Last October, the New York Times rejected a letter from the Archbishop of New York, no less, so this does not really 'astonish' any more! The NYT decides what's 'fit to print' - and unless it's some carefully calibrated article leaning their way, like the ones John Allen or Ross Douthat write for them (to make sure they can continue writing for them), even being the Archbishop of New York does not entitle you to express your contrary views on their pages!
'You stitched up the Pope and
this is how you did it',
says law professor to the New York Times -
but they won't publish him
April 21, 2010
Hat-tip to the Just B16 blog for this letter sent to
The New York Times by
Prof John Coverdale, professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law, New Jersey. It wasn’t accepted for publication, you’ll be astonished to learn. Here it is:
Like many other people, I have felt in recent weeks that some news outlets have unfairly targeted Pope Benedict XVI in connection with sexual abuse by priests.
In part this is a question of emphasis, with daily coverage of what may or may not have been minor mistakes in judgment decades ago and almost no attention to the major efforts Pope Benedict has made to remedy what is undeniably a horrible situation.
With some frequency, however, I have observed what strikes me as deliberate distortion of the facts in order to put Pope Benedict in a bad light. I would like to call your attention to what seems to me a clear example of this sort of partisan journalism:
Laurie Goodstein and Michael Luo’s article “Pope Put Off Move to Punish Abusive Priest” published on the front page of the New York Times on April 10, 2010. The story is so wrong that it is hard to believe it is not animated by the anti-Catholic animus that the New York Times and other media outlets deny harboring.
Canonical procedure punishes priests who have violated Church law in serious ways by “suspending” them from exercising their ministry. This is sometimes referred to as “defrocking.” (According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary to “defrock” is to deprive of the right to exercise the functions of an office. )
A priest who has been suspended may request that he be released from his vows of celibacy and other obligations as a priest. If granted, this petition to be “laicized” would leave the former priest free to marry. Laicization (which is altogether different from defrocking and which may apply to a priest who has committed no crime but simply wishes to leave the priesthood) is not further punishment. It is something a priest who has already been punished by being suspended might well desire, as do some priests who have committed no crime and who have not been suspended.
The priest who is the subject of the article had already been punished by being suspended long before his case reached Rome. He asked to be laicized. Cardinal Ratzinger delayed his laicization not his “defrocking” as the article incorrectly says. He had been defrocked years earlier when he was suspended from the ministry. All of this is clear without reference to outside sources to anyone who knows something about Church procedure and reads the article with sufficient care. It is anything but clear, however, to a normal reader.
My complaint here is not that the article misuses the word “defrock” but rather that by so doing it strongly suggests to readers that Cardinal Ratzinger delayed the priest’s removal from the ministry. Delaying laicization had nothing to do with allowing him to continue exercising the ministry, from which he had already been suspended.
Not only does the article fail to make these distinctions, it positively misstate the facts. Its title is “Pope Put off Move to Punish Abusive Priest.” [italics added] It describes Cardinal Ratzinger’s decision as involving whether the abusive priest “should be forced from the priesthood” [italics added]. Even a moderately careful journalist would have to notice that all of this is incompatible with the fact (reported in the second paragraph of the article) that the priest himself had asked for what Cardinal Ratziner delayed.
Had the facts been reported accurately, the article would have said that the priest was promptly punished by being removed from the ministry for his crimes, but that when he asked to be reduced to the lay state, which would have given him the right to marry within the Church, Cardinal Ratzinger delayed granting the petition.
That, of course, would hardly have merited front page treatment, much less a headline accusing the Pope of “Putt[ing] off Move to Punish Abusive Priest.”
The second half of the article reports that the priest later worked as a volunteer in the youth ministry of his former parish. This is obviously regrettable and should not have happened, but he was not acting as a priest (youth ministers are laymen, not priests).
A careful reader who was not misled by the inaccuracies in the first part of the article would, of course, realize that his volunteering as a youth minister had no factual or legal connection with Cardinal Ratzinger’s delaying the grant of laicization.
The article does not say in so many words that it did, but an average reader might well conclude that there was some connection when he is told that “while the bishop was pressing Cardinal Ratzinger to defrock Mr. Kiesle, the priest began volunteering in the youth ministry of one of his former parishes.”
Any one of these errors might be due to carelessness, but their cumulative effect, coupled with the decision to make this front page news accompanied by a two column photo of Cardinal Raztinger’s signature, strongly suggests to me that something worse than carelessness is involved.
I urge you to look into whether some major news outlets have indeed been engaged in a campaign to vilify the Pope and into whether their desire to do so has caused them to slip below minimum standards of professional journalism.
And the professor was only referring to the article about the Kiesle case! Imagine what his parsing would do to Goodstein's original article about the Murphy case in Milwaukee, or the NYT contribution to the myths about the Hullerman case in Munich! - all of them malice-driven engines of character assassination!
And since I am still catching up on an enormous anniversary backlog, it is not with complete pleasure that I post Damian Thompson's anniversary commentary that most of you may have read by now:
Benedict XVI after five years:
Time is running out
for a great reforming Pope
April 19, 2010
Today is the fifth anniversary of the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope, and there is chance – just a chance – that it also marks the beginning of the end of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
Yesterday, the Pope was reduced to tears when he met victims of predatory priests in Malta. His horror at these crimes is not in doubt. And now, at last, sections of the secular media are grudgingly acknowledging that those journalists who tried to paint the former Cardinal Ratzinger as the protector of paedophiles made a serious error of judgment.
Still, the Vatican could have done much more to stop the frenzied misdirection of public outrage towards the Holy Father. That it failed to do so tells us something depressing: that Benedict XVI, the cleverest pope for centuries, an important thinker in his own right and the author of wonderful teaching documents, may lack the administrative skills and support that he needs to push through desperately needed reforms.
How to sum up the particular vision of Benedict? In an article for
Catholic World Report, the Ratzinger scholar Tracey Rowland quotes a line from the 1963 Hollywood film, The Cardinal: “The Church … thinks in centuries, not decades.” Fr Ratzinger is reported to have been a consultant for the film; he would certainly endorse that particular line.
As Dr Rowland argues, Benedict wishes above all to lay the groundwork for healing the schisms that have torn limbs from Catholic Christianity, by purifying the worship of the Church in a way that enables Christians who are Catholics at heart to return into communion with Peter.
He understands – as no Pope before him has done – that conservative Anglo-Catholics are not Protestants, but aspiring Catholics for whom
the scandalously bad worship of the post-Vatican II Church is a spiritual, not just an aesthetic, obstacle to reunion.
Hence the Ordinariate provision, a structure for ex-Anglicans that will be set up soon but will take years to reach maturity (if it is not sabotaged).
Hence also the removal of virtually all restrictions on the celebration of the classical form of the Roman Rite – to my mind, the boldest and finest single achievement of Benedict’s pontificate to date.
Correctly orientated worship, believes Pope Benedict, is a sine qua non for the operation of the redeeming love of Christ in the world. That is why his request that priests should say Mass facing a crucifix on the altar is so important to him; he would prefer that the celebrant faced eastwards, in the same direction as the congregation, but at least the central crucifix helps ensure that the consecration is not directed at the people, which would make it more like a Protestant shared meal than a sacrifice.
But Catholics should ask themselves: when did they last visit an ordinary parish church and see a priest observing the Pope’s wishes? Just as the correct orientation of the altar matters enormously to Benedict XVI, so
the disregard of this reform tells us a lot about the fundamental disconnection between the Pontiff and his priests.
This disconnection is made possible by the immense power of the bishop and the diocese in the Church – a power that also made possible the sheltering of so many clerical sex abusers not just from the police but also from the Vatican.
Much of this power is derived from Scripture: the diocese has been the fundamental unit of the Church since its institution. A crucial problem is that
the Vatican – a tiny organisation, really, about the size of a middle-sized American corporation –
has neglected its historic role of aligning Catholic bishops with their Pontiff.
Benedict XVI wants to reform the Church; but how can he do so when the dicasteries (major departments) are run by cardinals and archbishops of widely differing degrees of loyalty and mental alertness?
In an interview he gave in the 1980s, Cardinal Ratzinger said that he had come to appreciate the laid-back Italian way of doing things, since it meant that the Vatican didn’t rush into bad decisions. I wonder if he still thinks that, surveying the wreckage of European Catholicism. No wonder no one goes to church on the continent, for what they encounter is barely recognisable as Catholic.
[Perhaps that may be true in the larger churches, but as someone who has dropped into an untold number of churches in Europe to catch early morning Mass when travelling by Eurailpass, most of the Masses still retained their traditional solemnity, although Novus Ordo, when the congregation is limited to a handful of people, and especially when it is said at a side chapel that only has the traditional altar. And not one priest ever minded that I knelt to receive the Host on the tongue, not in my hands,]
Even the philistine horrors of the Archdiocese of Liverpool cannot begin to compare with the liturgical desert of many French, German, Austrian and Italian dioceses, long since captured by the exhausted aesthetic and pastoral practices of 1960s liberal Protestantism. And who let this happen? The old men in the Vatican.
I wrote last week that, as a result of recent scandals, the Pope finally has a chance to clear out some of the cardinals who are too compromised by laziness, corruption and bad taste to initiate the Benedictine reform.
Since then, I’ve spoken to a friend of Benedict XVI who feels that
he lacks the will to effect the necessary changes. Also, it wasn’t exactly encouraging to see the Pope fall asleep during Mass in Malta; he is not ill or confused, but he is 83 and (though the world has been slow to pick up on this) of a naturally gentle disposition.
[I don't know about lacking the will - he seemd to have no problem replacing Cardinal Sepe at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and to assign Mons. Michael Fitzgerald (who had been John Paul II's point man for dealing with the Muslims) from the Vatican to Cairo in order to clear the decks at the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog - both moves in the early months of his Papacy. And he moved out Fitzgerald long before Regensburg. I don't think anyone doubts Cardinal Levada is his man. B16 placed Cardinal Tauran at Inter-Religious Dialog and Mons. Ravasi at Culture. He moved Mons. Amato, his former #2 at CDF to lead Saints, he called Cardinal Hummes to Clergy, and Cardinal Canizares to Divine Worship. He placed Archbishop Burke in charge of the Apostolic Segnatura. The apparent spanner in the works has been Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, but the Pope was evidently waiting for him to reach canonical retirement age, which will be soon, and everyone now believes Cardinal Pell from Syndey will take his place. Which of the John Paul II Old Guard are still in place whom oen can identify as anti-Ratzinger, and what are they in charge of?? I don't think it is helpful to generalize about the heads of the Ratzinger Curia, nor to judge the Pope's will by such a generalization, because an actual look at his appointees shows a completely different picture!]
I was in St Peter’s Square five years ago. It was hilarious to witness the rage of the Tabletistas (though, to my everlasting regret, I missed Bobbie’s blubbing). But it was hard to know what to expect of a papacy led by “God’s Rottweiler”, as we still thought of him.
Not yet having read his amazing books, I didn’t anticipate the intensity of Ratzinger’s vision of renovation.
Still less did I guess that his reforms might founder because he is simply too nice.
I think it is rather premature, to say the least, to say 'time is running out' for Benedict XVI - Leo XIII lived to be 93 - or that 'his reforms will founder because he is too nice'.
Far more than the Curia, it is the local bishops who can and do cause the worst damage to the Church - those of them who consider themselves (very wrongly) to have been placed by Vatican II on par with the Pope and under no obligation to be 'in communion with the Successor of Peter'.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/04/2010 20:03]