS.CC., who was bishop of the Prelature from 1997 to 2009.

It concerns sexual abuse of a minor that took place in the early 1990s and was brought to the attention of ecclesiastical authorities in January 2009.

The question was attended to and examined promptly by the Nunciature in Stockholm on orders of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In May 2009, the bishop presented his resignation, which was promptly accepted by the Holy Father. In June, Mueller left the Prelature. he underwent a course of therapy and no longer carries out any pastoral activity.

From the point of civil law, the case had passed the statute of limitations. So far, the victim, now an adult, has asked to remain anonymous.

---

I tried to 'see' the statement physically on the site of the Church of Norway, but it is all in Norwegian, and the many attempts I tried to open the right page on the statement have failed. However, the Italian agency SIR provides some excerpts in Italian translation which I am translating to English:


Excerpts from the Bishop of Norway's
statement about ex-Bishop Mueller
Translated from



"On April 6, 2010, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave me the difficult task to announce that around the end of January 2009, it received an accusation against Bishop Georg Müller of Trondheim regarding sexual abuse of a minor" Thus begins the statement from the Apostolic Administrator of the Prelature of Trondheim-Oslo in Norway.

Mons Bernst Eidvig goes on to explain that the CDF asked the Nunciature in Stockholm to investigate the case, and that when Müller was confronted, he admitted his offenses. At that point, he tendered his resignation.

Eidvig underscores that even if under Norwegian law, the statute of limitation for the offenses committed in the early 1990s had logn expired, the provisions of canon law remained applicable.

Mons. Müller was subsequently stripped of all his pastoral functions and has undergone therapy.

Eidvig also points out that the CDF did not publicize the case at the request of the victim, who has long reached adulthood, and asked that "his desire to remain anonymous be respected".

He said "The Church of Norway was shaken to its foundations" after Müller admitted to the offenses, and that "Personally, it is difficult for me to find the words".

"First of all, I wish to express my solidarity with the victim and I too hope and pray that his request to stay anonymous will be respected", Eidvig said. "Then-bishop Müller acted against every promise and duty that he had undertaken."

"A small bright sign in the midst of the sorrow we all felt was that the Holy See acted immediately and effectively as soon as the case was brought to them."

He noted that the Church has lived through moments of great difficulty in the past. "The difference is that this trial has struck as in our hearts and our weaknesses. The sorrow that afflicts us is terrible and not easy to bear."

To the faithful of Norway, Bishop Eidig appealed: "Pray for me that I may always have the grace to be a good pastor especially in moments so difficult for us."


Some relevant data:
There are less than 60,000 Catholics in Norway today, 70% of them foreign-born. The overwhelming majority (82%) of Norway's 5 million citizens are Lutheran. Next largest group is Islam (93,000), mainly immigrants, who surpassed the Catholics in number in the 1990s.

GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY



The Holy Father flew in this morning by helicopter from Castel Gandolfo for his regular Wednesday General Audience at St. Peter's Square.

More than 40,000 faithful gathered on a beautiful spring day to listen to him speak further on the significance of the Resurrection as one of the fundamental mysteries of the Christian faith. Here is what he said for the benefit of English-speaking pilgrims:

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Our General Audience today is marked by the spiritual joy of Easter, as the Church continues her celebration of Christ’s glorious resurrection from the dead.

The resurrection is the greatest of God’s mighty acts in history; mysterious beyond all imagining, it is also a real event attested by trustworthy witnesses who in turn became messengers of this Good News before the world. In every generation, the Gospel of Christ, crucified and risen, must constantly be proclaimed anew.

Each of us, as a disciple of Christ, is called to testify to the reality and power of the new life bestowed by the Risen Lord upon those who believe.

Saint Mark, at the end of his Gospel, tells us that the Lord "worked with" the Apostles, and "confirmed the message by the signs which accompanied it" (Mk 16:20).

Today too, the Risen Christ wishes to work with us, so that we may reflect his words in our words and reveal the power of his love by our actions.

During this Easter season, may our personal encounter with the Lord deepen our faith, hope and love, and inspire us to proclaim, with our lips and in our lives, the Good News that "Christ is truly risen!".

I offer a warm welcome to the newly-ordained deacons from the Pontifical Irish College, together with their families and friends. Dear young deacons: may the grace of your ordination conform you ever more fully to the Lord in humble obedience and faithful service to the building up of the Church in your beloved homeland.

Upon all the English-speaking visitors present at today’s Audience, especially those from England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Malta, Croatia, Australia, Japan and the United States, I invoke the joy and peace of the Risen Christ!

---

Here is a full translation of today's catechesis:

---

Dear brothers and sisters:

The usual General Audience of Wednesday is flooded today with the luminous joy of Easter. These days, in fact, the Church celebrates the mystery of the Resurrection and experiences great joy at the good news of the triumph of Christ over evil and death.

This joy is prolonged not only during the Octave of Easter, but throughout the 50 days till Pentecost. After the weeping and dismay of Good Friday, and after the expectation-laden silence of Holy Saturday, the stupendous announcement: "Truly the Lord has risen and appeared to Simon" (Lk 24,34),

This, in the whole history of teh world, is the 'good news' par excellence - it is the 'Gospel' that has been handed down through the centuries, from generation to generation.

Christ's REsurrection is the supreme and unsurpassable act of God's power. It is an absolutely extraordinary event, the most beautiful and mature fruit of 'the mystery of God". It is so extraordinary that it is is indescribable in its dimensions which escape our human capacity for knowledge and investigation.

Nonetheless, it is also a historical fact, real, witnessed and documented. It is the event that is the foundation of our whole faith. It is the central content of what we believe and the principal reason for why we believe.

The New Testament does not describe the Resurrection of Jesus as it happens. It only gives the testimony of those whom Jesus met in person after his resurrection.

The three synoptic Gospels tell us that the announcement "He has risen!" was first proclaimed by some angels. Therefore, it is an announcement that comes from God, one that God entrusts to his 'messengers' so that they would transmit to to everyone.

And so these are the very angels who ask the women who came early to the tomb that first Easter, to go quickly and tell the disciples: "He has been raised from the dead, and he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him." (Mt 28,7).

In this way, through the women of the Gospel, the divine mandate reached each and everyone so that each, in turn, could transmit to others, with fidelity and courage, the same news: the beautiful and joyous news, which is also the bearer of joy.

Yes, dear friends, all our faith is founded on the constant and faithful transmission of this 'good news'. We, today, wish to tell God of our profound gratitude for the numberless ranks of believers in Christ who have preceded us through the centuries, because they never failed in their fundamental mandate to announce the Gospel they had received.

The good news of Easter, then, requires the work of enthusiastic and courageous witnesses. Every disciple of Christ, and therefore, each of us, is called to be a witness. This is the precise, demanding and exalting mandate of the risen Lord.

The 'news' of the new life in Christ should shine in the life of each Christian, it should be alive and functioning - and truly capable of changing the heart of whoever gives him his entire existence.
He is alive above all because Christ himself is this living and vivifying spirit.

St. Mark reminds us of this at the end of his Gospel where he writes that the Apostles "went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs" (Mk 16,20).

The experience of the Apostles is also ours and that of every believer, every disciple who becomes an 'annunciator'. Even we, in fact, are sure that the Lord, today as yesterday, works together with his witnesses.

This is a fact that we can recognize every time we see the seeds of true and lasting peace sprout, wherever the commitment and the example of Christians and men of good will is inspired by respect for justice, patient dialog, convinced esteem of others, disinterest, personal and communitarian sacrifice.

Unfortunately, we also see in the world so much suffering, violence and incomprehension. The celebration of the Paschal mystery, the joyous contemplation of the Resurrection of Christ, who conquered sin and death with the power of God's love, is a propitious occasion to rediscover and profess with more conviction our faith in the risen Lord, who accompanies the witnesses to his word by working wonders together with them.

We will be truly and profoundly witnesses of the risen Christ when we allow the wonder of his love to show through; when in our words, and even better, in our actions that are fully consistent with the Gospel, the voice and the hand of Jesus himself can be recognized.

Therefore, the Lord sends us to be his witnesses everywhere. But we can be such only starting from and in continuous reference to the Easter experience, that which Mary of Magdala expressed when she announced to the other disciples, "I saw the Lord" (Jn 20,18).

In this personal encounter with the Risen One is the indestructible foundation and the central content of our faith, the fresh and inexhaustible spring of our hope, the ardent dynamism of our charity.
And thus our entire life will fully coincide with the announcement that "Christ the Lord has truly risen".

So let us allow ourselves to be won over by the fascination of the Resurrection of Christ. May the Virgin Mary sustain us with her protection and help us to fully savor the joy of Easter, so that in turn we will know to bring it to all our brothers.

Once more, a Happy Easter to everyone!

---

Brent Bozell is founder and president of the Media Research Council, a conservative think tank founded expressly to "document, expose and neutralize" liberal media bias. It's no wonder he cuts through all their fancy-schmancy sanctimony to show them for what they are. NewsBusters is the MRC blogsite.


The media's Vatican coup
By Brent Bozell

April 6, 2010


Our secular liberal media elites are never more poisonously insincere than when they recommend that conservatives should move closer to liberals, for their own good.

Witnessing the relentless media attacks on the Catholic Church, no member of the flock should assume that the agitators at Newsweek or the New York Times know best how to steer the faithful – or even believe they want to help the faithful.

Much like Ted Turner (founder of CNN), who called Catholics “losers,” his media colleagues see Catholics – and particularly Pope Benedict XVI – as loathsome political obstacles.

One can conclude from all the coverage of sexual-abuse charges that those charges aren’t really the primary point for the “truth” seekers. These leftist media elites have hijacked those heinous actions for a much broader goal. [DIM]8pt[=DIM][Not to mention that leave behind a broad swathe of lies, half-truths and distortions in their self-proclaimed task of 'seeking the truth'. They wouldn't recognize truth if it literally poked them in the eye!]

Theirs is a very political crusade, with the goal of sacking Pope Benedict and “reforming” the ancient Church into their hipster image, one that celebrates gay bishop Eugene Robinson’s Episcopalian gospel of “tolerance” and “inclusion” and “pluralism.”

That kind of church would pose zero threat to the global goals of the left. In that kind of church, there is no stained-glass ceiling to untrammeled abortion and unlimited “marriage” of everyone to everyone.

Secular liberals and liberal pseudo-Catholics alike have overtly compared the sex-abuse charges to Watergate, and the Holy Father to President Nixon. In this vision, what the Catholic Church truly needs are cardinals to go to the Pontiff, like Barry Goldwater went to Nixon, and tell him he has to pack it in, for the good of his flock.

This is a stunning smear of Pope Benedict. Richard Nixon was heavily involved in plotting the petty crimes of Watergate, from break-in to cover-up. No media outlet has proven beyond their own jaded liberal assumptions that Cardinal Ratzinger or Pope Benedict had a similar involvement in plotting a coverup – not to mention ordering sexual abuse by priests.

Forget proof, evidence...facts. This is all about character assassination.

Whether it’s Sally Quinn of The Washington Post going on MSNBC or Timothy Shriver writing in the Washington Post, this march of the Holier Than Thou to the walls of Vatican City is a sickening spectacle.

Father Thomas Brundage, who was a judge in the church trial of deaf-child-molesting Father Lawrence Murphy in Milwaukee and is intimately familiar with the facts, is being ignored by the media.

Here’s what he wrote about this Pope, in regard to the Murphy ase: “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.”

After Cardinal Ratzinger assumed responsibility in 2001 for sex-abuse cases being investigated by the Vatican, Brundage found “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.”

In addition, he wrote, “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 been most reactive and proactive of any international church official in history with regard to the scourge of clergy sexual abuse of minors.”

None of this mattered to the media. They will not allow this testimony to goodness to derail their religious revolution.

Newsweek even put a painting of the Virgin Mary on its cover with the words “What Would Mary Do? How Women Can Save the Catholic Church From Its Sins.” According to Newsweek, Mary is now a radical feminist. They declared the Catholic scandal “is no mystery: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the all-male club?”

That is their goal, and it’s political.

Men are pigs, according to the female religion editor of Newsweek, Lisa Miller, and celibate men who fail to accept women as professional equals are the biggest pigs of all.

This woman even attacked Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in her crusade. Were the bishops responsive to mothers who warned of abusive priests? “In this case Jesus was wrong: the meek did not inherit the earth. They received pious and self-serving sermonizing....the women of today's church have found themselves marginalized and preached to amid the interminable revelations of the sexual-abuse scandals. Their prayers to the Virgin, protector of humanity, seem to have gone unanswered.”

And as I write these words, the same spirit moves Rosie O’Donnell, as she just compared the Roman Catholic Church to...the psychotic suicide cult at Jonestown. [Rosie O'Donnell is an ignorant loudmouth who is the Demon High Priestess of the Santimonious!]


And this is the face of 'the true, the good, and the beautiful':


Benedict XVI at the GA today.


NB: I must say Thank you to the news agencies (AP, Reuters and AFP), who, despite their obvious negative bias in reporting on the Pope and the Church, continue to file the photographs they take of him without apparent editing. They could choose, for instance, to release only the photos which show him in a sinister or unflattering light, but then, if they used that as a criterion, they would never be able to release anything, would they? Providence is defying their worst intentions with the most photogenic of all Popes!



I saw the original of the following but it's one of the favorable media items piling up since Easter weekend that I haev not had time to translate. CNA gives a good idea of it:


Jewish columnist in Spain says
the media using sex-abuse issue as
a gimmick to promote secular agenda


Madrid, Spain, Apr 7, 2010 (CNA).- Jewish poet, novelist and essayist Jon Juaristi published an article on Easter Sunday in the Spanish daily ABC asserting that “it is not necessary to be Catholic” to understand the motives behind the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI and the Church.

He remarked that the campaign is merely a sales gimmick aimed at getting Catholics out of the public square.

In his article, Juaristi wrote that he wants to address the media attacks on the Pope since an increasing number of “journalists and independent bloggers now expect the Pope to submit his resignation.”

These people have a greater "fascination with the idea of a hypothetical papal resignation, than with the very acts of pedophilia committed by priests,” he said remarking that their intentions are “merely an excuse to corner Benedict XVI. And only the Pope and the Church have taken this issue seriously."

"By exploiting the scandal, the tabloids only seek more sales and progressives seek to remove Catholics from the public square, or at least destroy the reputation of clergy if the campaign can’t do the former,” he said.

“In case I haven’t said it enough,” he continued, “I am not Catholic, but even I am not blind to the immense moral stature of the current Pontiff in comparison to his present-day swarm of detractors, who are a bunch of harassers.”

Ever since the release of the Holy Father’s letter to Irish Catholics, Juaristi pointed out, the target of the attacks are no longer the pedophile priests and the bishops who covered them up, but rather the Pope himself.

“Since it seems in this case that the principle of 'strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered' is not going to work, it is likely that this campaign will drag on for some time and that the stage will be filled … with spontaneous individuals who recount what they suffered from the pedophile priest in question,” he said.


I will translate this brief editorial from TEMPI...

They paint a child-eating Church
because they hope to keep Christians
out of the public discourse
by the Editors
Translated from

April 7, 2010


For the Church of Papa Ratzinger it was a difficult but also purifying and instructive Easter.

Benedict XVI, and with him, all the bishops of the ecumene, have been very clear in acknowledging the shameful abuses that some priests have committed and to take responsibility for bringing them to justice and to keep them away from minors, while acting, too, against members of the Church hierarchy who have been complicit in covering up for their priests.

Heads will roll, and the scandal could well accelerate the Ratzingerian reform of the various curias, of the liturgy, and of seminaries.

But the abysmal distance between facts and the extended braying and barking of the media circuit against the Catholic Church will remain.

They make her appear as a child-eating monster, even as simple statistics show the minuscule contribution of sex-offender priests to reported cases of pedophilia and all the other perversions that are the outcome of the theory and practice of secular 'humanism'.

Just think of the free rein they give pornography. Or the pedophilia-advocating political party in Holland, that has now announced it will not field candidates in the next elections, not because the Dutch Parliament has outlawed it, but because they did not collect enough signatures to qualify them to become candidates.

Of course, it has become an international sport to shoot down - in more ways than one - anyone who wears a cross. In Asia and Africa, Christians are physically shot at or hacked to death or crucified or burned alive.

And here in the West - where the Christian who does not limit himself simply to catching butterflies, as Czelaw Milosz wrote, but insists on being involved in the res pubblica - public matters - "will have his hand chopped off" for such audacity.

Already Christians are on the play stations of theologians the likes of Kueng and Mancuso. For whom Benedict XVI needs to be legitimized by a third democratic and Martinian Vatican Council composed of married priests and priestesses!

Thank God, none of that will ever happen. What is certain is that the People of God will continue to trust in the Only One who will never deceive them.


And I missed this very apropos blog entry by the Telegraph's Cristina Odone, whose creds include being former editor of the Catholic Herald, and deputy editor of the New Statesman. No example could be more appropriate for the liberal media's stultifying self-blinding hypocrisy!


Benedict XVI and Roman Polanski:
Liberals bay for the Pope's blood
while genuflecting to a child abuser
By Cristina Odone

March 31st, 2010


There is child abuse and then there is child abuse. Or so the liberal establishment would have us think. The tale of two elderly men bears witness to the incredible hypocrisy of our intelligentsia.

Both men are brilliant and influential figureheads. Both have been accused of perverting the course of justice in cases of child abuse. But there the similarity ends between Pope Benedict XVI and Roman Polanski, the noted Polish film maker.

Because, you see, although Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in 1977, he is an “artist”.

When US authorities issued a warrant for his extradition last year, the creme de la creme of Hollywood was up in arms. Stars like Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Whoopi Goldberg petitioned for the director of The Pianist and the forthcoming The Ghost Writer to be let off.

When he raped a child, Goldberg explained, it “was not rape rape”. It was something altogether different. Polanski, you see, was so talented, so special, mortal laws could not apply to such a genius. From NW3 to Manhattan, the chatteratis clucked about the provincial American justice system and their philistine mentality.

The same chatteratis can now be heard baying for the blood of Pope Benedict XVI. He has been celibate all his life. He did not plead guilty to sex with a child, he did not flee from America, thereby perverting the course of justice.

He is not an award-winning film director, but merely the spiritual head of the world’s one billion Catholics. In other words, he is not “one of us”.

The Pope probably doesn’t care that he is a hate figure for the same intelligentsia that genuflects to a child abuser like Polanski. I do.

[BRAVA!!!]

Thanks to Lella's blog

we now have a full transcription of Cardinal Sodano's greeting to the Holy Father in behalf of the universal Church. Here is a translation:


CARDINAL SODANO'S TRIBUTE
TO THE HOLY FATHER
Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010

---

Holy Father,

On this solemn feast of Easter, the liturgy of the Church invites us to a holy joy, by telling us: "This is the day made by the Lord - let us rejoice and exult!"

Even with the rain coming down on this historic piazza, the sun shines bright in our hearts. In this spirit, we close ranks around you, the Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, the solid rock of the Holy Church of Christ, to sing with you the Alleluia of faith and Christian hope.

We are profoundly grateful for the strength of spirit and apostolic courage with which you announce to us the Gospel of Christ.

We admire your great love through which, with a father's heart, you have made your own "the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anguish of men today, especially the poor and the suffering" - to use the words of the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et spes.

Today, through me, the Church wishes to say to you in unison: Happy Easter, beloved Holy Father!

Happy Easter! The Church is with you!

With you are the cardinals who are your co-workers in the Roman Curia.

With you are our brother bishops all over the world who guide the 3,000 ecclesiastical districts on the globe.

And particularly with you these days are the 400,000 priests who generously serve the People of God in parishes, oratories, schools, hospitals, in the armed forces and countless other activities, as well as in missions in the most remote parts of the world.

Holy Father, with you are the People of God who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the chatter of the moment, nor by the trials that are meant to strike at the community of believers.

In fact, Jesus told us: "In the world you will have tribulations", adding right away, "But have courage - I have conquered the world".

Last Thursday, at the Holy Mass for the blessing of the Holy Oils, Your Holiness edified all of us, speaking of the goodness of God with words inspired by the first Bishop of Rome, the Apostle Peter, in describing the attitude of Christ during the Passion: "When insulted, he did not respond with insults; maltreated, he did not threaten vengeance, but trusted in Him who judges with justice".

Holy Father, we will treasure your words. On this Paschal solemnity, we pray for you that the Lord, our Good Shepherd, may continue to sustain you in your mission in the service of the Church and the world itself.

Happy Easter, Holy Father! Happy Easter, beloved Christ on earth! The Church is with you!

---

They are words that needed to be said, and the occasion was the right one. The words were also very well chosen to avoid any direct reference to the relentless media campaign against the Pope, and through him, the Church - except for that single phrase 'the chatter of the moment' (not, as most reports translated it, 'petty gossip').

But the media betrayed their consciousness of guilt in that almost everybody referred to Sodano's words in the news stories as 'a defense of the Pope'. There was no defense - because there is nothing to defend. The Pope's record on the child-abuse issue is clear and clean. The attacks on him are built on sheer and malicious innuendo.

Cardinal Sodano's words expressed affection, gratitude, solidarity, and support for the spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism. It was right that he articulated it as the most senior member of the Catholic hierarchy after the Pope.

It doesn't even matter that he may have had a role to play in sex-abuse cases that were hushed up when he was John Paul II's Secretary of State - that is not common knowledge at all to the tens of millions who saw and heard him on TV around the world last Sunday, and so there was nothing to detract from the content of his words.

Nor, I think, from the sincerity. After all, he did not make any references to the sex abuse scandals. If he had, the media may well have seized on it to castigate him for hypocrisy, at the very least.

It was good and right, necessary and propitious, that Cardinal Sodano said those words on Easter Sunday and to a world audience. And it was clear the Holy Father appreciated it. And you could see it by the way he stood up right after Sodano had pronounced his last word and looked towards him beaming (the same way he did, though in a different context, after Placido Domingo sang 'Panis angelicus' at the Wahsington DC Mass in April 2008), the way he embraced him afterwards. A father always appreciates it when his children say they love him!...Perhaps that is why when I translated Sodano's words, and everytime I read them, the tears come spontaneously at the poignancy of the occasion.


L'Osservatore Romano followed up the Sunday remarks with an interview with Cardinal Sodano in the April 6-7 issue:


'With the Church
alongside the Pope'
Interview with Cardinal Sodano
by Giampaolo Mattei
Translated from
the 4/6-4/7 issue of



"It has become a cultural contrast: the Pope embodies moral truths that are not accepted by secular society, and so the failings and errors of some priests are now being used as weapons against the Church".

Cardinal Angelo Sodano speaks further, after his remarks before Easter Sunday mass at St. Peter's Square, in which he expressed the affection and loyalty of the Catholics of the world for Benedict XVI.

"Behind these unjust attacks against the Pope," the cardinal said in an interview, "are views about the family and life that are against the Gospel. And now, the accusation of pedophilia is being used against the whole Church. In the past, there were the battles of modernism against Pius X, then the offensive against Pius XII to criticize his actions during World War II, and then against Paul VI for Humanae Vitae [the encyclical that declares the use of artificial contraception as a violation of God's law].

Your intervention, on Easter morning - could it be read as a reaction to the defamatory campaign against the Pope, which have intensified lately with the opportunistic pretext that he failed to speak about the sex abuse cases during Holy Week?
Along with these unjust attacks, we are being told that the Church is wrong about its strategy and that we should be reacting differently. The Church has its own style and it does not include adopting the methods that are now used against the Pope. The only strategy we have comes from the Gospel.

In your opinion, how is the Catholic world, living through this?
Catholics feel rightly wounded when they are all made out to be involved en masse in the serious and tragic sins committed by some priests, in which individual guilt and responsibility are transformed into a collective offence, in a forced operation that is truly incomprehensible.

My remarks simply gave voice to the People of God: to the college of cardinals, above all, who are one with the Roman Pontiff; but also all the bishops and our 400,000 priests.

I especially wanted to speak about these ministers who dedicate their lives to the service of God and the Church. If some minister has been faithless, then the media cannot and should not generalize.

Of course, we all suffer, and Benedict XVI has asked for forgiveness in behalf of the offenders several times. But it is not Christ's fault that Judas betrayed him. It is not the fault of a bishop if one of his priests defiles himself by serious sins. And it certainly is not the responsibility of the Pope.

All the Church is with the Pope: was that your message?
My words were spoken in the context of the Easter liturgy. It is logical that on the most significant feast of the year, a family gathers around the father. I therefore considered this an occasion appropriate for reiterating the profound bonds of unity that bring all the members of the Church together around him whom the Holy Spirit chose to lead the community of believers.

For my part, as dean of the College of Cardinals, I thought it was my duty to make that intervention. Like every cardinal, I have the mission to be always by the side of the Pope and to serve the Church usque ad effusionem sanguinis - even up to shedding one's blood.

I feel an apostolic duty to Benedict XVI for the apostolic dedication with which he serves the Church daily. And my words were also prompted by a personal impulse, by the profound affection that I have for the Vicar of Christ.

How did you conceive the remarks you gave?
Besides a testimonial of closeness to the Pope, it was also an invitation to calm. It is the appeal with which the Pope himself continually invokes the Church and the world, in the footsteps of all his great predecessors on Peter's Chair.

We should not be surprised at being persecuted because Jesus already warned the apostles that "a servant is not greater than than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they observed my words closely, so too will they observe yours", as we read in the Gospel of John.

Thursday, April 8

ST. JULIE BILLIART (b France 1751, d Belgium 1816)
Nun, Founder of the Sisters of Notre Dame
A farmer's daughter, Julie showed early signs of holiness, which found practical expression in making
laces and linens for her parish church and being a catechist to children and to farm laborers. At age
30, she was paralyzed by a mysterious illness, which did not keep her from continuing with her work
as catechist nor from dispensing spiritual advice for which she soon gained quite a reputation. During
the years following the French Revolution, she had to be taken from place to place to avoid getting
caught in the murderous wave of anti-Catholicism. In Amiens, she was sheltered by an aristocrat,
Francoise Blin de Bourdon, who came to admire Julie for her spiritual gifts. Eventually, they decided
to start a community dedicated to educating Christian girls and training catechists, which was to
become the Institute of Notre Dame. Julie, Francoise and two of their proteges professed their vows
in 1804, at which time, Julie was miraculously healed of of her paralysis, and was able to walk again
after 22 years. She travelled throughout France and Belgium establishing schools and convents. In
1809, she moved the motherhouse from Amiens to Namur in Belgium, when a new bishop wished to
impose rules to bring the congregation in line with ancient monastic orders. From 1804-1816, Julie
founded 15 convents, made 120 journeys, and carried on correspondence with her sisters now kept in
the convent at Namur. After her death, many miracles were attributed to her. A canonization process
was started in 1881, and she was beatified in 1906. She was finally canonized in 1969.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/nab/readings/040810.shtml


OR today.

At the General Audience, Benedict XVI speaks on the relevance today
of the 'good news' of Easter:
'Words and deeds must be consistent with the Gospel
in order to bear witness to the risen Christ'
Other Page 1 stories: An Easter meditation from the Patriarch of Moscow; and the US and Russia
sign a new treaty on further reduction of nuclear arms. In the inside pages, Archbishop Jean-
Louis Brugues, secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education, writes on the lessons from
Vatican II for a symposium at Rome's Sacred Heart University; and an interview with Nicholas
Cabibbo, physicist and president of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, on the significance of
Europe's giant particle accelerator in Geneva for the future of physics.


No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.




BTW- Check out this unusual video lovingly put together, you can see...
love2learnblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/do-you-know-pope-bened...

Mr. Neumayr is the editor of the montly magazine Catholic World Report. The American Spectator is a monthly journal of ideas whose writers are politically conservative. Here, Mr. Neumayr provides solid specificity for the philosophical animus evident in the reporting and in-house commentary of the New York Times on the Pope.



A liberal fantasy:
The end of history and 'the last Pope'
By George Neumayr

April 8, 2010

Post-Enlightenment liberalism has long regarded the Catholic Church as the last obstacle to its final triumph. The Enlightenment-era French dilettante Denis Diderot spoke of strangling the last priest with the "guts of the last king."

The ceaseless attacks on Pope Benedict XVI over the last few weeks form the most recent scene in this historical drama. Unlike Napoleon, today's forces of secularization can't imprison a Pope. Well, at least not yet; Christopher Hitchens is working on this, calling for the European Union to seize Benedict's traveling papers.

But they can strangle him politically and culturally. That his popularity poll numbers have apparently dipped below those of the most inane and rancid celebrities testifies to this perverse power.

The children of Diderot at the New York Times understand the secularist Enlightenment project very well. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, telegraphed this in a 2002 column.

Since he wrote the column before he was promoted to editor, he didn't bother to hide his anti-Catholic bigotry with circumspect throat-clearing. He described himself as a "collapsed Catholic" -- "well beyond lapsed." He affected a false modesty about this, saying that for this reason he claims "no voice in whom the Church ordains or how it prays or what it chooses to call a sin." But of course he does claim that voice -- and thinks all should obey it.

He made it clear that he was rooting for "reforms" that would reduce Catholicism to a captive of modern liberalism: "…the struggle within the Church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism."

In that one sentence lies the whole subtext to the paper's campaign against Pope Benedict in the last few weeks.

The Holy Father represents for Keller and Dowd and Goodstein the hated "forces of absolutism" that the tolerant and enlightened think themselves called by history to stop.

For an elite drunk on its own enlightenment, the ends will always justify the means against religion. So what, Keller figured, if my reporters could only come up with straining, half-baked pieces that cast fragments of information about Benedict in the worst possible light? Let's run them anyways, so that the forces of tolerance can triumph over the forces of absolutism!

And if it turns out that the forces of tolerance are largely responsible for mishandling these abuse cases (the ousted homosexual Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the subject of flattering profiles over the years in the New Yorker and New York Times, is the person most responsible for dereliction in the Milwaukee case the Times claims to find so outrageous), well, let's blame it on Benedict anyways. He could have done more!

In that 2002 column, Keller oozed contempt for the Church, speaking of the hierarchy as "aging celibates" (imagine Keller ever writing an equivalent sentence about imams) who refused to embrace the "equality of women, abortion on demand, and gay rights."

Keller had little use for Pope John Paul II, whom he likened to an authoritarian Communist:

---

One paradox of the Polish Pope is that while he is rightly revered for helping bring down the godless Communists, he has replicated something very like the old Communist Party in his church.

Karol Wojtyla has shaped a hierarchy that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live. The Communists mouthed pieties about ''social justice'' and the rule of the working class while creating a corrupt dictatorship of bureaucrats….

…like the Communists, John Paul has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable to a reformer. He has strengthened the Vatican equivalent of the party Central Committee, called the Curia, and populated it with reactionaries.

He has put a stamp of papal infallibility on the issue of ordaining women, making it more difficult for a successor to come to terms with the issue. He has trained bishops that the path of advancement is obsequious obedience to himself.

Alarmed by priests who showed too much populist sympathy for their parishioners, the Pope, according to the Notre Dame historian R. Scott Appleby, has turned seminaries into factories of conformity, begetting a generation of inflexible young priests who have no idea how to talk to real-life Catholics. {He did that???? That must be news to seminaries around the world who gladly took on the laissez-faire fallacies of the Vatican-II progressives to turn out priests practically unschooled in the elements of the faith, much less in its Tradition!]

---

Of course, if John Paul II had been a real Communist like Alger Hiss or Van Jones, Keller wouldn't have talked about him so scathingly. But any stick would do at the time and the Communist analogy appealed to his imagination at the moment.

Notice that these days the opportunistic complaint from the Keller-led Times is not that the Church is too authoritarian but that it is too lax. Apparently, it is not autocratic after all. The paper can't decide if Benedict is a Rottweiler or lap dog.

Upon his election, the Times called him "hard line" and "divisive." Now he is soft and clubby. But imagine if Benedict did govern the Church like the autocrat of Keller's imagination, sweeping down to sack every derelict bishop and corrupt priest across the globe, the Times would be the first to engage in ACLU-style whining about the lack of due process, etc., etc.

In fact, when he issued his renewal of the Church's ban on the ordination of homosexuals in the first year of his pontificate -- a ban which the "forces of tolerance" within the Church had suspended for decades, a factor contributing greatly to the abuse scandal -- the Times was the first to object.

"How many divisions does the Pope have?" secularists, inspired by Stalin, used to scoff. The Pope, as they know, enjoys no such power, yet in recent weeks they have acted as if he had a military and police at his disposal which he simply refused to use against abusers.

It is the "forces of tolerance" which command the divisions, and they will continue to march through history, displaying all the tolerance of French Revolutionaries as they look forward to that final moment when the last priest can be strangled with the guts of the last Pope.



Is it the time of purification for the Church
first predicted by Joseph Ratzinger in 1969?
Editorial
by John-Henry Westen



April 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The near-constant battering of the Catholic Church during the past month over the sexual abuse scandal has most Catholics reeling and much of the media in a feeding frenzy, seeing the scandals as an opportunity to bring down the archenemy of the sexual revolution.

This latest cycle of the sexual abuse scandal is different from that which took place in Canada and Boston years ago. It involves new and disastrous revelations daily and from all over Europe and North America, with sustained coverage in the media.

For over 35 years Pope Benedict XVI has predicted a smaller, more faithful Church. The 1970 book Glaube und Zukunft[Faith and the Future], based on five lectures by then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger given in 1969 at radio stations in Baviera and Hessen, is the first recorded mentioning of this prediction.

In those lectures the future Pope said, "From today's crisis, a Church will emerge tomorrow that will have lost a great deal. She will be small and, to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendour. Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her privileges in society."

In discussing the matter with my colleagues the consensus is that this crisis is definitely part of that long-predicted purification. Unfortunately, however, it comes in a very confusing package.

It would be easier to see truth in an obvious conflict between good and evil: where, for instance, some in the church were advocating for abortion or at least ‘choice,’ versus those who maintained the defense of the sanctity of human life.

But the murkiness of this crisis has the influence of evil written all over it.

The abuse is not exclusively tied to liberalism in the Church, such as was the case with former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland. Weakland was a notorious liberal who, in addition to admitting to transferring priests with a history of sexual misconduct back into churches without alerting parishioners, admitted to homosexual encounters while serving as archbishop.

Weakland retired in 2002 after it was revealed he paid hundreds of thousands of church dollars to a former homosexual lover who threatened to publicly accuse Weakland of sexually assaulting him.

But the ongoing and mindboggling revelations of abuse by Legion of Christ founder Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado show that this crisis touches even what seemed like an oasis of orthodoxy.

This crisis reminds me of Christ’s prophecy in Matthew 24:24 where he warns that times will come when ‘even the elect’ will be deceived.

It shakes the faith of many, as even bishops are found to be guilty not only of horrendous cover-ups and unthinkable enabling by shuffling around abusive clergy, but also of sexual abuse and perverse activity themselves.

Today’s revelations about Norwegian Bishop Georg Muller are devastating. Muller, 58, who resigned last year saying only he was unsuited to the work, now has admitted that the reason for his resignation was his sexual abuse of a 10-year-old choir boy 20 years ago. [At least, Mueller had the good sense to own up when confronted and to resign.}

In another devastating revelation this week, retired French Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Evreux in France said of his taking in a convicted Canadian pedophile priest in 1987, who later went on to abuse children in France: "Back then, that's how the Church operated." [One must take Gaillot's statement warily. He is a very controversial figure whom the Vatican removed as Bishop of Evreux (Normandy) in 1995 because of a long history of flagrant political activism in every liberal cause out there - from Green Peace and the first Gulf War to married pirests and gay marriages. He appears to be truly committed to social activism, with a consistent apostolate of working with the poor and with prisoners, for instance, but also takes pride in his doctrinal heterodoxy. He remains a bishop but with no assignment, which allows him full reign for his heterodoxy.

[Also, I strongly disagree with the indiscriminate use of the adjective 'devastating'. It is not as if anyone is any longer surprised that sexual offenses can and do happen among priests asnd bishops. Nor that any of the recent revelations were about recent offenses. What happened after the US scandal broke at the start of the millennium appears to have significantly diminished the incidence of such offenses among the clergy. Too little significance - or even attention - is given to that in all the current reporting. Even by a constantly supportive group as the Lifesite News people.]

But at the same time the media’s coverage on the scandal must be viewed with a very critical eye, as was seen in the recent attempts by the New York Times to unjustly smear Pope Benedict.

As Colleen Raezler of the Culture and Media Institute points out, the broadcast media relentlessly pursued their objective of smearing the Catholic Church during the holiest week of the year for Catholics.

“ABC, CBS and NBC featured 26 stories during Holy Week about Pope Benedict’s perceived role in the sex abuse scandal the Catholic Church is now facing,” she reported. “Only one story focused on the measures the Church has adopted in recent years to prevent abuse. In 69 percent of the stories (18 out of 26) reporters used language that presumed the Pope’s guilt. Only one made specific mention of the recent drop in the incidence of abuse allegations against the Catholic Church.” [There you are!]

While the media is now focused on the Catholic Church, this is an attack on all Christianity and Christian morality. That is why Lutheran pastor John Stephenson has come out so strongly in defense of the Pope.

Will the Church survive the crisis? Believing Catholics say that it will, since Christ promised (Matthew 16:18) that the gates of Hell would not overcome it. But, as the Pope predicted, it will likely be a smaller and purer Church.

[An equally significant statement by Benedict XVI enroute to the USA in April 2008: "I would prefer to have less priests but good priests".]

Many Catholics are ramping up their prayers for the Church, and the Pope. The Knights of Columbus are encouraging all their members around the world to join in a special novena for Pope Benedict XVI, beginning Divine Mercy Sunday, April 11, and concluding Monday, April 19, the fifth anniversary of the Pope Benedict’s election in 2005.

Canadian Catholic author Michael O’Brien, a good friend of mine, spoke with me today about the crisis. Michael warns of where he sees things going from a spiritual vantage point. And while his is a stark vision, it remains hopeful.

The famed author of the prophetic novel Father Elijah said: “It has been ever thus with the Church. Satan sifts us like wheat.”

“In a generation (if we should be granted that much more time in history), the aging self-deceived liberalism of the Churches in the West will be gone, as dead wood that has dropped from the tree. At the same time, the internal rot that has disguised itself as orthodoxy will have been burned away by trial and tribulation, indeed by persecution.”



And here's the reaction of America's most popular radio commentator and leading conservative Rush Limbaugh, who was asked by a caller on his radio show what he thought about all the current media fuss about the Catholic Church... Limbaugh is not Catholic, but being conservative, he sees the liberal game all too well...And not being Catholic, he does not know - as the gazillion-greedy US lawyers seem not to know - the actual and real autonomy of local Churches in the matter of administration (an autonomy that dates back to the beginnings of Christianity) - a common point of ignorance which explains the last part of Limbaugh's remark.

Why the American left
is trying to discredit the Church

From the broadcast of
April 7, 2010

---

LIMBAUGH: ...What really is going on here is that the forces of the left are in the process of trying to tear down and destroy every institution in America that stands for something other than big government, other than liberal Democrats.

The Catholic Church is despised by the left because of its abortion stance. It is despised because it is a religion other than the earth. It is a religion other than liberalism. So they're full-court press in trying to discredit the Church.

What they're gonna end up doing, though... Some guy just said, "If we bail out California, Washington gets more powerful." If the Pope finally figures out, "You know what? These local Catholic churches in their areas, the dioceses, can't control themselves. We're going to have to step in," the Vatican may end up getting more powerful here...
It could be a dual-edged sword for these people trying to destroy the Church.

---

Bishops express repentance
to child abuse victims

Posted on April 8th, 2010


LA VALLETTA - In a statement on Thursday, Archbishop Paul Cremona and Bishop Mario Grech expressed sorrow and repentance towards victims of child abuse and apologized to Maltese society saying that such cases were a source of humiliation for the Church.

They also said that the Church in Malta was one of the first dioceses to take action on reports of child abuse when, in 1999, it set up a council known as Response Team, under the chairmanship of a retired Judge to investigate allegations of sexual abuse both on minors, as well as on adults, by members of the clergy, religious and pastoral operators.

The following is the text of the statement signed by the Bishops:

---

Recently, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, sent a letter to the Church in Ireland, regarding the tragic incidents involving the sexual abuse of minors. In his letter, he made reference to the horror surrounding these crimes. He referred to them as “criminal and sinful acts”.

Much to the shame of the Church, these crimes are more horrifying when they are perpetrated by members of the clergy. As a Church, we sympathize with the victims and feel the need for repentance for the sins of those who committed these abuses.

Yet we also suffer the humiliation of knowing that these crimes were committed by those who, in the name of the Church, were duty-bound to nurture and protect these young people. This is a moment of humiliation for the entire Church.

This applies also in the case of the Church in Malta, who, in the same vein as the Pope, expresses its grave sorrow and repentance towards all those who have been abused, towards all our Christian brothers who have been hurt, and towards Maltese society in general.

In his letter, the Pope reiterates that which he has always stated in the past, that is, these cases should be treated without any measure of weakness. Meanwhile, the Church continues to pray for the conversion of those who committed these acts.

The Church in Malta was one of the first dioceses to take action. In 1999, it took the necessary measures to set up a council known as Response Team, under the chairmanship of a retired Judge, in order to investigate allegations of sexual abuse both on minors, as well as on adults, by members of the clergy, religious and pastoral operators.

In order that these cases could be investigated as quickly as possible, another Response Team was formed just a few months later. In the light of the letter which Pope Benedict XVI addresed to the Church in Ireland, the Church in Malta continues to intensify its commitment towards battling these abuses.

In cases of such severity, we hereby appeal to all Christians to cooperate with the competent authorities, including the civil authorities. We reiterate that which the Church already stated in 1999: Christians are obliged to cooperate with the Church, rather than disguising facts or remaining silent, in order that this wound may be healed once and for all.

In spite of the fact that these cases are a source of humiliation for the Church, it must continue to fulfill the mission entrusted to her by God, in favour of mankind’s well being, in the light of the Good News of the Kingdom.

We must assume for ourselves the words which St Paul spoke when referring to his own weakness: “for my power (the Lord’s) is made perfect in weakness….for when I am weak (St Paul), I am strong” (2 Cor 12, 9-10).

Let us embrace this moment of humiliation and suffering as a call to further unite our mission as a Church together with our human capabilities, recognizing always that these are dependent upon the power of the Holy Spirit.

---

I noted recently that the Associated Press is a far worse enemy for the Church and the Pope than the New York Times is because it has worldwide tentacles. I posted in TOXIC WASTE earlier today a hateful hatchet job by Victor Simpson, which has now been taken up by many media outlets, if we go by the Yahoo and Daylife headline lists, under the general title "Vatican announces tougher checks for next Pope"! How did it get so fast from being Simpson's personal projection to being attributed to the Vatican itself????

Now comes Nicole Winfield negating, in effect, the validity of Cardinal Sodano's words of loyalty to the Pope - and of course, to discredit Sodano - because of Sodano's involvement in the protection of the late Fr. Maciel. I am only sueprised it took three days in coming...

It is unfortunate, of course, that Sodano has this presumptive blot on his record, but any reading or rereading of his Easter remarks and his interview with the OR will show he was very careful not to make any statement that the media could use to accuse him directly of hypocrisy in the sex abuse issue.

On Sunday, he referred to the present scandal only once, and indirectly, as 'chatter of the moment'. And in the interview with OR, he makes it very clear he is speaking of 'unjust attacks against the Pope' and his concern for Catholics who are "involved en masse in the serious and tragic sins committed by some priests, in which individual guilt and responsibility are transformed into a collective offence".


Former Vatican No. 2
becomes unlikely cheerleader
By NICOLE WINFIELD



VATICAN CITY, April 8 -- The former Vatican No. 2, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, has assumed the lead role in praising the Pope for his handling of clerical sex abuse and defending him against "unjust attacks" in the media.

But the retired Vatican secretary of state is an unlikely front man in Rome's battle for public opinion given his reported support for the Rev. Marciel Maciel, the discredited founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Vatican investigators last month completed an investigation into the Legionaries after the order admitted that Maciel had fathered at least one child and had molested young seminarians.

The explosive revelations have called into question the very future of one of the Church's most prominent religious movements and the Maciel case now stands as one of the more egregious cases of Vatican inaction concerning priestly sexual misconduct.

Sodano has long been accused in news reports in U.S. Catholic publications and in a book and documentary "Vows of Silence" of having helped stall a Vatican probe into the founder, although there's no suggestion he did so to cover up any alleged misdeeds.

In fact, Legionaries officials today - even those who worked closely with Maciel - say they were completely blind to the double life that he lived for decades.

It was only in 2006, nine years after the allegations against Maciel first went public, that the Vatican announced that it had concluded its investigation and had disciplined the Mexican prelate. The Vatican invited him to a "reserved life of prayer and penance" - making him a priest in name only. Maciel died in 2008.

Given that, it was odd that Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals, was selected to give a high-profile salute to the Pope at the start of Easter Mass on Sunday, praising Benedict as the "unfailing rock" of the Catholic Church.

"Holy Father, on your side are the people of God, who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials which sometimes buffet the community of believers," Sodano said.

Sodano followed up on Wednesday with a front-page interview in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, in which he blamed the "unjust attacks" against the Pope on people who oppose the Church's teaching on family and life - Vatican-speak for opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

Sodano equated the scandal that Benedict is confronting to that facing Pope Pius XII, blamed by Jews for having failed to do enough to stop the Holocaust.

While Jewish leaders immediately questioned that parallel [Oh please! Spare us! Did they, really????], critics of Maciel seized on the irony of Sodano coming to Benedict's defense.

"It must have been extremely frustrating for the Holy Father to sit through that address, while knowing that the speaker himself had intervened to thwart the Vatican's investigation into one of the most intransigent abusers - Marcial Maciel," said Genevieve Kineke, a former member of the Legionaries' lay movement Regnum Christi who edits life-after-rc.com, a discussion forum for people who have left the movement. [Either she did not watch the telecast at all, and the Pope's genuine appreciation, or she thinks the Pope was himself being hypocritical in accepting the remarks at all! And is it not likely that Benedict XVI would have considered Sodano's gesture as the latter's way of making up to him, however late, for having opposed Cardinal Ratzinger's approach to the sex-abuse issue in the past? And that the Pope, as a Christian, accepted this in good faith?]

A message left at Sodano's home Wednesday was not returned.

Maciel founded the Legionaries in 1941 in Mexico City. The order's conservative view, strict loyalty to Vatican teaching and its success in enrolling recruits won the admiration of Pope John Paul II, whom Sodano served as secretary of state for nearly 15 years.

But Maciel spent the last years of his life fending off the accusations by former seminarians that he had sexually abused them - accusations which formed the basis of a book "Vows of Silence" by investigative reporter Jason Berry and the late Gerald Renner.

After years of denying the charges and questioning the motives of the accusers, the Legionaries admitted in a March 25 communique that "though it causes us consternation, we have to say that these acts did take place."

The Legion also admitted that Maciel had fathered a daughter, and that two other brothers had come forward saying they were his children from a relationship with another woman.

Sodano had long been one of Maciel's top supporters in Rome, having befriended the charismatic Mexican while Sodano was the Vatican's nuncio in Chile in the 1970s, Berry has written.

The National Catholic Reporter, a U.S. Catholic newspaper, has reported that Sodano helped shut down a preliminary investigation into the abuse allegations in 1998 being carried out by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now pope.

There's no indication though that he did so to cover up for Maciel.

On Wednesday, Berry published a lengthy article in the National Catholic Reporter suggesting that Sodano and other top Vatican officials received payments from Maciel.

A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini, said he had no comment.


Regardless of his complicity in the Maciel case, Cardinal Sodano is no moron. Surely he was aware that no matter how careful he was in his statements on Sunday and his interview with the OR, the media would get back at him and resurrect the Maciel case to discredit the words he said in favor of Benedict XVI.

But he took that risk and spoke up as he did on Easter Sunday and in the OR interview, in the most unexceptionable manner, and I will always thank him for that... Especially since it was a statement of filial support that one would have expected Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to have expressed in a written statement on behalf of the universal Church, after the March 24-25 double-barrelled attack by the New York Times, perhaps right after Father Brundage's statement made it clear that he himself, Bertone, had acted properly in all ways on the Murphy case.

Cardinal Levada took that initiative, why didn't Bertone? But the Pope's #2 man has been pretty consistent so far about failing to step up to the plate when needed. His first statement about the entire issue was made to newsmen in Chile two days ago, which I have not seen reported by the Anglophone news agencies. As reported by the Italian news agencies, he did not say very much:


In Chile, Cardinal Bertone
speaks up for the Pope...

SANTIAGO, Chile (Translated from ANSA) - During Holy Week, Benedict XVI had "the support of the faithful in St. Peter's Square, which included many young people", said Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in his arrival here today.

Asked by newsmen about the silence of the Pope regarding the sex-abuse issue during Holy Week, he answered: "Let us talk of Chile. Let us talk of the future. The Pope is strong. He is strong for all people."

He also said Benedict XVI was 'the great prophet of the third millennium', pointing to the reception given him by "enthusiastic people, especially the young" at Easter Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square.

... and for himself



SANTIAGO, April 6 (Translated from Apcom) - The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, today rejected forcefully the charge that he covered up the case of the Milwaukee priest Fr. Lawrence Murphy, who was accused of abusing doezens of children in a deaf-mute school in the 1970s.

"It is not true, not true at all," he said. "You should know that. We documented everything. But let us not talk about this now or we will be here all day," Bertone said upon arriving in Chile for an eight-day visit.

"Enough already. Enough with this story," Bertone said to stop the insistence of newsmen who surrounded him on arriving at Chile's international airport.

He is in Chile to bring a message of solidarity from Benedict XVI for the country that was struck by a devastating earthquake on February 27. Latest official reports place the dead at 450, and damage at 30 billion dollars.

During his visit, the cardinal will also meet with the new President of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, then visit the areas struck by the earthquake.


I apologize not having posted these items earlier - I was hoping there would be more, or that OR would report on it. In any case, I do hope the Cardinal will have another chance to make a proper statement to the media while he is in Chile. Answering ambush questions at the airport when you have just flown in after a trip that must have lasted at least 12 hours is not exactly the right occasion for a proper statement. At some point, he will have a news conference about his trip, and we can only hope he starts it with a prepared statement on this subject, and make clear he will not answer questions about it because he came to Chile for a specific mission.


P.S. Tomorrow's issue of L'Osservatore Romano does have a story about Cardinal Bertone in Chile, with some answers he gave at a news conference yesterday in Punta Arenas, saying among other things, that he fully supports everything Cardinal Sodano said on Easter Sunday. He also said he expects Pope Benedict XVI to travel to Latin America evnetually, and that in fact, 'a visit to Chile in 2012 has been discussed"... Will translate the article later.

Yesterday, even as the MSM were glosting over the case of the Norwegian bishop, the regular Vatican announcement for the day also announced the resignation of a Canadian bishop under the same Canon Law provision that the Norwegian bishop did - which does not, of course, mean that the specific cause for the resignation was necessarily sexual abuse. Both reports I've seen so far from the Canadian media do not hint at all that the resignation may have had to do with sexual abuse, which I find very commendable. Here is how his hometown newspaper in St. Catharine's, a city in the Niagara region of Canada, reported it:


Bishop Wingle steps down

April 7, 2010

The head of the St. Catharines diocese of the Roman Catholic Church has unexpectedly stepped down.

Few details about Bishop James Wingle's resignation have been released. According to the Vatican Information Service, the pope accepted Wingle's resignation this morning.

Wingle, who was appointed as the local Bishop in 2002, issued a short letter to the diocese saying he was taking a sabbatical "centered on prayer and personal renewal" and that he no longer than the stamina to meet the demands of bishop.

Wingle, a staunch public defender of Catholic orthodoxy, was a key figure in organizing World Youth Day in 2005 during the visit of the late Pope John Paul II.

A diocese administrator will be appointed in about a week who will assume the duties of the bishop until permanent replacement is appointed by the Vatican.

[The paper then goes on to publish the full text of Fr. Wingle's letter.]


Here's how a Canadian news agency reported the news:

Bishop Wingle steps down
By GRANT LAFLECHE

April 8, 2010


Betty Ghiendoni could barely get the words out when she heard the news.

"I'm shocked. I'm just ... I'm shocked," she said Wednesday afternoon when she learned Bishop James Wingle, the head of the St. Catharines diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, had left his post.

"I really liked him," said Ghiendoni, a member of the Holy Rosary Catholic Women's League. "We need something to hang onto. A pillar. That is what Bishop Wingle was to us. A pillar for the church."

The Vatican announced early Wednesday the Pope had accepted Wingle's resignation. Under Church law, a bishop can leave his post if he is "less able to fulfill his office because of ill health or some other grave cause."

Wingle, who could not be reached for comment, released a short statement to the diocese Wednesday saying he did not have the energy his duties require, though he was not specific about any health issues.

"My decision to offer my resignation was the result of a long and intense process of prayer and reflection," Wingle wrote.

"The duties of the office of a diocesan bishop call for vigorous stamina to meet the challenges of leadership. I am no longer able to maintain the necessary stamina to fulfill properly my duties. I believe that my resignation will serve not only my own spiritual and personal well-being, but the good of the diocese and the Church as well."

Wingle, who was made the Bishop of the diocese in 2002 replacing Bishop John O'Mara, wrote that he was going on a sabbatical of " prayer and personal renewal."

"If my shortcomings and limitations have caused any disappointment, I ask for God's mercy and your understanding."

Wingle is a staunch defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and did not shy way from making public statements about the church's position on everything from sexuality to politics to popular culture.

In 2006, for example, Wingle openly chided politicians who backed legislation permitting homosexual marriage in Canada, warning of "moral chaos and confusion" if the law was not changed.

Father Di Souza, bless him!, has an excellent follow-through in this ongoing chapter of the culture wars - excellent because he recapitulates what has gone before, specifically in the matter of the New York Times defamations. It is always good to remind people that these are all lies and bad faith:


The Pope and the press
Father Raymond J. de Souza

April 8, 2010


Pope Benedict XVI was falsely accused two weeks ago by The New York Times. That same false charge was repeated and amplified in the National Post. The facts are now in, and even the Times has corrected itself by rewriting the story. [DID IT? I have to see that correction and post it! In fairness to the Times.]

Two weeks later, however, and despite its flaws, the story is reverberating around the world. Indeed, without the Times' accusations, the sexual abuse story would not have dominated Holy Week as it did.

On March 25, the Times set off a worldwide firestorm with a front page story that made an incendiary accusation: "Top Vatican officials -- including the future Pope Benedict XVI--did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit."

Falsehood upon falsehood -- four errors in the first paragraph.
- First, the case to defrock Father Lawrence Murphy was approved by the "top Vatican officials," was never stopped by anyone in Rome and was ongoing when Murphy died.
- Second, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, is not shown in the documents to have taken any decisions in this case.
- Third, the real villain, aside from Murphy himself, was the compromised former Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, who had sat on the case for 20 years.
- Fourth, the files were not "newly unearthed"; a general chronology had been released by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee years ago, and the documents were released by the archdiocese itself.

The New York Times was guilty of egregiously reporting -- or worse -- on a story of global implications. ['Or worse' is right. It was deliberately shoddy and obfuscating in order to cast 'guilt' on Joseph Ratzinger.]

While the case was not new -- the priest died in 1998 -- the charge landed on front pages around the world, including the National Post, because the Pope was supposedly involved. Within days we learned that the Times was false on the facts, suspect in the sources and reckless in the reporting.

All of which the paper had to implicitly concede a week later in an extraordinary rewrite by the same author. So what happened? Were the reporter, Laurie Goodstein, and her editors merely careless, genuinely duped or willing collaborators in an orchestrated smear?

The story did not get the extra scrutiny it deserved. The documents on which the story was based did not support the newsworthy charge against the Pope.

After the National Post repeated the charges on our front page on March 26, I read all the documents, posted at the Times web-site. I wrote a point-by-point rebuttal, which was immediately linked to all over the world and played a contributing role in exposing the Times story. (It can be found now at fatherdesouza.ca)

For those who knew this file, the sources used screamed out for greater scrutiny. The first was Jeffrey Anderson, who gave the documents to Goodstein, a longtime reporter on Vatican affairs who covers the religion beat.

Anderson is the most prolific contingency-fee lawyer in suing the Church, from which he has made tens of millions. He has current civil suits pending against the Vatican. It is in his direct financial interest to promote the public perception of complicity by the Pope.

That alone should have prompted Goodstein to examine what the documents showed and to inquire of others whether there were other relevant documents that he did not give her. Instead, her story accepted fully the Anderson spin.

The next obvious step would have been to corroborate what was found in the documents. It was subsequently revealed that Goodstein did not even contact the key judicial official in the Murphy case, Father Thomas Brundage.

Had she done so she would have learned that the defrocking trial was still ongoing until three days before Murphy's death, when it was stopped by Weakland -- undermining the key accusation in her story.

After Brundage corrected the record publicly, Goodstein finally interviewed him, five days after her original story appeared.

The only other published source for the original story was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the disgraced former archbishop of Milwaukee. He resigned in 2002 when it was revealed that he had a homosexual affair and then used $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to buy the man's secrecy.

Weakland detailed his other clandestine homosexual affairs, his mismanagement of sexual abuse cases and his longtime hostility to Pope Benedict in his 2009 autobiography. Did Goodstein know how discredited Weakland was? She knew, as she wrote a flattering story about the autobiography last year.

So when she approached Weakland for comment on the story, some basic questions might have been in order. She did not ask them.
- First, why did Weakland, who had jurisdiction over the case since 1977, wait nearly 20 years before moving against him?
- Second, during the very period the Murphy case was underway, Weakland was negotiating the terms of his former lover's blackmail payoff. Would that not make his comments about transparency and justice somewhat suspect?
- Third, was there any independent corroboration to support Weakland's own letters? It is possible that bad sources can still provide good information. But did news editors the world over even know enough about the principals in this story to demand extra scrutiny?

As others began to ask those obvious questions, and it became apparent that Goodstein had not asked any of them, she published an extraordinary follow-up story on April 1. This one appeared on page 6, not the front. Gone was the suggestive headline. This one had the banal title: "Events in the Case of an Accused Priest."

All of the accusations against the future Pope are dropped, the new information from her tardy interview with Brundage is included, Weakland's comments disappear and Jeffrey Anderson is gone altogether.

The April 1 story is for all intents and purposes a correction of the March 25 story. Had it come first, it would not have made the front page on March 25; it likely would not have made the paper at all. The firestorm of the past two weeks would not have occurred.

[OK, so apparently, the Times and Goodstein did try to 'make up' for their big mistake, and some credit must go to them for that... But they rightly counted that no one would report the correction! As I do not have the time to search individual sites one by one, I have to depend for English stuff on leads that I get from the Yahoo and Daylife headline lists which they update every time there is something new. I shall go back now and check the stories they listed on April 1, but I do not recall ever having seen the Times correction listed, much less picked up by the major news agencies. So for all intents and purposes, as far as the world at large knows, the story stands as it was written on March 25...]

Remember what the major items on the sexual abuse file were the day before Goodstein's story appeared.
- On March 20, Pope Benedict had published a blunt letter to Catholics in Ireland, apologizing to victims, lambasting the priest abusers and excoriating the failure of bishops to exercise proper oversight.
- On March 23, the annual independent audit of American dioceses revealed that in 2009, there were six credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors, in a church of 68 million people -- a sign of astonishing progress in stamping out this evil. That was the news - before The New York Times decided to make its own.


P.S.
I finally found the Goodstein article, which I could not find at all using the search word 'Benedict XVI'. I only found it when I used the article title provided by Fr. Di Souza as my search term - and it comes under the heading of 'SEX CRIMES' - along with most of their reporting about sex abuses by priests and the current 'scandals'!

If that is not proof enough of bad faith, the article itself is! I'm sorry, Father DiSouza, but you are being too kind if you call this a correction. It virtually repeats everything that appeared in the earlier article, except for some mild insubstantial changes made, I suspect, o nly to make it appear corrections were being made.

Even worse, is what Goodstein chooses to use of Father Brundage's statement - chiefly to get him to admit he was wrong to have said the Times had quoted him wrongly, when they had not used his name at all previously.

NO WONDER EVEN THE WIRE SERVICES IGNORED IT COMPLETELY! THERE'S NO 'THERE' THERE... AND I TAKE BACK WHAT I SAID ABOUT GIVING THE 'TIMES' SOME CREDIT FOR MAKING A 'CORRECTION'!

---

Events in the Case of an Accused Priest
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: March 31, 2010

The case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys at a school in Wisconsin, stands out among the cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests because of the number and vulnerability of the victims, and the availability of documents revealing how Church officials handled the matter.

Father Murphy died in 1998, still a priest, despite documents showing that a priest had informed Church officials as early as the mid-1950s that deaf children had complained that Father Murphy was molesting them. The police and prosecutors in Wisconsin were also informed by the victims and their advocates, but failed to act.

The documents show that during the mid-1990s, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, facing the threat of lawsuits and hearing wrenching testimony from deaf adults who said they had been abused by Father Murphy, concluded that Father Murphy should be removed from the priesthood.

Archbishop Weakland appealed on July 17, 1996, to the Vatican office of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Ratzinger then headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had oversight of the case because Father Murphy was suspected of using the confessional to commit his crimes — a crime that is considered particularly serious under the church’s canon law because confession is a sacrament.

The documents show that Archbishop Weakland sent two letters to Cardinal Ratzinger, and one to the Apostolic Signatura, the church’s highest court, asking for guidance on whether to conduct a canonical trial of Father Murphy.

After eight months, on March 24, 1997, Archbishop Weakland received a response from Cardinal Ratzinger’s second-in-command in the doctrinal office, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state. Archbishop Bertone instructed the Milwaukee archdiocese to proceed with a canonical trial of Father Murphy, which could result in defrocking the priest.

On Jan. 12, 1998, Father Murphy sent a letter from his home in Boulder Junction, Wis., to Cardinal Ratzinger. He asked for a cessation of the trial because he was 72, had had a stroke and had repented, and because the case was beyond the statute of limitations.

On April 6, 1998, Archbishop Bertone wrote to Bishop Raphael M. Fliss of the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin, where Father Murphy was living, saying that the statute of limitations was waived in this case. But Archbishop Bertone suggested that given Father Murphy’s letter asking for leniency, Bishop Fliss should employ “pastoral measures” instead of a trial. [This has since been shown to be based on a computer translation of Bertone's letter who did not suggest stopping the trial.]

Under Church law, those measures can include prayer, repentance and restrictions on what kinds of ministry and sacraments the priest may perform.

Bishop Fliss wrote back to Archbishop Bertone on May 13, 1998, saying, “It is in my judgment that all reasonable pastoral methods have been exhausted” and that a trial against Father Murphy was necessary.

On May 30, 1998, while Archbishop Weakland, Bishop Fliss and the auxiliary bishop of Milwaukee were in Rome for a regular visit to the Vatican, they met with Congregation officials, including Archbishop Bertone.

A log kept on the Murphy case and signed “RJS” — the initials for the auxiliary bishop, Richard J. Sklba — briefly summarized the Vatican meeting on May 30, 1998: “It became clear that the Congregation was not encouraging us to proceed with any formal dismissal” of Father Murphy. The reasons were that for 24 years he had shown “apparent good conduct,” and that with so much time passed between the crimes and the trial, it would be difficult to try him.

The minutes of the meeting said that a trial would be difficult because of the problem of getting proof without increasing the scandal. The minutes said Archbishop Weakland should limit Father Murphy’s ministerial duties instead. Archbishop Weakland, the minutes said, “reaffirmed the difficulty he will have explaining this to the community of the deaf.”

The translated minutes were sent to Bishop Fliss on Aug. 15 by the Rev. Thomas T. Brundage, then the judicial vicar in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the official responsible for presiding over the trial of Father Murphy.

A letter on Aug. 19, 1998, from Archbishop Weakland said he instructed Father Brundage to halt the trial. Father Murphy died on Aug. 21, 1998.

Father Brundage, who is now working in the Archdiocese of Anchorage, posted an essay this week saying he was never informed that the trial of Father Murphy had been halted.

He also said that he had been misquoted in both The New York Times and The Associated Press. In an interview on Wednesday, Father Brundage acknowledged that he had never been quoted in any Times articles about the Murphy case — and the paper did not misquote him. He said he was misquoted in an Associated Press article that was posted temporarily on the Times Web site, and he mistakenly attributed that to The Times.

He said the documents show that the Vatican had encouraged the Milwaukee Archdiocese to halt the trial, but they did not use strong language and actually order a halt. He said that he never saw the letter from Archbishop Weakland abating the trial until it appeared on the Times Web site last week.

“The only possible explanation I can come up with is that Archbishop Weakland withheld the letter, knowing the reaction I would have had,” Father Brundage said.

Father Brundage said he would have been appalled because he was absolutely convinced that Father Murphy should be put on trial, because, “This was a horrendous case.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 2, 2010
An article on Thursday that detailed the chronology of the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who was accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys at a school in Wisconsin over many years, misstated the date of his death in 1998. It was Aug. 21, not. Sept. 2.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 1, 2010, on page A6 of the New York edition.

---

This article discusses the point I have made here a couple of times about the administrative structure of the Catholic Church, which carries out its work around the globe mainly through the bishops who head autonomous local churches. I welcome it for articulating the issue in legal terms.

National Public Radio is a publicly funded institution in the United States. It is notorious for its liberal views. But it presents this issue fairly well.


Courts weigh whether
Vatican controls bishops
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

April 6, 2010


At the heart of two lawsuits that are working their way through the federal courts lies one question: Does the Vatican control its Catholic bishops?

The answer could determine whether the Vatican can be sued in U.S. courts and be forced to open up its secret archives.

The Vatican's relationship with its bishops surfaced again this week in the case of the Rev. Joseph Jeyapaul, an Indian priest who served in northern Minnesota in 2004 and 2005. After the priest returned to India, two teenage girls from Minnesota accused him of molesting them. Now the local prosecutor wants him back in the U.S. to face charges.

According to documents and interviews, the Vatican wrote Jeyapaul's bishop in India and asked that "Father Jeyapaul's priestly life be monitored so that he does not constitute a risk to minors and does not create a scandal."

Mike Finnegan, the attorney for one of the young women, says Jeyapaul is now overseeing 40 schools in the diocese. He says the Vatican should have removed him from ministry.

"Pope Benedict has absolute power and control over that bishop in India," Finnegan says. "And if Pope Benedict wanted something done and told this bishop to do it, the bishop would absolutely have to do it."

But Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena says the Church cooperated with U.S. authorities, supplying them with Jeyapaul's address so that they could try to extradite him. He adds that people do not realize how administratively decentralized the Catholic Church is.

"The Pope is not a five-star general ordering troops around," Lena says. "He is not Louis XIV telling his minions what to do. The 'military command center' or 'absolute authority' models of the church in which Rome dictates orders by royal fiat is just wrong."

Lena says it is the bishop who controls his diocese and is responsible to operate it within the framework of canon law.

That dispute — is a bishop an employee of the Vatican or not? — is the central issue raised by two lawsuits in U.S. federal court. One case involves the Rev. Andrew Ronan, a Servites order priest who was moved from Ireland to Chicago to Portland, Ore., and who admitted abusing minors in each place. Ronan has died, but an alleged victim sued not only the order but also the Vatican.

"The Ronan case, because it involves the international movement of the priest and a documentary trail that goes from the priest through the superiors to Rome, looked like our best shot to get to the Vatican," says Jeffrey Anderson, who represents the plaintiff.

That will be no easy task, as the Vatican is considered a sovereign state, and U.S. courts are reluctant to claim jurisdiction over foreign countries.

To pierce the sovereign immunity, Anderson must show that the priest abused the victim in his capacity as an employee of the Vatican. [Unless they are employed in the Roman Curia, getting paid direcrtly by the Vatican, priests are not Vatican employees in any sense of the word. If he is a diocesan priest, he is an employee of the diocese which pays his salary and living expenses. If he belongs to a religious order, he is answerable only to the superior of his order.]

Under Oregon's law — which is far more liberal than that of other states — the Vatican might be held liable for the priest's actions. [How? Why? All the precedents in US case law that have given damages to sex abuse victims have penalized the diocese, because it is the diocese that is the priest's employer.]

Another case in Kentucky is a little broader: It alleges that the bishops were acting as employees of the Church when they moved around suspected priests. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer and an adviser to plaintiffs' in both cases, believes the bishops are akin to senior managers of the Vatican.

"The Vatican appoints bishops. The Vatican fires bishops. It transfers bishops," Doyle says. "The Vatican controls what they do on a day-to-day basis through the code of canon law. Everything a bishop does is determined or interpreted by the Vatican."

Not so, says Nicholas Cafardi, a canon lawyer at Duquesne University. He says the Pope doesn't pay the bishop's salary or get involved in the minutia of running a diocese.

"There's no doubt that the Pope has a certain level of jurisdiction over dioceses in the world," he says. "But jurisdiction does not translate into control, and for them to be employees, you have to show some level of control."

Cafardi says these lawsuits do not merely attack longstanding law on suing foreign states, they also ask the U.S. courts to transform the Catholic Church.

"If these cases succeed, they will have succeeded in restructuring the Catholic Church in a way that the Church has not structured itself," he says. "And I would see that as a very serious threat to freedom of religion."

Still, federal appellate courts in the 6th and 9th Circuits have said the cases may proceed. And recently, the U.S. Supreme Court asked the departments of Justice and State for their views. Taking these as a green light, attorneys for the plaintiffs are filing requests for thousands of documents in the Vatican archives, and even demanding to take a deposition from the Pope.

"I want to unearth every evidentiary trail that leads from every offending priest directly to the Vatican and ultimately take the depositions of every official, all the way to Rome and to the pope himself," says plaintiff's attorney Anderson. [Dream on, Anderson! - who already has visions of getting the Pieta or even the entire Sistine Chapel as his booty!]

But Joseph Dellapenna, an expert on sovereign immunity law at Villanova University, says there's little chance that lawyers will be able to do discovery on the Pope himself.

He says a court might grant the lawyers access to lesser Vatican officials. But he says getting a court order doesn't mean they will get the goods.

"If the documents are not in the United States," he says, "if they're in the Vatican, if the persons you want to depose are in the Vatican, chances are you're not going to be able to do it, even if an American court rules that they are not immune."

He says that sovereign countries often refuse to comply — especially when they feel the lawsuit is a political attack.


NB: Five of the nine justices of the US Supreme Court today are CATHOLIC (Chief Justice Roberts, and Associates Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor) - three of them in their 50s, and the two older ones far from retiring. Even if one of them, newly appointed Sotomayor, is a liberal, I doubt that she would rule against common sense, established jurisprudence and historical fact if push comes to shove.

I'm falling more and more behind with translating beautiful statements of support for the Pope by various bishops around the world. I will start with this one that does not need translating - and I will try to work on the rest, even if all I can do is to translate the essential part of their statements.


In defense of the Pope
by Mons. James Conley
Auxiliary Bishop of Denver (Colorado)

April 8, 2010


Over these past few weeks a flurry of stories have appeared in the media regarding clergy sexual abuse and its mishandling by Catholic bishops and even the Pope himself. Much of this information is dated.

The fact that these stories were triggered in part by an attorney with a long and lucrative financial history of litigating the Catholic community and were pressed with such enthusiasm by editors during Holy Week — and in particular on Good Friday — could hardly have been a coincidence.

Sexual abuse of children cries to heaven for justice. It violates everything that is good and holy. It mocks everything Christ said in the gospels. Jesus compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the innocence of a little child. And for a Catholic priest to commit a crime and a sin like this is profoundly evil.

But sexual abuse is not uniquely or even predominantly a Catholic problem. It is a sickness widespread in our culture and also a global problem. Most studies indicate that in the United States as much as 60 percent of all sexual abuse of minors takes place within families.

It's certainly true that some Catholic priests perpetrated this evil on the innocent in years past. And too many Catholic bishops ignored or failed to grasp the gravity of this crime in addressing the problem. These men are gravely accountable to God for their actions.

But no other community or institution has examined itself on this painful issue as rigorously as the Catholic Church. No other group has put into place zero tolerance policies for sexual abuse and created safe environment programs like the Catholic Church in America, to the point where the Church is one of the most secure environments anywhere for children and young people.

And no person has done more to rid the Church of the evil of sexual abuse than the current successor of St. Peter, Benedict XVI. As archbishop of Munich thirty years ago, then as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now as the Vicar of Christ, Pope Benedict has always been dedicated to his responsibilities of purifying the Church in this area.

I served as an official in the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops for ten years. In that capacity, I worked alongside then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who was a member of our Congregation. During my last year in Rome I served under the same good man after his election as pope. I learned from direct, first-hand experience that Benedict XVI is truly a man of God, a gift to the Church and a shepherd after the heart of the Good Shepherd.

Benedict XVI named me a bishop in April 2008. As a brother bishop to the bishop of Rome, it pains my heart and should wound the heart of all Catholics, to see the vindictive way he has been treated in the media. The editorial cartoons, the opinion pieces, the vicious attacks on his person and reputation, the disinformation and twisting of facts — all these abuses against responsible press freedom have been repugnant.

No other world religious leader, Jewish, Muslim or other, would be treated in this way. Contempt for the Catholic Church — and don't be fooled; the contempt is directed not just at Church leaders, but at ordinary believers as well — no matter how vulgar or bitter, is the last acceptable prejudice.

Why? Because the Catholic Church is one of the few remaining voices that speaks effectively against the moral confusion of our day. The Catholic faith does not and will not bless the damaging moral path some people now seem to prefer.

Let me close with the words of Benedict from his Holy Thursday Chrism Mass in Rome:

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I am always struck by the passage in the Acts of the Apostles which recounts that after the Apostles had been whipped by order of the Sanhedrin, they "rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name of Jesus" (Acts 5:41).

Anyone who loves is ready to suffer for the beloved and for the sake of his love, and in this way he experiences a deeper joy. The joy of the martyrs was stronger than the torments inflicted on them.

---

Discipleship involves suffering. But suffering does accomplish a powerfully good thing: It clarifies who is willing to suffer for Christ's Church and her mission, and who is not.


Cardinal Sepe says
'The Pope is paying the price
for the courage of truth'

Cardinal Cresencio Sepe, Archbishop of Naples has published a statement on the diocesan webstie, translated here.

---

The 'good news' par excellence in the whole history of the world is the Gospel that has been "announced and transmitted through the centuries, from generation to generation".

These words by the Holy Father at the General Audience on Wednesday - 'still flooded with the luminous joy of Easter' - take us back to a firm point of faith and to the necessity that tis 'good news' must always be kept alive by 'enthusiastic and courageous' witnesses.

Nothing is more essential in the life of the Church. And no news, yesterday or today, could possibly be worth as much. Nothing else, most of all, links us, yesterday as well as today, more firmly to reality, and to that 'here and now' which makes us enfranchised citizens of our time.

We know very well that under the spotlight, certainly powerful but too often misleading, of today's news, the portrayal of the Church these days has almost hidden its true face. More so in the days between the Passion and the determinative event of Redemtpion, when mankind once more recalls the 'truth that transforms'.

Nothing seems to be as it was, but precisely by virtue of that truth that was incarnated and became a sign of contradiction in the world, we must continue to jeep alive and to make more fruitful that message of love that caused him to be nailed by hatred to the Cross.

That message, that truth, has not ceased to be actual - it is the reason the Church lives and works in the world - as a sacrament of salvation, but also a a social body fully situated in the concrete reality within which man lives and can productively invest his abilities into serving the common good.

By opening wide the doors to salvation, the Cross nonetheless has not completely smoothed over the difficulties of the journey that mankind faces, but gives him the the free choice between good and evil. The nails of hatred have remained with us, ready to be used anew.

In the same way, nothing is as it was, from sacrifice to sacrifice, from persecution to persecution. And yet the wood of the Cross continues to be ever green.

Basically, this is really the other face of the 'good news' par excellence, the Gospel that, in order to be propagated and made known, requires, today as yesterday, 'enthusiastic and courageous witnesses'.

From that moment, five years ago, when he introduced himself to the world as 'a humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord', the universal Church found in Pope Benedict its most enthiusastic and courageous witness - the theologian who never tires in singing of 'Christian joy', the man of God who has been perennially acnhored to 'the courage of truth'.

The entire christian experience is, in esence, a story of uniterrupted witness to Christ, starting from the Apostles who, as St. Mark reminds us, "went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs" (Mk 16,20).

Citing that passage from Mark, Pope Benedict reiterated that

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The experience of the Apostles and even ours is that of every disciple who becomes an 'annunciator'. Even we, in fact, are sure that the Lord, today as yesterday, works together with his witnesses.

This is a fact that we can recognize every time we see the seeds of true and lasting peace sprout, wherever the commitment and the example of Christians and men of good will are inspired by respect for justice, patient dialog, confident esteem of others, disinterest, personal and communitarian sacrifice."

---

But, he adds: "Unfortunately, we also see in the world so much suffering, violence and incomprehension".

Incomprehension is lpart of the constitutive history of the
Church. Today, it touches the Church of Benedict XVI, and in its most doggedly persistent and ungenerous forms, the Pope himself.

The origin of the scandal is well known, and it is certainly odious as the sin - sexual abuse of minors - that has disfigured the consecrated persons who made a mockery of their vocation.

To feed this scandal, the media daily cite figures and statistics that show the scourge is as vast as the sad geography of the places stained by these horrors. [COLORE]#1216FF[COLORE][I object to the term 'vast' - it feeds the wrong impression that the media already give, in never citing other figures to put the numbers involving priest offenses in perspective; and even in the figures they cite, they only mention the 'more than 300' cases in Germany, none about Austria, Holland or Switzereland, where the figures have not reached dozens yet.]

But to keep count of such aberrations is almost reductive, because even one case is too much and should arouse alarm, indignation and condemnation.

The Pope's letter to the Irish Church and faithful was both moving and inflexible. In his condemnation of this most serious scourge, Pope Benedict has revealed not just the style but also the essence itself of a Magisterium that looks at man from God's perspective.

His Pontificate is increasingly one of raising the bar, looking upward. Those who think that life is just an immense plain, without toughs or peaks, also lose the ability to look ahead.

Benedict XVI is a Pope with a profundity that has perhaps been lost by contemporary man, even robbed from him, in the purely horizontal dimension of the 'fluid society' of our day.

The 'courage of truth' can hardly be found in such an environment. And perhaps one is not far wrong to point out to this element to explain attacks that are as senseless as they are ungenerous and unmotivated, attack strategies that are not occasional and are well-targeted.

The vehemence and inconsistency of these accusations are disconcerting. Especially in their target: To question the limpid conduct of Papa Ratzinger is in itself a very serious matter.

But his serenity continues to be a luminous example for everyone. Pope Benedict is the first to know that the 'courage of truth' demands, in times like these, a testimony that cannot be without a price.

He is paying that price - with great generosity - for all of us. And for his Church. To be with him, at this time, means to be truly united and close to the Church of Christ, as it journeys, without pause and without fear, into its third millennium.


+Cresencio Cardinal Sepe
Archbishop of Naples

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I welcome any topic these days that's not about 'the scandal' or 'crisis'... Father Scalese, a very congenial blogger, actually has a more current entry about the 'crisis' which presents his usual blend of common sense and insight, but I felt I should translate this first. The good father is a Barnabite (formally, the Clerics Regular of St. Paul, founded in 1530 as one of the first Counter-REformation orders) who returned last January to italy after give years as a missionary in the Philippines.


The key to reading
Benedict XVI's Ponitificate:
The hermeneutic of continuity
by Fr. Giovanni Scalese, CRSP
Translated from

April 6, 2010

Father Scalese reproduces his first column for ECO, the journal of the Barnabites, in its 1/2010 issue. The column is called 'Osservatorio ecclesiale' - and he interprets it to mean he is to comment on what is happening in the Church. He continues...

Is there a need for this? I think so, because sometimes, even if we are actively participating in the life of the Church, we do not really take note of what is happening around us, and we continue reasoning and judging reality with schemes which may have been valid twenty years ago but are no longer appropriate for understanding the present.

I remember about 30 years ago, at the start of John Paul II's Pontificate - I was a great admirer of Paul Vi, and one day I expressed my perplexity about the orientation of the new Pope.

Mons. Andrea Erba, who was a simple priest then, told me, "Do not forget that the Church always moves ahead". At the time, the answer did not impress me, but now, I must say he was completely right. The Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, continues along its way - it would be myopic not to see the evolution taking place in her, just as in society and any other reality.

I believe something similar is happening today. It will soon be five years since Benedict XVI was elected Pope, but one would think not everyone is aware of it even now. There are many who continue to 'think' of the Church as if Karol Wojtyla were still Pope, and persist in making unpleasant comparisons between the two Popes and to judge the present Pontiff by his predecessor.

They forget one simple truth: John Paul II is dead, and Benedict XVI leads the Church today. One can agree or not with the decisions of the reigning Pope, but one cannot ignore the signs that his interventions are already leaving on the Church.

If it is true that everyone, including the Pope, is a child of his time, it is similarly true that everyone (and for more reason, the Pope) makes his contribution to the time in which he lives and works.

This column does not intend to make value judgments, positive or negative. As an observatory, it should limit itself to observing reality. Each one can then proceed to make his own judgment - but in order to do this, we must be conscious of what is taking place around us.

With this premise, we can ask ourselves what are the basic orientations of this Pontificate. This is the question we will seek to answer this year in this column. Since this is the first issue of ECO for 2010, the question is whether there is a key, a unifying criterion, that can allow us to 'read' the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

It would not have been by chance (for a believer, nothing can be considered chance, but everything fits into a precise divine plan) that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope in 2005, on the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of Vatican-II.

Indeed, one of the first issues confronted by the new Pope was the interpretation that must be given to Vatican II. He did that in his memorable address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005 (eight months after his election).

On that occasion, Benedict XVI posed this question: "Why has the reception of Vatican II, largely by the Church itself, been such a difficult process?"

To which he gave this answer:

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It all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or - as we would say today - on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application.

The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit.

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology.

On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject - Church - which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.

---

And he proceeded illustrating the opposing ‘interpretations’ and the various outcomes of their respective applications. We cannot here follow Papa Ratzinger’s argumentation. Anyone can read it in its entirety on the Vatican web site.
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia...

For now, we shall content ourselves with highlighting a few points:

1. The address on December 22, 2005, although it was formally an address during the traditional presentation of Christmas wishes, has a value that we might call ‘programmatic’, being the first great discourse of his Pontificate. [I would not say that. It was perhaps the first on a specific issue, but the homily at the first Mass he celebrated as Pope on April 20, 2005, and at his formal installation on April 25, were just as great and memorable as general statements of his program.]

2. The problem of the correct interpretation of Vatican II, 40 years after it ended, takes on a fundamental importance at this critical moment in the life of the Church. It is no longer possible to repeat the same stereotypes. One must take a critical attitude – not to place the Council itself in question – but to ask ourselves:
- What did the Council really say?
- Has that message been correctly understood?
- Have the teachings of the Council been put into practice, and with what results?

3. Benedict XVI, fully exercising his magisterial functions, as an authentic interpreter of Vatican-II, shows us the right interpretative key: the so-called ‘hermeneutic of reform’, explained by him as “renewal in continuity of the one subject – the Church”.

From That time on, the texts of Vatican-II could no longer be interpreted in the light of a phantasmal ‘spirit of Vatican II’ (about which no one knows what its exact features are, nor who are supposed to be the custodians), but only in the light of the Church’s uninterrupted Tradition.

Not because there is no possible development within that Tradition, but because renewal must be carried out in the continuity of the one Church, which remains the same Church, before and after the Council.

4. Personally, I find in this ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ the key to reading not just Vatican II, but the Pontificate of Benedict XVI itself. His decisions, his actions, can be understood only in this light.

Many portray Papa Ratzinger as a traditionalist Pope, nostalgic, and an advocate of ‘restoration’ – and that is because they continue to aaply to him those worn-out ideological schemes that summarily divide persons into progressives and conservatives. But in doing so, they risk understanding nothing of Benedict XVI’s ‘policies’.

But if, instead, we try to read his many interventions in the light of the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, then everything he does makes sense.

Papa Ratzinger does not intend to take a step back into the past – all he wants is that the Church renews herself but remains herself.

A remarkable piece in the Jerusalem Post by the Jewish former Mayor of New York! Unlike most of his fellow liberals, his ideology has not obliterated his common sense. Even more remarkable is that he quotes Jesus to make his point.


ENOUGH ALREADY!
'He that is without sin,
let him cast the next stone'

April 8, 2001


I believe the continuing attacks by the media on the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI have become manifestations of anti-Catholicism. The procession of articles on the same events are, in my opinion, no longer intended to inform, but simply to castigate.

The sexual molestation of children, principally boys, is horrendous. This is agreed to by everyone, Catholics, the Church itself, as well as non-Catholics and the media.

The Pope has on a number of occasions on behalf of the Church admitted fault and asked for forgiveness. For example, The New York Times reported on April 18, 2008, that the Pope "came face to face with a scandal that has left lasting wounds on the American Church Thursday, holding a surprise meeting with several victims of sexual abuse by priests in the Boston area.... 'No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse,' the Pope said in his homily. 'It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention.'"

On March 20, 2010, the Times reported that in his eight page pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, the pope wrote, "You have suffered grievously, and I am truly sorry ... Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated."

The Pope also "criticized Ireland's bishops for 'grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership.'"

The primary explanation for the abuse that happened - not to excuse the retention of priests in positions that enabled them to continue to harm children - was the belief that the priests could be cured by psychotherapy, a theory now long discarded by the medical profession.

Regrettably, it is also likely that years ago the abuse of children was not taken as seriously as today. Thank God we've progressed on that issue.

Many of those in the media who are pounding on the Church and the Pope today clearly do it with delight, and some with malice.

The reason, I believe, for the constant assaults is that there are many in the media, and some Catholics as well as many in the public, who object to and are incensed by positions the Church holds, including opposition to all abortions, opposition to gay sex and same-sex marriage, retention of celibacy rules for priests, exclusion of women from the clergy, opposition to birth control measures involving condoms and prescription drugs and opposition to civil divorce.

My good friend, [the late] John Cardinal O'Connor, once said, "The Church is not a salad bar, from which to pick and choose what pleases you."

The Church has the right to demand fulfillment of all of its religious obligations by its parishioners, and indeed a right to espouse its beliefs generally.

I disagree with the Church on all of these positions. Nevertheless, it has a right to hold these views in accordance with its religious beliefs.

I disagree with many tenets of Orthodox Judaism - the religion of my birth - and have chosen to follow the tenets of Conservative Judaism, while I attend an Orthodox synagogue. Orthodox Jews, like the Roman Catholic Church, can demand absolute obedience to religious rules. Those declining to adhere are free to leave.

I believe the Roman Catholic Church is a force for good in the world, not evil. Moreover, the existence of one billion, 130 million Catholics worldwide is important to the peace and prosperity of the planet.

Of course, the media should report to the public any new facts bearing upon the issue of child molestation, but its objectivity and credibility are damaged when the New York Times declines to publish an op-ed offered by New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan on the issue of anti-Catholicism and offers instead to publish a letter to the editor, which is much shorter and less prominent than an op-ed.

I am appalled that, according to the Times of April 6, 2010, "Last week, the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica wrote, without attribution that 'certain Catholic circles' believed the criticism of the Church stemmed from 'a New York Jewish lobby.'"

The Pope should know that some of his fellow priests can be thoughtless or worse in their efforts to help him. If the "certain Catholic circles" were referring to the Times, the Pope should know that the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., is Episcopalian, having taken the religion of his mother, and its executive editor, Bill Keller, is also a Christian.

Enough is enough. Yes, terrible acts were committed by members of the Catholic clergy. The Church has paid billions to victims in the US and will pay millions, perhaps billions, more to other such victims around the world. It is trying desperately to atone for its past by its admissions and changes in procedures for dealing with pedophile priests.

I will close with a paraphrase of the words of Jesus as set forth in John 8,7: He [or she] that is without sin among you, let him [or her] cast the next stone.


Another sane liberal American has his eyes opened by the actions that have now come to light about how Cardinal Ratzinger pursued the case of Father Marcial Maciel even before the CDF had the full power to do so. True/Slant describes itself as "an original content news network tailored to both the “entrepreneurial journalist” and marketers who want a more effective way to engage with digital audiences". Its foundrs have solid credentials and experience with America's largest media outlets:


Pope Benedict XVI and the Legion of Christ:
Giving the Pope a fair shake
By E.D. KAIN

April 9, 2010

There is a twin-narrative emerging amidst the many revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up within the Catholic Church.

On the one hand we are gaining an ever clearer picture of just how widespread both the abuse was and how deep-rooted the cover-up went, both on the parts of bishops, but also on the part of the Vatican itself, and especially amongst some members of the hierarchy within the Vatican. [The now-entrenched myth that is myth because the abuse is factually far less widespread among priests than it is among lay teachers in secular schools, to take just one sector; and the cover-up was less deep-rooted than it was shallow expediency on the part of the bishops. And a great exaggeration if referred to the Roman Curia where only the Congregations for Bishops and for Religious Life have any nominal supervision of diocesan bishops and superiors of religious orders, respectively, and where, until 2001, the canonical tribunals of the Roman Rota were exclusively in charge of adjudicating cases that were raised to them by the dioceses - but only if it was raised to their level. However, such stereotypes live on because secular writers pick up and perpetrate factoids from earlier biased stories without bothering to check them out.]

On the other hand, we are beginning to understand the role played by Cardinal Ratzinger – the man who would be Pope Benedict XVI, and the man at the very epicenter of efforts to reform the Church and rid it of both the pedophiles and those who would protect and profit from them.

Contrary to many reactionary opinion pieces linking Benedict to the sexual scandals themselves, articles such as this excellent investigative report
ncronline.org/news/accountability/money-paved-way-maciels-influence...
by Jason Berry of the National Catholic Reporter, suggest that far from being a part of the cover-up of the terrifying sexual abuse scandal surrounding Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, Benedict (both as pope and as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) not only refused the Legion’s money, but also acted against the wishes of his predecessor John Paul II and his advisors and struck out on his own to begin an investigation into the Legion and specifically into Maciel himself.

Indeed, just one week after John Paul II had entrusted the Legion with the administration of Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Center (and after many other instances wherein the former Pontiff heaped praise on Maciel and his organization) then Cardinal Ratzinger authorized his own investigation into Maciel. Shortly after Ratzinger became Pope he banished Maciel outright, and stepped up the Vatican’s efforts to investigate the Legion.

In 2001, Ratzinger – after years of being hamstrung in his efforts to investigate reports of sexual abuse in the Church – pressured Pope John Paul II to consolidate authority to investigate all reports of sexual abuse within in the Church in Ratzinger’s office – the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith or CDF. According to Berry,

---

The Vatican office with the greatest potential to derail Maciel’s career before 2001 — the year that Ratzinger persuaded John Paul to consolidate authority of abuse investigations in his office – was the Congregation for Religious, which oversaw religious orders such as the Dominicans, Franciscans and Legionaries, among many others.

---

Over the years Maciel was able to buy off the support of the various heads of the Congregation for the Religious, as well as many of John aul II’s confidantes, and in particular Msgr. Dziwisz, John Paul’s secretary and ‘closest confidante’ who Maciel used to gain access to the Pope and also to funnel a great deal of money to the movers and shakers within the Vatican. Not all Vatican insiders accepted Maciel’s money, however:

---

One cardinal who rebuffed a Legion financial gift was Joseph Ratzinger.

In 1997 he gave a lecture on theology to Legionaries. When a Legionary handed him an envelope, saying it was for his charitable use, Ratzinger refused. “He was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said.

---

The narrative is still emerging, as I noted above, but here is how it is unfolding:

As sexual abuse cases were coming to light in greater frequency in the 1990’s, then Cardinal Ratzinger had very little oversight of the abuse scandals.

His office was in charge of other crimes – particularly crimes carried out in the confessional, which is why his office was contacted in regards to the American pedophile priest Fr. Murphy who molested deaf boys for years and whose crimes were covered up by three subsequent arch-bishops before being brought to light by the media.

Murphy was purported to have carried out his acts in the confessional and this was the sole reason his case was brought to Ratzinger after over three decades of cover-up in the Milwaukee diocese where he was stationed.

In newly translated documents, Ratzinger’s deputy and Secretary of the CDF, Cardinal Bertone, expresses dismay at the number of years it has taken for the Milwaukee bishops to come forward with the information and at the difficulty in pursuing action against Murphy after so much time has passed and so much evidence has been lost.
For more on this, see Jimmy Akin
www.ncregister.com/blog/smoking_gun_memo_in_murphy_paedophil...

In any case, Ratzinger had very little control over the vast majority of sexual abuse cases because he was not in charge of overseeing their investigations. So he pressured John Paul II to change this and to consolidate control in the CDF which Ratzinger headed.

This happened in 2001, and from that time Ratzinger began the process of reforming how the Church handled such cases, and began to circumvent the ‘old guard’ of Vatican insiders who wanted to keep the status quo of cover-ups and hush money in place – such as Cardinal Sodano, Vatican Secretary of State, a man heavily influenced by Maciel’s money, and Dziwisz, confidante to John Paul II.

It is a complicated story, no doubt, and there is a great deal more to tell and a great deal more we will end up hearing on the matter, but one thing is increasingly certain: Ratzinger became Pope knowing full well that his papacy would be devoted to ridding the Church of both sexual abuse and the cover-ups which allow them to continue.

He is surrounded by those who were complicit in these crimes, who are seeking even now to undermine his efforts. This includes members of the Legion of Christ, but also those with ties to the Legion and with ties specifically to Fr. Marcial Maciel.

One has to wonder, after all, at Cardinal Sodano’s recent defense of Benedict, and whether there isn’t a little poison in his words when he likens Benedict’s struggles to that of the controversial Pope Pius XII and his alleged inaction during the Holocaust.

[I've said enough about my own views about Cardinal Sodano's Easter Sunday remarks.. Those who describe it as a eulogy base it on the initial wire-service reports, but anyone who bothers to read it - very easy to translate from the italian - will see it was not a eulogy at all but a tribute of filial support and affection to the present father of the Church in behalf of all his children, the Catholic faithful, starting with the cardinals. Even when Sodano calls the Pope 'the unfailing Rock of the church', he was merely repeating Jesus's words when he made Peter his caretaker on earth... In this context, I suggested that Pope Benedict may have considered Sodano's gesture and words as his way of making amends for any mistakes he may have done in the past with respect to the sexual abuse issue.]

Contra Andrew Sullivan who writes:

---

Benedict XVI knew all of this. To his credit, he was clearly troubled by it, and never accepted its compromising money. But given the authority to pursue Maciel in 2001, Ratzinger held off for four years until Maciel’s protector, John Paul II, was incapacitated and near death. Which means to say: Ratzinger knew what had gone on, and allowed a clear molester and bigamist to remain a pillar of John Paul II’s Church for years.

---

[EEEWWW! I feel like I must Lysol this whole thread for having allowed anything of ultra-bigot Andrew Sullivan to sully it at all! But you see how he STRAIIIIIINS, as anal-retentives must do, to put Benedict XVI in a bad light even when he is acknowledging he did something good!. He did not 'hold off' for four years - he used the time to have the CDF investigate the charges. The first time I ever saw Mons. Scicluna's name, it was in connection with his having gone to the United States and Mexico to interview witnesses against Maciel in the early 2000s. And as to 'allowing' Maciel to 'remain a pillar of John Paul II's Church', it was not in the power of a mere cardinal to do that if the Pope himself did not want it that way!]

I think it is far more likely that Ratzinger acted as quickly and as prudently as he could given the many obstacles preventing any swift action against Maciel.

Some things simply take time, especially in an organization such as the Church, and with the sort of protections afforded Maciel by John Paul II under the influence of his advisors.

Far from a reason to continue to call for Benedict’s resignation, this information should illuminate just how thankful we should all be that Ratzinger became Pope. Indeed, many resignations are in order, but Benedict’s is not one of them.

Friday, April 9

ST. CASILDA DE TOLEDO (Spain, 950?-1050)
She was the daughter of the Muslim king Al-Mamun of Toledo, at the height of Moorish dominance in Spain. She is one
of the earliest saints of whom a version of the following legend is told: Casilda used to bring bread to Christian
prisoners in secret; one day, caught by her father sneaking out, he challenged her to show what she was carrying in
her basket. She did - and there were roses instead of bread. Later she fell ill with what is now believed to have been
uterine cancer; she went to the healing waters at a shrine to St. Vincent the martyr in Burgos province, where she
was baptized. She stayed on in the area living a life of solitude and penance. and was said to have lived to age 100.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/nab/readings/040910.shtml


OR today.


No papal stories in this issue. Page 1 stories: US and Russia sign
a new nuclear-arms reduction treaty; president flees after popular
revolt in Kyrghyztan (a former Soviet republic), but US airbase and
supply line to Afghanistan remains open; in Thailand, anti-government
demonstrations spread; Knights of Columbus president Carl Anderson
'brings St Paul to Davos' international economic forum with his book
on 'The Civilization of Love' based on Catholic social doctrine. In the
inside pages, Venerable Cardinal Newman's speech when he was
named a Cardinal and a story on the Oratory in his honor in Birmingham.


No events scheduled for the Holy Father today.

An excellent follow-through initiative from Vatican Radio....


An Irish Catholic responds:
Reaction to the Pope's letter
From the English service of

April 8, 2010


An interview with the editor of The Irish Catholic, Garry O’Sullivan, on reaction to the Holy Father's Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland

Q1. To the abuse victims and their families.
In his letter the Pope writes “you have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry”. Has this apology been heard?
Yes I think it has. Even people who were critical of the letter admitted that he had apologised so that demand that the Pope apologise has been laid to rest fully.

Q2. To those clergy who abused children.
In his letter the Pope writes that priests who abused children must “stand before properly constituted tribunals”, to the best of your knowledge, what is the current situation regarding ongoing investigations of clergy accused of child abuse in Ireland?
Well, the vast majority of clergy who abused children in Ireland are dead or have been dealt with by the courts. There are two chapters of the Murphy report, which was released in November, still to be published - they were withheld because of two pending court cases. It is expected that one of them will be resolved soon.

However, the storm will blow once again when those other chapters are published and one of them is expected to be pretty bad in its contents. The police are also looking at the possibility of pressing charges but there are no developments at the moment.

However it is unlikely that any charges will be pressed because in many cases no laws were broken, or the amount of time that has passed makes it very difficult for any charges to be brought. But like I say many of the people who were involved in these cases are dead, or have left the priesthood or have been thrown out of the priesthood.

We need to emphasise that while there is a statue of limitations in civil law, very often, in the canonical process of dealing with the abuse of children, the statute of limitations has been waived.
Absolutely, but you know in the Ferns case, a report in 2000, similar to the Murphy report, the Ferns diocese went to the Vatican to the then Cardinal Ratzinger and had several priests removed from ministry, so there is a proven process, and I don’t think the Church currently would be found wanting in that because they are very keen to be clear on this issue and to deal with it speedily.

Q3. To the Bishops
In his letter the Pope writes “..some of you and your predecessors failed..to apply cannon law..grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred”. In the aftermath of their meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, the bishops of Ireland admitted their failure and asked forgiveness, but since then what have they done to address the problem of a vaccum of pastoral leadership for a church that is increasingly disaffected with its hierarchy?
The bishops came back from Rome with something like a bounce in their step because I suppose for the first time in a long time they seemed to have a plan - they said the Pope would be sending his letter and that it was all part of a process.

Since they’ve come back they have been reeling from blow after blow, some self-inflicted, to be honest. It’s not difficult to understand why the bishops would be seen to lack credibility because of these things but also because the Pope in his Letter said to them that their credibility had been seriously undermined.

Q4. To the Clergy of Ireland
This weekend the Archbishop of Canterbury said that “…it's quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now”. In his letter the Pope reached out to encourage those priests and religious who have inherited the consequences of the actions of paedophile priests. What is the mood among them? And what is the wider attitude in Ireland right now to clergy is it as bleak as the Archbishop of Canterbury paints it?
Ordinary priests have been deeply hurt. But I think what is keeping them together, what is keeping those ordinary decent men still in their parishes ministering to the flock is basically they have the support of the people in their parishes. These people see that they are good priests and don’t associate them with the church hierarchy who can’t seem to get their act together.

But, in Ireland, ‘Paedophile Priest’ has become a term and an occasion for the mockery of men who give up a lot to be at the service of people and the Church. It is going to have a huge consequence on vocations. However, the mood among priests isn’t so bad. Their churches were fairly full this Easter and there is no evidence of a decline in attendance or in collections. [God bless them all!]

Q4. The Lay Voice
The lay Catholic voice in Ireland has been a silent voice up till now, has it been given more space in the debate in the wake of this crisis?
I suppose when they go to Mass, by doing so, they are not necessarily showing support for the institutional Church, what they are showing is that their faith has not been damaged and many Catholics have been able to separate the scandals from the fact that the Church is the Church of Jesus Christ and that they have faith in Jesus. [And this is what the secular world and the MSM can never see and therefore, have never been able to appreciate - why they project their own self-limited worldview on the world's 1.16 billion Catholics, and generalize that Catholics are 'shaken' by the crisis and have 'lost faith' in the Church. The faith of regular folk is generally firm because it is genuine faith in God who transcends all human pettiness. I thank God everyday that I was born in the faith and that I never saw a reason to question it even after being exposed to other forms of transcendental thinking.]

Only on Easter Sunday there was a group protesting outside the main Church in Dublin the Pro Cathedral, and they had tied babies shoes to the railings. This is an awful sight for some people going into Mass and some people were being heckled as they entered the mMss. What Irish laity, what Irish Catholics are wondering is, why can’t the bishops and the Cardinal sort this problem out? [They are trying to, one hopes, despite all the derision in the media. And I think what all Catholics should watch out for and be vigilant about is if new cases of sexual abuse happen. From all accounts, the Church in Ireland, like most other local churches, are dealing with old cases, not recent ones.]

Q5. On why it happened
Following the publication of the Pope’s Pastoral letter, many opinionists singled out the Pope’s observations on the consequences of the secularisation of Irish society and the Irish Church, claiming that he had laid the blame for paedophile priests on secularism. In your opinion is this what the Pope was saying, is it as simple as this?
Some people are saying that and I wonder have they really read the Pope’s letter. I read that part of the Letter very closely again and again, because what the Pope was doing, and I thought it was very interesting, was he was trying to get to a resolution of what caused this.

He is very clear on that in the Letter, he doesn’t categorically state that one thing or the other caused it, he tries to draw a context, to look at the context and the issues. Now he does mention secularisation. The one which many people honed in on was secularisation. But the Pope also spoke about formation of priests, spiritual and moral education, the failure to use canon law.

However, it is important to note that roughly half the men who abused children that were named in the Murphy Report were ordained before Vatican II ended. Seminaries may well have become overly permissive in the 70’s and no doubt this caused problems, but the repressive atmosphere of the 40’s and 50’s seminaries allowed paedophile priests to be ordained.

Unfortunately, when these men were causing problems in the late 60’s and 70’s the attitude among their superiors was to use pastoral practices to help them and to get them psychiatric treatment, rather than bringing on the rigors of canon law.

Q5. On the media
In the wake of the Murphy and Ryan reports, the Bishops visit to Rome and the Papal letter, cases of abuse of children by clergy and religious in Germany, Austria, Holland, the USA have been making headlines. A common denominator is the perceived view of the Vatican’s inaction in addressing the cases. As a Catholic, as an Irishman and as a journalist how have you been following the development of the sex abuse scandal in the media?

I think in terms of child abuse, people expect the Church to be open, honest and transparent. That is a reasonable expectation. Sometimes, yes, the media are too hard, they go too far or they don’t have all the facts, but blaming the media just looks like you are trying to avoid the hard questions. You can’t go wrong once you stick to the facts and stick to the truth. The truth will set us free. I think that is an axiom that is often forgotten, even in the Church.

[The problem is the media generally only report what is bad, what tends to support their general hostility to the Church, and ignore or distort the right things that the Church is doing.

This attitude of media people defending the media, right or wrong [as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan did in her recent column], is exactly analogous to what media is accusing the Church of - protecting its own at the expense of truth! Should that not be obvious? And yet otherwise intelligent people like Noonan and O'Sullivan himself don't seem to see it!]

Q6. On the future
In an editorial on the Papal Letter you write : “There are many questions and few answers and the Pope himself seems keen to get to the heart of the matter. However, in tandem with the Roman visitation we need an Irish visitation of our own Church”. You also propose “An Irish solution to an Irish problem” – quoting Charlie Haughey – can you expand on this?
The people best positioned to understand the Catholic Church in Ireland are the Irish people. The Pope in that Letter talks about the laity, so why not give them a role? There is no reason why some intelligent and faithful Catholics could not, with a representatives of the religious, the bishops and the priests, hold a review of Church practices. Look at the past, look at the present and look at the future. It doesn’t have to be binding.

The only way this is going to be sorted out is with the laity be involved with the bishops and with the priests and the clergy. Let the Vatican send in people to inspect the seminaries, there are only two in the country, but the people need to be involved in this or the Church won’t have a future.

[That is a very valid suggestion. Dependable local laity could be named to work with the Vatican 'visitators' as advisers and consultants while the investigation is going on.]

Because we are in the Easter season, is there anything positive to be gained out of all of this?
Of course there is. We believe in the Risen Christ and that is our hope as a people of faith. In Ireland, we are very quick to talk about the Holy Spirit. We see the Holy Spirit when there are positive things but we don’t see the Holy Spirit when there are negative things. I have heard very few people say, maybe this is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is all around; it is in the voice of the victims, it is in the voice of the priests. it is in the voice of people in general, and in the voice of the Holy Father writing to the people of Ireland.

What is really happening here? What is happening is that the evil that was in the Church, as the Holy Father said, the filth that was in the Church is being revealed. A light is being shone in on a room of darkness – that’s a good thing.

In many ways there are a lot of people who have left the Church, whose voices, when they criticised the Church in the past were crushed, some were victims some weren’t. Hopefully the Church in the future will be humbler, less arrogant and more inclusive of everyone.

The parable of the lost sheep, is lost in Ireland. Nobody wants to minister to the people who don’t go to Mass on Sunday, that have left the Church and yet Jesus commanded his apostles to go after the lost sheep. There was more rejoicing in heaven over the one sinner than over the one hundred righteous people.

I think we need to get back to basics and to the Gospel. We need new wineskins and new wine in the Church in Ireland and perhaps in other parts of the Church around the world.

You can always tell who is for Benedict XVI and who is against by what they write. No one is surprised at the antis in the MSM. But even those who are not actively involved in trying to dredge up muck and slime to spatter the Pope's white robes express themselves in pessimism about everything else about the Church - such as this one, which does have the merit of presenting some voices that buck the writer's obvious pessimist bias!


Sex abuse scandal threatens Pope's focus
on Europe's Christian Roots
by Lisa Bryant



PARIS, April 7 (VOA) - Five years after being elected Pope, Benedict XVI is reeling from Church sex scandals that risk undermining a central mission of his papacy: promoting Europe's Christian heritage. ['Reeling'? How presumptuous to know exactly how the Pope is taking this all-out assault on him! Just look at his calm and sunny demeanour and the way he moved and strode in his usual decisive way at last Wednesday's catechesis - not at all a person who is 'reeling'!]

On a sunny April morning five years ago, the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI explained his choice of a papal name to thousands of pilgrims massed in St. Peter's Square. He cited, among other things, one of Europe's patron saints - St. Benedict of Norcia. The Pontiff called him a fundamental point of reference for Europe's unity, and a strong reminder of the region's Christian roots.



Promoting Europe's Christian heritage is a centerpiece of Benedict's papacy. But some religion analysts fear that mission is threatened by the pedophilia crisis that has battered the Roman Catholic Church, along with some media reports, strongly denied by the Vatican, that Pope Benedict may have been responsible for some of the failings of abusive priests.

Philippe Portier is director of the Group on Society, Religion and Secularity at the French National Center for Scientific Research, in Paris.

Portier says the pedophilia scandals are seriously weakening the Pope's project to re-Christianize Europe. He believes the Church will have great difficulty in regaining the confidence of Catholic activists who can put that goal into action.

Isabelle de Gaulmyn, head of the religion section for France's La Croix newspaper, agrees.

De Gaulmyn describes the fallout of the pedophilia reports as disastrous, and damaging to the Church's efforts to have a legitimate voice in society, in the long term.


[What happened to the De Gaulmyn who blogged before Holy Week that Catholics - the masses of the faith ful - would prove during Holy Week that their faith is unshaken???? 'Damaging to the efforts to have a legitimate voice in society'??? Oh ye of little faith! The secular world has been trying to do that since Vatican II - and yet, Roman Catholicism - and the voice of the Pope - remains the one remaining bulwark against the evils of secularization. Her strength is in remaining firm and true to the Gospel message and preserving the Christianity that developed from the Gospel through 2000 years.

These pessimists also forget that Roman Catholicism is not alone in the crusade to keep Christianity the vital force in Europe. The Orthodox Churches are not an inconsiderable weight in this war, and they have been far more reliably 'orthodox' - in the sense of straight - than all the Protestant denominations that were born from the Reformation!]

Pope Benedict inherited the project to promote Europe's Christian roots from his predecessor John Paul II. A slew of statistics show a drift away from the church by Christians of all denominations. In France, for example, about 70 percent of the population considers itself Catholic, but only about 20 percent attend Mass, even occasionally.

Earlier this decade, the Catholic Church worked hard, but unsuccessfully, for a mention of Europe's Christian heritage in a draft, and ultimately discarded, European constitution. Last year, the 27-member European Union finally adopted the Lisbon Treaty to strengthen and streamline its institutions. The treaty simply refers to a dialogue with churches.

But Johanna Touzel, spokeswoman for the Brussels-based Commission of the Bishops Conferences of the European Union, says the church still has an impact on an EU-wide level.

"First thing, we are not [only] promoting Christian roots, we are promoting human dignity and common good in all EU policies. And this is a major difference because on these two [values] you can have non-Christians who can share them," she said,

Touzel says the pedophilia scandal has not directly affected the conference's work, but she acknowledges the Church is clearly weakened because of it.

"I can only hope that this kind of earthquake in our Church will lead to necessary reforms because an institution like the Church [which] is eternal, still needs to reform itself to keep pertinent in the 21st century," she added. [The pilgrim Church is the 'ecclesia semper reformanda', isn't it? - the very essence of Benedict XVI's idea of 'renewal in continuity', which is what reform should be within the Church!]

Some Church supporters believe the scandal will help re-energize the Church and that the Pope's evangelizing message for Europe will not be lost. That includes Jean-Pierre Delville, a priest and theologian at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium.

Father Delville says the Catholic church cannot promote Europe's Christian roots without purifying its own roots from the sin and suffering caused by abusive members. He points to Belgium as an example.

A separate, high-profile 1996 court trial of a pedophile and murderer sparked wider soul searching within Belgian society, and prompted the Church to crack down on sex abuses.

Church supporters can also take heart in a new poll published by France's La Croix newspaper. It indicates 61 percent of Europeans believe Christian messages and values are still meaningful, even though it says seven out of 10 believe Christians do not do a good job communicating them. [Apparently De Gaulmyn does not read her own newspaper!]

Spokesman Christian Weisner, of the international Catholic reform movement We are Church, points to the past.

"In my heart and my brain, I think there is a deep hope that the Church will overcome this crisis as it overcame other crises in history," said Weisner. [He said this???? It's the first statement I've read from any We are Church representative that makes sense. They always speak as though the Church as it is is doomed unless it adopts their progressive agenda.]

In France, Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a psychoanalyst and expert on priests and pedophilia, has no doubt Pope Benedict will continue to push his message of Europe's Christian roots, regardless of his present problems.

Monsignor Anatrella says Benedict is a determined Pope who will not be swayed by the events of the moment.