Posted on 04/10/2010 11:49:41 PM PDT by Steelfish
Your church sets itself up for this criticism, because in this case it acted first to protect itself. As I understand it there are some limitations created by your church's confessional system in reporting these crimes. However, moving priests around who were doing these things and not encouraging victims to report crimes immediately is very damning.
The Catholic Church should not be criticized any more than any other church, or any other organization, because pedophiles have slipped in.
I agree. It's what you do when you know there is a problem that a church, school, Boy Scout Troop, etc. should be judged by.
I do believe that ANY church should be setting the example in dealing with them, so in that respect the Catholic Church, and any other Church, should be more accountable than any other organization for not dealing with it in light of Biblical teaching on immorality.
Why do RC's seem so inclined to defend rather than force all the bums involved out?
In the case of the criminals that were moved from church to church committing the same crimes against young boys and girls once it's clear they aren't repentant would the secrecy of the confessional be broken?
Why not do that from behind prison walls.
Hold up... these are apples and oranges here.
In the cases of the priests who were being moved from church to church, the issue had come up other than in situations when the offending priest was the penitent - so that isn't the issue at hand at all.
Rather, the problem here was one of inaction on the parts of the dioceses where these priests were serving - out of the misguided understanding that these priests could be 'cured' (part of the prevailing psychology of the time), or for some other reason. In many of these cases, it was the inaction of the individual dioceses themselves - because the bishops did not need the approval of the Holy See to move these priests to places where they would have no contact with children or to move them out of active ministry altogether. It is completely unnecessary to wait for the Holy See to defrock such a priest.
As an anecdotal example, I know of a priest who had a sexual relationship with an adult woman - something which from a purely legal perspective is completely above board. Yet when it was found out, he was removed from active ministry - I doubt he will ever return, even though the diocese needs priests and he is relatively young. He will likely never be defrocked, and probably won't be given a dispensation to return to the lay state. He will continue to have the obligations of the priest without serving in any sort of ministry - in a sense, he's permanently stuck between worlds. There is no reason that these dioceses could not do the same with the priests who were known pedophiles who posed far more danger than this particular priest will.
The personal hostilities have been known to run hot and run deep on both sides... anyone who has ever spent time in the Religion Forum knows that. It's a sad irony that the Religion Forum must be one of the most tightly regulated forums on the site.
The facts:
Journalists Abandon Standards To Attack The Pope
By Phil Lawler | April 10, 2010
We’re off and running once again, with another completely phony story that purports to implicate Pope Benedict XVI in the protection of abusive priests.
The “exclusive” story released by AP yesterday, which has been dutifully passed along now by scores of major media outlets, would never have seen the light of day if normal journalistic standards had been in place. Careful editors should have asked a series of probing questions, and in every case the answer to those questions would have shown that the story had no “legs.”
First to repeat the bare-bones version of the story: in November 1985, then-Cardinal Ratzinger signed a letter deferring a decision on the laicization of Father Stephen Kiesle, a California priest who had been accused of molesting boys.
Now the key questions:
• Was Cardinal Ratzinger responding to the complaints of priestly pedophilia? No. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which the future Pontiff headed, did not have jurisdiction for pedophile priests until 2001. The cardinal was weighing a request for laicization of Kiesle.
• Had Oakland’s Bishop John Cummins sought to laicize Kiesle as punishment for his misconduct? No. Kiesle himself asked to be released from the priesthood. The bishop supported the wayward priest’s application.
• Was the request for laicization denied? No. Eventually, in 1987, the Vatican approved Kiesle’s dismissal from the priesthood.
• Did Kiesle abuse children again before he was laicized? To the best of our knowledge, No. The next complaints against him arose in 2002: 15 years after he was dismissed from the priesthood.
• Did Cardinal Ratzinger’s reluctance to make a quick decision mean that Kiesle remained in active ministry? No. Bishop Cummins had the authority to suspend the predator-priest, and in fact he had placed him on an extended leave of absence long before the application for laicization was entered.
• Would quicker laicization have protected children in California? No. Cardinal Ratzinger did not have the power to put Kiesle behind bars. If Kiesle had been defrocked in 1985 instead of 1987, he would have remained at large, thanks to a light sentence from the California courts. As things stood, he remained at large. He was not engaged in parish ministry and had no special access to children.
• Did the Vatican cover up evidence of Kiesle’s predatory behavior? No. The civil courts of California destroyed that evidence after the priest completed a sentence of probation— before the case ever reached Rome.
So to review: This was not a case in which a bishop wanted to discipline his priest and the Vatican official demurred. This was not a case in which a priest remained active in ministry, and the Vatican did nothing to protect the children under his pastoral care.
This was not a case in which the Vatican covered up evidence of a priest’s misconduct. This was a case in which a priest asked to be released from his vows, and the Vatican— which had been flooded by such requests throughout the 1970s — wanted to consider all such cases carefully. In short, if you’re looking for evidence of a sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, this case is irrelevant.
We Americans know what a sex-abuse crisis looks like. The scandal erupts when evidence emerges that bishops have protected abusive priests, kept them active in parish assignments, covered up evidence of the charges against them, and lied to their people. There is no such evidence in this or any other case involving Pope Benedict XVI.
Competent reporters, when dealing with a story that involves special expertise, seek information from experts in that field. Capable journalists following this story should have sought out canon lawyers to explain the 1985 document— not merely relied on the highly biased testimony of civil lawyers who have lodged multiple suits against the Church. If they had understood the case, objective reporters would have recognized that they had no story. But in this case, reporters for the major media outlets are far from objective.
The New York Times— which touched off this feeding frenzy with two error-riddled front-page reports— seized on the latest “scoop” by AP to say that the 1985 document exemplified:
…the sort of delay that is fueling a renewed sexual abuse scandal in the church that has focused on whether the future pope moved quickly enough to remove known pedophiles from the priesthood, despite pleas from American bishops.
Here we have a complete rewriting of history. Earlier in this decade, American newspapers exposed the sad truth that many American bishops had kept pedophile priests in active ministry. Now the Times, which played an active role in exposing that scandal, would have us believe that the American bishops were striving to rid the priesthood of the predators, and the Vatican resisted!
No, what is “fueling a renewed sexual abuse scandal” is a media frenzy. There is a scandal here, indeed, but it’s not the scandal you’re reading about in the mass media. The scandal is the complete collapse of journalistic standards in the handling of this story.
The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is something that is always deserved.
And yes, pastoral care after guilt is proven SHOULD be from behind prison walls - I won't disagree with you on that. Yet it's still more complicated than just "forcing the bums out."
The Swiss Guard may have been a force to reckon with, centuries ago. But, the most recent photo I've seen of them suggests that it's devolved into some sort of a plum patronage position. The "guards" looked like college-aged metrosexuals in striped pantaloons ... nothing fearsome about them.
Thank you for posting this - on this note I retire.
The Vatican Swiss Guard are an elite corps.
So I’ve been informed. More recent photos of them don’t quite live up to the billing, though.
You do not have the full story, I seriously doubt it is what you proclaim...
Indeed. There is a larger agenda at play here and it’s revolting: See below:
______________________________________________________________________________
The End of History and the Last Pope
By George Neumayr on 4.8.10
Post-Enlightenment liberalism has long regarded the Catholic Church as the last obstacle to its final triumph. The Enlightenment-era French dilettante Denis Diderot spoke of strangling the last priest with the “guts of the last king.”
The ceaseless attacks on Pope Benedict XVI over the last few weeks form the most recent scene in this historical drama. Unlike Napoleon, today’s forces of secularization can’t imprison a pope. Well, at least not yet; Christopher Hitchens is working on this, calling for the European Union to seize Benedict’s traveling papers. But they can strangle him politically and culturally. That his popularity poll numbers have apparently dipped below those of the most inane and rancid celebrities testifies to this perverse power.
The children of Diderot at the New York Times understand the secularist Enlightenment project very well. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, telegraphed this in a 2002 column.
Since he wrote the column before he was promoted to editor, he didn’t bother to hide his anti-Catholic bigotry with circumspect throat-clearing. He described himself as a “collapsed Catholic” — “well beyond lapsed.” He affected a false modesty about this, saying that for this reason he claims “no voice in whom the church ordains or how it prays or what it chooses to call a sin.” But of course he does claim that voice — and thinks all should obey it.
He made it clear that he was rooting for “reforms” that would reduce Catholicism to a captive of modern liberalism: “…the struggle within the church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism.”
In that one sentence lies the whole subtext to the paper’s campaign against Pope Benedict in the last few weeks. The Holy Father represents for Keller and Dowd and Goodstein the hated “forces of absolutism” that the tolerant and enlightened think themselves called by history to stop.
For an elite drunk on its own enlightenment, the ends will always justify the means against religion. So what, Keller figured, if my reporters could only come up with straining, half-baked pieces that cast fragments of information about Benedict in the worst possible light? Let’s run them anyways, so that the forces of tolerance can triumph over the forces of absolutism!
And if it turns out that the forces of tolerance are largely responsible for mishandling these abuse cases (the ousted homosexual Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the subject of flattering profiles over the years in the New Yorker and New York Times, is the person most responsible for dereliction in the Milwaukee case the Times claims to find so outrageous), well, let’s blame it on Benedict anyways. He could have done more!
In that 2002 column, Keller oozed contempt for the Church, speaking of the hierarchy as “aging celibates” (imagine Keller ever writing an equivalent sentence about imams) who refused to embrace the “equality of women, abortion on demand, and gay rights.”
Keller had little use for Pope John Paul II, whom he likened to an authoritarian Communist:
One paradox of the Polish pope is that while he is rightly revered for helping bring down the godless Communists, he has replicated something very like the old Communist Party in his church. Karol Wojtyla has shaped a hierarchy that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live. The Communists mouthed pieties about ‘’social justice’’ and the rule of the working class while creating a corrupt dictatorship of bureaucrats….
…like the Communists, John Paul has carefully constructed a Kremlin that will be inhospitable to a reformer. He has strengthened the Vatican equivalent of the party Central Committee, called the Curia, and populated it with reactionaries. He has put a stamp of papal infallibility on the issue of ordaining women, making it more difficult for a successor to come to terms with the issue. He has trained bishops that the path of advancement is obsequious obedience to himself. Alarmed by priests who showed too much populist sympathy for their parishioners, the pope, according to the Notre Dame historian R. Scott Appleby, has turned seminaries into factories of conformity, begetting a generation of inflexible young priests who have no idea how to talk to real-life Catholics.
Of course, if John Paul II had been a real Communist like Alger Hiss or Van Jones, Keller wouldn’t have talked about him so scathingly. But any stick would do at the time and the Communist analogy appealed to his imagination at the moment. Notice that these days the opportunistic complaint from the Keller-led Times is not that the Church is too authoritarian but that it is too lax. Apparently, it is not autocratic after all. The paper can’t decide if Benedict is a Rottweiler or lap dog.
Upon his election, the Times called him “hard line” and “divisive.” Now he is soft and clubby. But imagine if Benedict did govern the Church like the autocrat of Keller’s imagination, sweeping down to sack every derelict bishop and corrupt priest across the globe, the Times would be the first to engage in ACLU-style whining about the lack of due process, etc., etc. In fact, when he issued his renewal of the Church’s ban on the ordination of homosexuals in the first year of his pontificate — a ban which the “forces of tolerance” within the Church had suspended for decades, a factor contributing greatly to the abuse scandal — the Times was the first to object.
“How many divisions does the Pope have?” secularists, inspired by Stalin, used to scoff. The Pope, as they know, enjoys no such power, yet in recent weeks they have acted as if he had a military and police at his disposal which he simply refused to use against abusers.
It is the “forces of tolerance” which command the divisions, and they will continue to march through history, displaying all the tolerance of French Revolutionaries as they look forward to that final moment when the last priest can be strangled with the guts of the last pope.
George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.
My church?
Good. Can we also arrest on the same grounds (crimes against humanity) those who, like Dawkins, share the athropocentric worldview that resulted in the extermination of over 100 million human beings who dared to differ from his opinion?
However,
the personally assaultive of personhood shots of the most virulent sort
TEND to come
MOSTLY from one side.
That’s not a HUGE issue to me . . . though the double standard can be grating . . .
I find it very curious and fascinating.
I persistently wonder . . . what’s WITH that?
WHY is that the case?
Puzzling.
What I do see are the perverts of the MSM gleefully demanding that the Church be villified and attacking the Pope, when they probably shouldn't be in the rock throwing business.
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