George Weigel brings more light today to one of the issues I have often underscored during the current 'crisis'; and before that, in the general matter of the structure of the Church, particularly the autonomy of the local Churches, over whom the diocesan bishop really has full administrative control, and the insidious misreading of Vatican II by many bishops to mean that they can ignore the Pope's instructions for the Universal Church - such as Summorum Pontificum - and act on their own. What Mr. Weigel fails to underscore in citing Vatican II is the repeated statement in Vatican-II documents about the duty of the bishops to act "in communion with the Successor of Peter".
The limits of the papacy
April 14, 2010
During the preparation of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Pope Paul VI proposed that the constitution’s discussion of papal primacy include the affirmation that the Pope is “accountable to the Lord alone.”
This suggestion was rejected by the Council’s Theological Commission, which wrote that “the Roman Pontiff is also bound to revelation itself, to the fundamental structure of the Church, to the sacraments, to the definitions of earlier councils, and other obligations too numerous to mention.” Pope Paul quietly dropped his proposal.
Yet the image persists that the Catholic Church is a kind of global corporation, with the Pope as CEO, the bishops as branch managers, and your parish priest as the local salesman. And according to that image, the Pope not only knows what’s going on all the way down the line, he gives orders that are immediately obeyed all the way down the line.
Or, to vary the misimpression, the Church is like the United States Marine Corps — there, at least according to legend - when the Commandant issues an order, everyone from the highest-ranking four-star to the lowliest Parris Island recruit staples a salute to his forehead and does what he’s told.
This distorted and distorting image of the Pope as dictatorial CEO or Marine commandant is, admittedly, reinforced by the language of the Code of Canon Law. Thus Canon 331 states that the “Bishop of the Church of Rome … has supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, and he can always freely exercise that power.”
Yet, while, both theology and law tells us that the Pope enjoys the fullness of executive, legislative, and judicial authority in the Church, his exercise of that power is circumscribed by any number of factors.
It is circumscribed by the authority and prerogatives of local bishops, According to the teaching of Vatican II, bishops are not simply branch-managers of Catholic Church, Inc.; rather, they are the heads of local Churches with both the authority and the responsibility to govern them.
Moreover, the Pope, according to the Council, is to govern the Church with the College of Bishops who, with him and under him, share in responsibility for the well-being of the entire People of God, not only for their own local Churches.
The Pope’s capacity for governance is also shaped by the quality of his closest associates, and by the accuracy and timeliness of the information he receives from the Roman Curia via the nuncios and apostolic delegates who represent the Holy See and the pope around the world.
An example of how this fact of ecclesiastical life can impede a Pope’s ability to respond promptly to situations comes from the American crisis of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal misgovernance in 2002.
Because of grossly inadequate reporting from the apostolic nunciature in Washington between January and April 2002 — when the firestorm was at its hottest — John Paul II was about three months behind the news curve in mid-April 2002; what appeared (and was often presented by the press) as papal uninterest in the U.S. crisis was in fact a significant time-lag in the information-flow.
Papal governance can also be undermined by inept subordinates. Thus the image of an uninterested John Paul II was reinforced in 2002 by Cardinal Dario Castrillon’s disastrous presentation of the Pope’s annual Holy Thursday letter to priests that year, during which Castrillon blew off questions about the U.S. crisis by saying that John Paul had more important things to worry about, like peace in the Middle East.
These very real human limits on the exercise of papal power seem almost impossible for some editors and reporters — and indeed for some Catholics — to grasp. Yet the fact remains that the overwhelming responsibility for turning the scandal of clerical sexual abuse into a full-blown Church-wide crisis lays at the feet of irresponsible local bishops, and unfortunately of bishops who bought the conventional wisdom about therapeutic “cures” for sexual predators.
That underscores the imperative of getting episcopal appointments right and of removing bishops whose failures destroy their capacity to govern: see “Ireland today, Catholic Church in.”
Here is an article written by one of the Catholics named earlier this year to a media group to prepare the UK public adequately for Pope Benedict's visit in September, and its task has, of course, been complicated greatly by the media-fomented hostility by its over-the-top, below-the-belt, all-hands-on-deck character assault on the Holy Father.
The mob should lay off:
The Pope is completely innocent
by Jack Valero
April 15, 2010
On Sunday I appeared on
The Big Questions on BBC1 to discuss whether the pope should "resign". It quickly descended into a heckling circus where calmly reasoned argument fell victim to unfocused outrage. Afterwards, two representatives of the Protest the Pope Coalition told me menacingly I had "no right" to defend Benedict XVI's record on abuse.
But shouting down the truth doesn't make it go away. I don't defend the pope because I think it is the duty of a good Catholic; I defend him because he is completely innocent of the charges made against him, and because the media has merged with the mob and misreported the facts.
The three recent stories from the US cited by Richard Dawkins and his mob as "proving" that the pope should be arrested under international law – the horrible cases of Murphy in Wisconsin, Teta and Trupia in Arizona, and now Kiesle in California – have thesein common:
- The abuses took place in the 1970s;
- The police were informed and acted;
- The priest was suspended by his bishop;
- Requests for dismissal from the clerical state ("defrocking") were sent to Cardinal Ratzinger's department in the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; and
- Some time later the priests were defrocked – except in the case of Murphy, who died during his trial.
Suspension and defrocking are two separate actions. The first can be done by a bishop, with immediate effect; the second is a lengthy process that involves Rome.
Suspension – meaning a priest is no longer able to function as a priest – say mass, hear confession, act as chaplain etc – is the key action that a bishop has to take against an abusive priest to prevent him having contact with minors.
If, in any of these "smoking gun" cases, the bishop failed to suspend an abusive priest immediately, he did wrong. But such failure would have had nothing to do with Cardinal Ratzinger, whose only involvement was when a request for defrocking landed on his desk.
The time Rome took over each defrocking says nothing whatsoever about cover-up or collusion. It says only that defrocking was then a complex and elaborate procedure that took too long. However, what
prevented the abuse was not the defrocking but the suspension by the bishop.
There is no link between the length of the defrocking process and the priest's opportunity to abuse. In fact, in the case of Kiesle,
most of the abuse for which he was convicted took place after he was defrocked, when his bishop had no more control over him.
But wasn't Ratzinger in charge while all this was going on? Didn't it happen on his watch? No.
From 1982 to 2001 he was in charge of a department that dealt with defrocking, but not with suspensions and penalties for paedophile priests, which were the responsibility of local bishops. A number of bishops failed to suspend the abusive priests, some of whom continued to abuse. That is the scandal.
It has been exposed and dealt with, and a number of bishops have, as a result, resigned. More important, guidelines are now in place to prevent it ever happening again.
Not only was Cardinal Ratzinger not complicit in these failures, he was the Vatican official who most clearly saw what was needed to tackle the problem.
Then, in 2001, Pope John Paul asked him to review the local churches' handling of clerical abuse cases. Cardinal Ratzinger asked bishops around the world to forward to him all cases where credible allegations had been made against priests.
He did this not to "cover up" the crimes – which had been reported to the local police – but to ensure that the priests were more speedily dealt with. He accomplished this by amending the procedure for defrocking to allow for a fast-track procedure that did not involve trials.
Some try to make out that Cardinal Ratzinger's 2001 letter orders a cover-up by insisting that parties observe secrecy under pain of excommunication. What it actually says is that confidentiality should be observed during church trials, to allow the victims to give evidence freely and to protect the accused until found guilty.
There is nothing in that letter preventing victims reporting the case to the police, and the assumption is that they should.
Pope Benedict is not responsible for cover-up, collusion, turning a blind eye, institutional idolatry or any of the other accusations that, with greater or lesser vehemence, have been hurled at the Catholic church during recent weeks.
On the contrary, he is the one in the Vatican who has done most to rid the Church of this scourge. He is the one who has acted most consistently and energetically to improve the church's handling of these cases.
HEY, MR. DAWKINS, SHAME ON YOU, BUT
HAVE YOU READ YOUR OWN BOOK LATELY???
The first thing I came across this morning was from Damian Thompson, who quotes a number of gleanings from YouTube, etc., someone points this out about the Grand Panjandrum of the Neo-Atheists ...
Is this the same Richard Dawkins in whose most celebrated book, published as recently as 2006, we read this:
“Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about paedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692…
"All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).
The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America… We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers.
"The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. This is so counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses.”
The God Delusion, pp. 315-16
The Pope-haters can be driven so blind with their powerlessness, really, against a 2000-year-old institution - that they even forget what they themselves have said in the past!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/04/2010 21:57]