This article is meant to be somewhat in praise of Benedict XVI, and it comes in the series of newsmakers for 2010 appearing in Macleans, Canada's only newsweekly magazine. Unfortunately, the writer also perpetrates those false notions about Benedict XVI that have now become mindlessly elevated to media myth and endlessly cited as 'fact'.
Benedict XVI: Grace under fire
He didn’t foresee the long-running sex abuse scandal suddenly igniting,
but the Pope showed surprising openness in dealing with it
by Brian Bethune
December 9, 2010
There is always, in the spiritual and political life of the Roman Catholic Church, a fire smouldering somewhere: minority Christians under persecution here, an abortion initiative in a Catholic country there, rebellious laity, scandalous clergy.
So Pope Benedict XVI had no particular reason, on New Year’s Day 2010, to foresee that the long-running clerical child sexual abuse scandal would suddenly burn white-hot, and spread far outside the confines of his Church.
But as the penitential season of Lent began in February, hundreds more victims surfaced with their harrowing stories, not only in Ireland and the U.S., the epicentres of the scandal, but across Europe, including Benedict’s native Germany.
This time it was more than the original crimes that angered the faithful and outsiders alike. The focus was increasingly on
the cover-up — the swearing of victims to secrecy, the shuffling of pedophile priests to fresh starts (and fresh opportunities) in unsuspecting parishes — and the way that cover-up touched the papacy itself.
Questions were raised in the media and among Catholics about Benedict’s role, before he became Pope, in determining the Vatican’s treatment of predatory clergy,
a response widely condemned as ineffectual at best and criminally negligent at worst. [Widely condemned out of ignorance, deliberate and willful, of the facts!]
Benedict found himself launched on an annus horribilis that would prove as awful as any experienced by a Pope in modern times.
In March, the Pope became caught up in the German part of the scandal. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich in 1980, he had reportedly approved the transfer of confessed pedophile priest Peter Hullermann to therapy. After being treated for only a few days, Hullermann returned to pastoral duties and abused more children
[several years after Cardinal Ratzinger had left Munich, it must be emphasized! The timeline has been generally left off in all the subsequent reporting about this, making it appear that Hullerman's recidivism took place under Cardinal Ratzinger!]
He was finally convicted of sexual abuse in 1986
[which is apparently the year he started offending again - there is no record at all that he offended between late 1980 when Hullerman came to Munich and February 1982 when the Cardinal left for Rome to head the CDF.]
Benedict’s defenders, who dismissed the Hullermann allegations as an attempt to smear the Pope’s reputation, were left reeling when it emerged in mid-March that Hullermann, now out of jail, was still practising as a priest. (He was immediately suspended from his duties.)
[What does all this have to do with defending the Pope who was completely out of Munich affairs since February 1982 when he left for Rome????]
Ratzinger’s failure to defrock Lawrence Murphy, one of the most notorious pedophiles in the U.S. Church, who had molested 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin during the 1960s and ’70s, also drew fire. Ratzinger halted a Church trial in 1996 [more than 20 years after the offenses were committed!] after Murphy wrote to him to beg for mercy because of his poor health. The cardinal, noting no criminal charges had been laid, acceded. Murphy was allowed to die a priest, and was buried in his vestments.
[This is, of course, a completely biased and highlighy inaccurate account of the Murphy case. But then, this is the kind of tendentiously facile summarizing that MSM has indulged in with respect to the sex-abuse issue and Cardinal Ratzinger's supposed personal culpability - the Black Legend that will continue to be reiterated by MSM everytime a new 'scandal' comes to light.]
By summer the Pope was facing calls for his resignation, massive and hostile media attention, and the prospect of a harrowing September visit to Britain. Never the most Catholic-friendly country at the best of times, the homeland of author Christopher Hitchens and Geoffrey Robertson, the human rights jurist whose new book sets out the case for prosecuting Benedict for obstruction of justice, promised to be a papal nightmare of bad press, sullen Catholics and angry demonstrators.
Michael Higgins, one of the most prominent lay Catholic intellectuals in Canada, was there for the visit. Among the organizers and senior churchmen involved, he says, “determinedly happy faces hid almost universal worry.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to Benedict’s Waterloo.
Catholic rage [the only Catholics who 'raged' were sanctimonious liberals who are ever ready to find anything wrong with the Church and with the Pope], if not outsiders’ condemnation, started to abate, as the faithful recalled that Benedict had done far more than his predecessor, the charismatic John Paul II, to crack down on abusive clergy and, just as important, was much more open about the scale of the problem,
even if not to the extent some would wish.
And they realized, too, that the cover-up cases now being revealed were, on the whole, old cases, indicating that steps taken by the Church in the 1980s and after — including by Ratzinger, the Vatican’s chief disciplinarian under John Paul — had borne fruit.
Benedict, after all, was the Pope who had decried the “filth” that was encrusting his Church and who met with victims time and again.
[But Bethune does not say why the media had obstinately ignored Cardinal Ratzinger's record on this account since he became Pope. Recall the 2006 BBC documentary which accused him - most erroneously, of course - of instructing the bishops of the world to cover up for offending priests, even ascribing to him a 1963 Vatican document! The BBC has never retracted that preposterous accusation.]
“I think the British tour went well,” Higgins remarks, “because Benedict refused to ignore the issue. He was heartfelt in his sorrow and his disappointment.
I think he gets the message [Gee, what condescension! But it's the usual liberal condescension to Benedict XVI, whom they persist in treating as a stubborn schoolboy who never learns a lesson, or an old dotard that they must forever lecture to} — realizes how huge this issue is and how much damage was done — far more than John Paul did.”
Early in his papacy, Benedict removed from active ministry the Mexican sexual abuser Marcial Maciel Degollado, who had simply been ignored during the papacy of his good friend John Paul.
Higgins calls it “
the most egregious example of tolerated corruption in John Paul’s time, and Benedict ended it.”
The Pope too seems to have felt that the storm, at least as it swirled about him personally, was abating in the autumn. Or perhaps, at 83, he’s in a hurry to accomplish his oft-indicated aim of reconciling faith and reason and gaining a greater presence for the Church in the public square.
Instead of ducking the headlines, Benedict collaborated on a wide-ranging book with a sympathetic German author, Peter Seewald, in which the Pope asserted, among other matters, that resignation on health grounds was a viable option for Popes and — far more controversially — that
the need to prevent diseases like AIDS could outweigh the Church’s blanket opposition to condoms. [The liberal interpretation, now encoded into myth, in order to make it appear that the Pope has come over to their side and that they were right all along to have raised a Hurricane-5 scale ruckus in March 2009 against what he said then about condoms!]
[As a matter of fact, when the Vatican first announced that the Pope had done the interview for a book to be published almost right away, the obvious conclusion one drew was that he wished to directly address the issues raised during his Pontificate, and especially in 2009-2010, not ex cathedra, as Popes usually speak, but through an informal medium where he would not be constrained by his office from expressing his personal thoughts.]
He gave the
startling (for a Pope) example of a male prostitute wearing one for a client’s sake.
[It's not startling, because it is a singular situation in which condom use has nothing to do with contraception, which is what the Church objects to, not the use of condoms per se.]
A Vatican spokesman later confirmed that for Benedict, the use of condoms by people infected with HIV, female or male, could be “the first step of responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk to the life of the person with whom there are relations.” [So, a first step to morality the
Though Benedict emphatically did not alter official Church teaching —still opposed to contraceptive use — his words angered some conservative Catholics. They were welcomed by many others, including clerics and health care workers in Africa,
where the AIDS problem is worst — and where Catholicism is booming.
[Facile shorthand, and quite misleading, to describe the AIDS situation in Africa, as if the majority of AIDS patients there were Catholics - they are not! And it perpetrates this most unlikely fallacy that MSM deals in, according to which if the Pope and the Church say NO to comdom use by married Catholic couples, it is tantamount to sentencing tens of millions to death by AIDS! On the one hand, they taunt the Pope that no one listens to the Church's antiquated teachings anyway, but suddenly in this case, they would have us believe that everyone would not only take notice but, Catholic or not, would also heed the Pope and stop using condoms! Logic and common sense fly out the window when ideology becomes the dominant criterion for thought!]
The Christian liturgical year began anew on Nov. 28 with the First Sunday of Advent. Pope Benedict XVI could have left his old, horrible year, on the quiet. But that doesn’t seem to be his style.
Speaking of the interview, here's another informal review of LOTW:
The Pope tells all
Dec 09, 2010
In a book already getting worldwide attention for the disclosure of an answer to just one question asked of the Pope, one can be sure that
Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times has much more to tell.
Peter Seewald interviews Pope Benedict XVI, and as readers have already observed, the condom question that was making national headlines is by far one of the least interesting pieces. The book includes the Pope's views on the Church in the today’s times; the controversy over his lecture in Regensburg, Germany; questions on whether he ever considered resignation; and his thoughts on Pius XII. Here's a glimpse into the book:
On page 23, the Pope describes learning of scandal and says, "It was really almost like the crater of a volcano, out of which suddenly a tremendous cloud of filth came, darkening and soiling everything, so that above all the priesthood suddenly seemed to be a place of shame and every priest was under the suspicion of being one like that, too."
On page 147, the Pope answers a question about whether the Church opposes regulating conception. He says, "After all, everyone knows that the Church affirms natural regulation of conception, which is not just a method but also a way of life. Because it presupposes that couples take time for each other."
On page 151, when asked about the acceptance of homosexuality in the West, the Pope affirms the "meaning and direction of sexuality" and that is "to bring about the union of man and woman, and in this way to give humanity posterity, children, a future. This is the determination internal to the essence of sexuality. Everything else is against sexuality's intrinsic meaning and direction. This is a point we need to hold firm, even if it is not pleasing to our age."
But the Pope also gets a bit whimsical and we get a peek at his personality. In the book, readers learn what he does in the evening, whether he uses his exercise bicycle, what his favorite movies are and if he's attached to any material possessions.
In many ways, it is like sitting down with the Pope and asking him every question that has been on your mind.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/12/2010 12:43]