Pope to US bishops:
On acknowledging the sufferings
of sex abuse victims, transparency
in handling the issue, and
the need for new evangelization
Pope Benedict XVI today addressed the bishops of northeastern United States (dioceses of New England and New York state) who have been the first US group to make an ad limina visit in his Pontificate. The rest will take their turns over the next several months.
Here is the text of the address he delivered to them:
Dear Brother Bishops,
I greet you all with affection in the Lord and, through you, the Bishops from the United States who in the course of the coming year will make their visits ad limina Apostolorum.
Our meetings are the first since my 2008 Pastoral Visit to your country, which was intended to encourage the Catholics of America in the wake of the scandal and disorientation caused by the sexual abuse crisis of recent decades.
I wished to acknowledge personally the suffering inflicted on the victims and the honest efforts made both to ensure the safety of our children and to deal appropriately and transparently with allegations as they arise.
It is my hope that the Church’s conscientious efforts to confront this reality will help the broader community to recognize the causes, true extent and devastating consequences of sexual abuse, and to respond effectively to this scourge which affects every level of society.
By the same token, just as the Church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards.
A second, equally important, purpose of my Pastoral Visit was to summon the Church in America to recognize, in the light of a dramatically changing social and religious landscape, the urgency and demands of a new evangelization.
In continuity with this aim, I plan in the coming months to present for your consideration a number of reflections which I trust you will find helpful for the discernment you are called to make in your task of leading the Church into the future which Christ is opening up for us.
Many of you have shared with me your concern about the grave challenges to a consistent Christian witness presented by an increasingly secularized society.
I consider it significant, however, that there is also an increased sense of concern on the part of many men and women, whatever their religious or political views, for the future of our democratic societies.
They see a troubling breakdown in the intellectual, cultural and moral foundations of social life, and a growing sense of dislocation and insecurity, especially among the young, in the face of wide-ranging societal changes.
Despite attempts to still the Church’s voice in the public square, many people of good will continue to look to her for wisdom, insight and sound guidance in meeting this far-reaching crisis.
The present moment can thus be seen, in positive terms, as a summons to exercise the prophetic dimension of your episcopal ministry by speaking out, humbly yet insistently, in defense of moral truth, and offering a word of hope, capable of opening hearts and minds to the truth that sets us free.
At the same time, the seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated.
The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers, leading at times to that “quiet attrition” from the Church which you raised with me during my Pastoral Visit.
Immersed in this culture, believers are daily beset by the objections, the troubling questions and the cynicism of a society which seems to have lost its roots, by a world in which the love of God has grown cold in so many hearts.
Evangelization thus appears not simply a task to be undertaken ad extra; we ourselves are the first to need re-evangelization.
As with all spiritual crises, whether of individuals or communities, we know that the ultimate answer can only be born of a searching, critical and ongoing self-assessment and conversion in the light of Christ’s truth. Only through such interior renewal will we be able to discern and meet the spiritual needs of our age with the ageless truth of the Gospel.
Here I cannot fail to express my appreciation of the real progress which the American Bishops have made, individually and as a Conference, in responding to these issues and in working together to articulate a common pastoral vision, the fruits of which can be seen, for example, in your recent documents on faithful citizenship and on the institution of marriage.
The importance of these authoritative expressions of your shared concern for the authenticity of the Church’s life and witness in your country should be evident to all.
In these days, the Church in the United States is implementing the revised translation of the Roman Missal. I am grateful for your efforts to ensure that this new translation will inspire an ongoing catechesis which emphasizes the true nature of the liturgy and, above all, the unique value of Christ’s saving sacrifice for the redemption of the world.
A weakened sense of the meaning and importance of Christian worship can only lead to a weakened sense of the specific and essential vocation of the laity to imbue the temporal order with the spirit of the Gospel.
America has a proud tradition of respect for the sabbath; this legacy needs to be consolidated as a summons to the service of God’s Kingdom and the renewal of the social fabric in accordance with its unchanging truth.
In the end, however, the renewal of the Church’s witness to the Gospel in your country is essentially linked to the recovery of a shared vision and sense of mission by the entire Catholic community.
I know that this is a concern close to your own heart, as reflected in your efforts to encourage communication, discussion and consistent witness at every level of the life of your local Churches.
I think in particular of the importance of Catholic universities and the signs of a renewed sense of their ecclesial mission, as attested by the discussions marking the tenth anniversary of the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and such initiatives as the symposium recently held at Catholic University of America on the intellectual tasks of the new evangelization.
Young people have a right to hear clearly the Church’s teaching and, most importantly, to be inspired by the coherence and beauty of the Christian message, so that they in turn can instill in their peers a deep love of Christ and his Church.
Dear Brother Bishops, I am conscious of the many pressing and at times apparently insoluble problems which you face daily in the exercise of your ministry.
With the confidence born of faith, and with great affection, I offer you these words of encouragement and willingly commend you and the clergy, religious and lay faithful of your Dioceses to the intercession of Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States.
To all of you I impart my Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of wisdom, strength and peace in the Lord.
Two black-and-white photos from tomorrow's OR. In this day and age, there is no excuse for such technically bad photographs - so bad they can't even be improved with Corel paintshop! (Compare them to the crisp and bright color photo up above, used on Page 1.) I only used the black-and-whites because the left photo shows the Pope addressing the US bishops, and the right shows him with Mons. Timothy Dolan (right), Archbishop of New York and president of the USCCB.
Unfortunately, AP seized on the Pope's remarks to cast him and the Church in a bad light - if you can imagine anyone doing that with the remarks quoted above. But then, nothing is too low to plumb for MSM - and AP, in particular (along with the professional Church-haters they use as hatchets to do their bloody work) - when seeking to impugn the Church. This is another hateful negative opinion piece from AP masquerading as a news story.:
Benedict XVI: Sex abuse
a ‘scourge’ for all society
VATICAN CITY, Nov. 26 (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI
insisted on Saturday that all of society’s institutions and not just the Catholic Church must be held to "exacting" standards in their response to sex abuse of children, and
defended the Church’s efforts to confront the problem.
[Note the verbs 'insisted' and 'defended' which express editorial judgment on what the Pope said. What was there for him to 'insist' on, since he has hardly ever said this before, and what was there for him to 'defend' in what he said today? The tone of this lead paragraph suggests that the Pope's statements about sex abuse were defensive, when they were simply affirmative!]
Benedict acknowledged in remarks to visiting U.S. bishops during an audience at the Vatican that pedophilia was a "scourge" for society, and that decades of scandals over clergy abusing children had left Catholics in the United States bewildered.
"It is my hope that the Church’s conscientious efforts to confront this reality will help the broader community to recognize the causes, true extent and devastating consequences of sexual abuse, and to respond effectively to this scourge which affects every level of society," he said.
"By the same token, just as the Church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards," the Pope said.
An official of a U.S. group advocating for victims of clergy abuse lamented that Benedict, with his remarks, was setting a "terrible example" for bishops.
"No public figure talks more about child safety but does little to actually make children safer than Pope Benedict," David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told The Associated Press in an emailed statement.
"The Pope would have us believe that this crisis is about sex abuse. It isn’t. It is about covering up sex abuse," Clohessy said. "And while child sex crimes happen in every institution, in no institution are they ignored or concealed as consistently as in the Catholic church."
[And a pox on all the Clohertys of the world who have nothing in mind other than a vendetta on the Church - who continue to talk as if this were the year 200,0 and nothing had been done at all in the past 11 years about both the abusive priests and the cover-ups or attempted cover-ups perpetrated by some bishops, or as if pedophile abuse and miscreant bishops were the rule of the thumb in the whole Church.... And call me 'undemocratic' but isn't there something inherently wrong when a news agency like AP gives equal space and play to statements by the Pope and the hateful Pavlov-dog reflex spitback by publicity hounds like Cloherty????]
The pedophile scandal has exploded in recent decades in the United States, but similar clergy sex abuse revelations have tainted the church in many other countries, including Mexico, Ireland, and several other European nations, including Italy.
But the most high-profile sex abuse case in the United States at the moment doesn’t involve the church. Penn State university’s former defensive football coordinator Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys, and the fallout has led to the firing of longtime coach Joe Paterno and the departure of university president Graham Spanier.
College football in the U.S. is highly popular. The scandal has shaken the reputation of a college program that long had prided itself on integrity.
Benedict didn’t address accusations by many victims and their advocates that Church leaders, including at the office in the Vatican that Benedict headed before becoming pontiff[WHOA! What was that again? Since when have there been accusations that CDF officials have ever tried to cover up any sex abuse cases brought to their attention??? AP is brazenly incorporating a new embellishment in the boilerplate paragraph of charges against the Vatican that they routinely add to any story about sex abuse by priests],
systematically tried to cover up the scandals, and that they have rarely been held accountable for that.
Investigations, often by civil authorities, revealed that church hierarchy frequently transferred pedophile priests from one parish to another. [AP makes it appear that this is a routine happening when, in fact, this has been documented only in a few cases - not even 10, as I recal - in the United States and Ireland.]
Benedict told the bishops that his papal pilgrimage to the United States in 2008 "was intended to encourage the Catholics of America in the wake of the scandal and disorientation caused by the sexual abuse crisis of recent decades."
Echoing sentiment he has expressed in occasional meetings with victims of the abuse on trips abroad, Benedict added: "I wish to acknowledge personally the suffering inflicted on the victims and the honest efforts made to ensure both the safety of our children and to deal appropriately and transparently with allegations as they arise."
Benedict seemed to be reflecting some churchmen’s contentions that the Church has wrongly been singled out as villains for the abuse, a view that angered victims’ advocates.
"The Pope is again setting a terrible example for the world’s bishops, echoing the claim by some of them that the church hierarchy is somehow being picked on by the public, the press and their parishioners," Clohessy said. [Forgive me for being so uncharitable, but I cannot express enough contempt for vermin like Clohessy.... and to be fair to Clohessy and his ilk, a similar contempt for the AP reporters at the Vatican and their editors for their shameless manipulation of the story..
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/11/2011 15:27]