The Pope and his Pharisaical attackers
Editorial
By George Neumayr
Issue of April 2010
The very secularists and libertine Catholics who wanted the aberrant sexual revolution to enter the Church in the 1960s and 1970s now hold Pope Benedict XVI responsible for its lingering effects. This takes considerable gall, but that has never stopped them before.
Moreover, what moral authority and “credibility” do they bring to the issue of protecting children, exactly?
These are the same people who favor the abortion of unborn children. They favor the high-brow child abuse of turning children over to homosexual couples at gay adoption agencies. They think it enlightened to bring Planned Parenthood representatives into elementary schools. They celebrate on Main Street gay-pride parades that include the North American Man/Boy Love Association.
The moral authority of these Church-hating ideologues is nil. We are witnessing the repulsively absurd spectacle of a culture drenched in depravity lecturing the Vicar of Christ on moral responsibility.
One doesn’t even have to agree with every action or inaction of Benedict's ecclesiastical career to see that these attacks on him have been appallingly stupid, glib, and Pharisaical.
Liberal pundits call for the resignation of the Pope with about as much consideration as they order a latte. The press interprets the Pope’s recent comment that faith leads one “toward the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion” as a response to these calls. It probably wasn’t, but if it was, he is right.
This is just the petty punditry of petty people who preside over a culture increasingly defined by the corruption of children.
Pope Benedict has taken serious steps to address the abuse scandal in the Church. What steps have a degenerate liberal elite taken to protect children in society at large?
The feverish drive to silence and smear the Pope — from the
New York Times to pundits like Andrew Sullivan and Maureen Dowd to editorialists at the
National Catholic Reporter — is not about the protection of children but the imposition of liberal ideology on the Church. Period.
Their real objection to Benedict is not that he has done too little to reform the priesthood but that he has done too much.
It was the
New York Times and the
National Catholic Reporter that pounced on him for issuing, in his first year as pope, a ban on the ordination of homosexuals.
It was the
National Catholic Reporter that ran pieces casting the “zero-tolerance” policy as heartless and draconian to wayward priests.
These are not reformers of a permissive priesthood but proponents of one.
The Archbishop of New York strikes again in behalf of the Pope, the Church and truth! From his blog this week...
'All we ask is for media
to be fair and accurate'
March 30, 2010
To Whom Shall We Go?
In some ways, Holy Week is hardly the time I would choose to make the following comments. Still, the matter is so pressing that I feel compelled to address it.
Last week I asked for some fairness in the seemingly unappeasable criticism of the Church over the catastrophe of clergy sexual abuse.
Not to my surprise, if anything, it has only gotten worse, especially in the interminable headlines about the Pope himself.
Last fall I wrote in this blog about anti-Catholicism in the New York Times and other media, providing a list of contemporary examples. A few tried to slap me back into place, suggesting that I stupidly believed the Church to be immune from scrutiny. [The blog entry, posted in the ISSUES thread last October, was actually a letter to the New York Times from the Archbishop of New York which the 'newspaper of record' refused to publish! If the Archbishop of New York can be denied access to his own hometown newspaper, the New York Times, how credible can it be? Not that it hs been credible at all since it swung all the way to one-sided journalism during the George W. Bush years.]
Baloney! The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves; we do not expect any special treatment…so bring it on.
All we ask is that it be fair and accurate.
The reporting on Pope Benedict XVI has not been so.
The first reports were about a shameful priest in Germany three decades ago. I weighed in on that coverage last week.
The second story, sprayed all over the New York Times this week, and predictably copied by the world’s press, is groundless. (I am grateful for Father Raymond de Souza’s excellent piece posted at National Review Online which goes through the story point by point.)
The report accuses Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of preventing a priest whose sins and crimes can only be described as diabolical, one Lawrence Murphy, from facing proper penalties in the Church for the serial abuse of deaf minors.
While the report on the nauseating abuse is bitterly true, the insinuation against Cardinal Ratzinger is not, and gives every indication of being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict.
Here’s a summary of the key points:
•» The New York Times relied on tort lawyers who currently have civil suits pending against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the Holy See, who are aggressively supporting the radical measure right now before the Wisconsin legislature to abrogate the statute of limitations on civil cases of abuse, and who have high financial interest in the matter being reported. Hardly an impartial source…
•» The documentation that allegedly supports these sensational charges is published on the website of the New York Times; rather than confirming their theory, the documents instead show that there is no evidence at all that Cardinal Ratzinger ever blocked any decision about Murphy. Even a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, calls this charge “unfair” in his column of March 29.
•» We also find on the website a detailed timeline of all the sickening information about Murphy, data not “uncovered” by any reporter but freely released by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee a number of years back, and thoroughly covered at that time by the local media in Milwaukee.
One wonders why this story, quite exhaustively reported in the past, rose again this very week. It is hardly “news.” One might therefore ask: Why is this news now? The only reason it is news at all is because of the implication that Cardinal Ratzinger was involved. Yet the documentation does not support that charge, and thus they should have no place in a putatively respectable newspaper.
Nothing in this non-news merits the tsunami of headlines, stories, and diatribes against the Church and this Pope that we have endured this past week.
There was legitimate news last week that should have received much more attention than it did. It was the annual independent audit report on American dioceses on compliance with our own tough Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. For those who profess to be so interested in the welfare of the young, the news should have been trumpeted as stunning progress.
Catholics deeply disturbed by lurid tales of wicked behavior twenty or thirty years ago might have been surprised to discover:
•» The Church has had in place strict protocols and preventative measures to stop this from happening again. Last week’s audit reported that six million children in our schools and religious education programs underwent safe environment training – that’s 96% of the children in our care. Background evaluations were completed on two million priests, deacons, seminarians, educators, employees and volunteers.
•» Last week’s audit reported that there were six (6) credible allegations of sexual abuse of current minors for the entire year, in a Church of more than 60 million members. Though one would be too many, the percent is dramatically lower than experts tell us is the sad national average, and is only known because the Church is transparent in reporting.
•» In the spirit of no good deed goes unpunished, the false allegations of last week have obscured the good work that the Cardinal Ratzinger did at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and as Pope.
Beginning in 2001, as ably described by respected journalist John Allen [Archbishop Dolan, please don't be duped! - even if Allen has correctly pointed out through the years the deliberate distortion of the 1962 and 2001 CDF documents by Church detractor and carrion-circling vulture lawyers], and also mentioned recently by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Cardinal Ratzinger brought about a profound change in how sexual abuse cases were handled.
The details are many, but the effect was clear. It became easier to remove priests who have committed these crimes from ministry very quickly, and often, dismissed from the priesthood altogether.
Since his election, Pope Benedict has repeatedly demonstrated that even high-ranking priests are to be held accountable, and has not minced words about the failures of his brother bishops – both here in the United States and just last week, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland.
This failure to report in similar detail today’s successes and yesterday’s failures suggests the bias I wrote about last fall. This is also about simply telling the truth, or more to the point, about peddling falsehoods to destroy the Holy Father’s good name. It needs to be called what it is – scandalous.
Let me be upfront: I confess a bias in favor of the Church and her Pope.
I only wish some others would admit a bias on the other side.
A blessed Holy Week.
Since I do not willingly search out what the New York Times has to say about Benedict XVI these days, I may perhaps be forgiven for not seeing this Op-Ed piece that appeared on Palm Sunday in that newspaper - the second one after John Allen's that they have published since their one-two punch last week against the Holy Father.
A time for contrition
by ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: March 28, 2010
During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your Eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?”
The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your Majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the Church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
wo centuries later, the clergy has taken another shot at it. What the American and Irish churches have endured in the last decade and what German Catholics find themselves enduring today is all part of the same grim story:
the exposure, years after the fact, of an appalling period in which the Catholic hierarchy responded to an explosion of priestly sex abuse with cover-ups, evasions and criminal negligence.
Now the scandal has touched the Pope himself. There are two charges against Benedict XVI: first, that he allowed a pedophile priest to return to ministry while archbishop of Munich in 1980; and second, that as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1990s, he failed to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had abused deaf children 30 years before.
The second charge seems unfair. The case was finally forwarded to the Vatican by the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, more than 20 years after the last allegation of abuse. With the approval of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the statute of limitations was waived and a canonical trial ordered. It was only suspended because the priest was terminally ill; indeed, pre-trial proceedings were halted just before he died.
But the first charge is more serious. The Vatican insists that the crucial decision was made without the future Pope’s knowledge, but the paper trail suggests that he could have been in the loop. At best, then-Archbishop Ratzinger was negligent. At worst, he enabled further abuse.
For those of us who admire the Pope, either possibility is distressing, but neither should come as a great surprise. The lesson of the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit in the scandal.
[While I understand that Douthat is trying to be 'objective' here (if only to insure that the Times will continue allowing him to write for them), I still maintain that, regardless of what the culture of the Church was in 1980, Joseph Ratzinger would never have knowingly approved or condoned the appointment of a sex offender undergoing therapy to pastoral duties which involve contact with the young. Nothing in his record shows that he would have compromised a moral judgment just because 'it was SOP at the time'!
Absent any evidence that he knew the priest was given pastoral assignments, the only fair accusation one can make is he should have known because he should have at some point tried to find out what happened to the priest who came for therapy to Munich. And we can say that in hindsight now, only because the priest subsequently went on to commit another offense(s) for which he was convicted. If Father Had kept a spotless record (at least what is known) after he was assigned to Munich, no one would have cared what Archbishop Ratzinger knew or did not know at the time.]
From diocese to diocese, the same cover-ups and gross errors of judgment repeated themselves regardless of who found themselves in charge. Neither theology nor geography mattered: the worst offenders were Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles — a conservative and a liberal, on opposite ends of the country.
This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the Church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the Church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s over-emphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.)
But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.
[As terrible and ultimately disastrous as that culture was, none of it invalidates the blame that 'conservatives' place on the moral relativism that has afflicted the West since the 1960s, in parallel to the theological relativism that was a consequence of Vatican II.
Priests with pedophile tendencies may never have been so ready to forget their vows and to indulge their lusts if the cultural Zeitgeist was not proclaiming to one and all that there could be no restrictions whatsoever on sexual practice, while the false spirit-of-Vatican-II prophets were preaching that priestly celibacy should be abolished and that Vatican-II meant the Catholic Church was better off adapting its liturgy and its most sacrosanct practices to what Protestants have been doing since the Reformation.]
What’s more, it was a conservative hierarchy’s bunker mentality that prevented the Vatican from reckoning with the scandal. In a characteristic moment in 2002, a
prominent cardinal told a Spanish audience that “I am personally convinced that the
constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the Church.” That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI.
[ In the light of what is happening today, what did he say then that was not true? He never said the abuses did not happen. He said they involved a small number of priests - which was true then and more so now - and then pointed out how the media was using it as a campaign against the Church. Which they were, and are.]
Since then, he’s come to grips with the crisis in ways that his predecessor did not: after years of drift and denial under John Paul II, the Vatican has taken vigorous steps to promote zero tolerance, expedite the dismissal of abusive priests and organize investigations that should have happened long ago.
Because of Benedict’s recent efforts, and the efforts of clerics and laypeople dating back to the first wave of revelations in the 1980s, Catholics can reasonably hope that the crisis of abuse is a thing of the past.
But the crisis of authority endures. There has been some accountability for the abusers, but not nearly enough for the bishops who enabled them. And now the shadow of past sins threatens to engulf this papacy.
Popes do not resign. But a Pope can clean house. And a Pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s darkest eras.
[And what has Benedict XVI shown in word and deed since he became Pope but contrition for this scourge visited by a tiny handful on the Mystical Body of Christ?]
This is Holy Week, when the first Pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/04/2010 05:28]