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:
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?
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.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/04/2010 19:22]