CARDINAL LAW’S RESIGNATION [Rabid Bigots Falsely Accuse Pope]

CatholicLeague ^ | 12-13-2002 | Bill Donohue

[Dave S]

Pope-haters & catholic-haters - please continue to show your true colors. We are taking this all down.

Me thinks your some kind of nut. What's your problem?

[xm177e2]

Q: How is this about "rabid bigotry"?

Don't pay attention to the extreme rhetoric. The Catholic League is like a Catholic version of the National Action Network (Al Sharpton's organization). It's political street theater; William Donahue is a monumental boob.

He's always whining about how much Catholics are being discriminated against. Catholics (and other religious people) are slandered and discriminated against in many occasions--just like minorities. But Jesse Jackson goes too far, as does Wild Bill Donahue.

If this was a Muslim religious leader involved in a sex scandal like this FR would never hear the end of it. The same people defending the Pope now would be some of the loudest attackers.

[Dave S]

I continue to live under the presumption that the first amendment applies to me and therefore I will note the names and posts of all bigots for future reference.

Yes but be aware that you can be sued by individuals (non celebreties) that you accuse of being bigots and its up to you to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are. If they have said something about the Pople and you call them bigots, and they sue you, you have to prove a negative (i.e., that the Pope didnt do what they said) AND that they knew this. Better take your medicine and calm down.

[John_11_25]

The Pope, who represents the Catholic Church, and therefore responsible for its actions.

If (I will give him the benefit of the doubt) did not know about sexual abuse cases, then a lot of high ranking people in the Vatican surely did, as someone had to authorize million dollar payments.

Therefore he is responsible for their actions as well as the actual priests that committed the crime, if he does nothing, or does not try to find out what is going on, then he is just as guilty. (That’s why you need people at the top of organisations that are physically and mentally capable of doing their job).

However it seems some high-ranking people at the top of the Vatican, think they get more sympathy (and in turn money, from the followers) with an old man, who can barley speak. If he were physically and mentally able, the press would want to speak to him and not his aids.

Therefore I suggest the best thing to do for all concerned is for the Pope to announce the disbandment of the Catholic Church and all its assets and then he should step down, and become the last Pope of the Catholic Church, as we know it.

Thereby fulfilling the 3rd prophesy of Fatima, that John Paul would be the last Pope of the Catholic Church and would walk on its ruins.

[Dave S]

Anti-Catholic Bigot: one who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, and politics of hating Catholicism and its leaders to the core, and is intolerant of those who differ.

How would you describe someone who is deeply offened by the behavior of some priests, by the many bishops and higherups who aided and abbetted these priests, and the parishoners who condoned their offerings be used to payoff victims to protect the guilty?

[Dave S]

It's time some of these people got off of their judgment chairs, and take a look at their own churches. If it can happen in the RC church; it can certainly happen in any church!

Perhaps if your priest could enter into marriage and live a more or less normal life, you wouldnt attract so many perverts into the priesthood. While its possible anywhere, it seems to be hugely predominant in your church and for some reason you seem to want to cover it up.

[Dave S]

Don't just presume that even if you're not a R.C., that it can't happen in other churches!

You're in deep denial. Law and others in Boston were part of a criminal conspiracy and coverup. What right do you have to even comment on others. You have a huge mess of your own to clean up. If you dont watch out and Boston archdiosese goes bankrupt, then all church records will be open to the public. Wont that be fun.

[Rain-maker]

The leader is responsible for the institution, whether it be the Vatican, Enron, etc.

If he can not control the integrity of his institution then he is negligent or a fool.

[dsutah]

Did I say anything about Law not being punished? No, I didn't, and you're still not addressing my post! I think you're in denial yourself! For your information; churches, as well as schools or other organizations, are full of individuals who have the capacity/potential to go wrong. Say what you will, but certainly you remember that when Christianity started; people were certainly uplifted, filled with the Holy Spirit.

But that didn't make them perfect plastic people incapable of sin. But it was to strengthen them, and help them keep on the path. They were still humans, learning to keep from tempting situations. Let me ask you, isn't it possible for anyone in other churches from going astray? Or are they perfect, even more perfect than the Lord himself? I don't think you'll ever find someone more perfect than he was and still is.

Yes, the RC church has got a mess to clean up. Yes, the priests and others who abuse children and/or cover for others should be punished. What I'm trying to remind you and others of, is to be watchfull of your own church leaders! Otherwise you come off sounding like the Pharisee in the story about the Pharisee and the Publican. He was standing there saying he was so glad he wasn't a sinner like the guy sitting humbly, and crying that he was a sinner and sorry for his sins.

Now surely you've read that story, my dear; because it is in the Bible, I've seen it! There is also something about "Taking the log out of your own eye, before removing the mote from your brother's"! Maybe it's not in that exact form in all Bible's, but I'm sure it is basically the same in all! Maybe you should look and find it before you try to sit in judgment of RCs behavior! And then again, you have no right to judge!

[EDINVA]

Reading this thread has been very painful. If you want analogies, this is analogous to the Lott situation. To those on the Right, what Lott said was not earthshaking and hardly worthy of the bouhaha (except to the extent that it has caused POLITICAL damage to the party/cause). To minorities his comments merely reflected their long held perception of Lott and Republicans and conservatives generally as racist or, at a minimum, totally insensitive to their race's history. Depends on one's perspective. It reads on this thread that the diehard Catholics are defending their Church leader, while those opposing believe the current controversy merely confirms everything they've ever thought of and believed about the Catholic Church, and are to varying degrees, relishing the Church's predicament. Bigotry? Maybe. Prejudice? You bet.

[dsutah]

Oh you're just full of it! There are no more 'perverts' in our church than in any other. You know, you sound so, smug and self-righteous, and it's disgusting! And my 'priest' is just fine, thank you! And all of our pastors, and priests who have come to our parish as visitors, have been fine, capable, men.

To my knowledge, they had no scandal on them, except one. That one was dismissed by our bishop at the time. A very small handfull of them were found to have had problems, and all have been removed from their parishes by our bishops over the years.

And no, marriage will not solve this problem with our priests. Why, because married men are just as capable of messing up, as single men. And when they mess up, they have a wife to answer to also. Women priests? Ha! Women are just as subject to sin as men! Also, our Lord wasn't married, neither was Paul, and Phillip the Deacon was a widower, and his 3 daughters were referred to as 'virgins', so I might guess they stayed that way! Many of the martyrs and Christian heros/heroines were never married either, so your point is?

A lot of us have had to face what's happened in our church, and i'ts a painfull thing! But our church has been around a lot longer than others. Why it goes back to Christ an his Apostles! We've had other scandals, but there were just as many faith-filled people within it; who, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, were able to make needed corrections. And we'll do it again, and be renewed. Would you be able to face something like this happening? I wonder, with your obnoxious attitude!

Shouldn't you take a look and see if your's has any problems with this, and what they're actually doing about it? You better look closely, and make sure they're not covering up for anyone. And then, you come and throw your stones, but not before!

[Petronski]

Thank you for bringing this post to us. There are more than a few such rabid bigots right here on FR.

[Petronski]

YOu might could of scored some

Your grammar aside, this statement of yours shows that you view this matter as some kind of a game--scoring points and all--and that is all we need to know about you.

[jrlc]

So this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the laywers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that's probably about it.

[jrlc]

BTW, if the liberal press would cover it, buggering boys also undermines Islam worldwide. The religion hates women, loves boys.

[Illbay]

I don't believe, btw, that this is any sort of "smoking gun." It sounds as though all this happened AFTER the fact.

I'm not sure why a "defrocked priest" should be any sort of concern of the Catholic hierarchy, though. It seems curious.

[LadyDoc]

Michael Novak on Cardinal Bernard Law & Boston on National Review Online

December
13, 2002, 6:45 p.m.
The
Boston Disease
What
remains after Cardinal Law.


here is a uniquely
tribal quality to Boston, more so than in any other major American city,
even among others in the northeast. Bostonians don't take to outsiders
easily, and don't allow them to become insiders easily, either. And Bostonians
are themselves divided into tribes that to this day seem to mix with one
another as little as necessary. The
Late George Apley and other novels by John P. Marquand dramatized
the feeling quite well, and it hasn't yet entirely faded.
When I first went
to Boston (oh my!) just over 50 years ago, fresh from high school, I recall
visiting the home of a classmate in Quincy and being met at the door by
his very sweet Irish grandmother. Welcoming me warmly she was a little
puzzled by my name. "Novak?" she gently asked, "What sort
of name is that?"
"Slovak,"
I replied in as sprightly as voice as I could muster.
"Oh," she
said thoughtfully. "Well, that's nice, too."
"And you, Mrs.
Sweeney [not her real name]," I countered. "Have you lived your
whole life here in Quincy?"
"Ah, no!"
her eyes flashed merrily. "I was born out west." She added as
a clarifying afterthought: "In Worcester."
I figured out after
a while that I had to explain to people why Boston is called the Hub of
the Universe. The rest of the world is moving.
It so happened that
a few years later, when I was in graduate school at Harvard, my brother
married a young woman from Ireland who had relatives in "southie"
(i.e., south Boston). For the relatives, in those days, Harvard was another
country and spoke another tongue.
By accident, we also
had friends who moved in the circle of the old WASP families, from whom
various governors of the commonwealth had come, and that too was a different
world — banking, investments, an especially interesting veteran of
the CIA with vivid personal adventures overseas, insurance, etc. "Everyone
in Boston votes Republican," one young woman told me with total self-assurance,
not adverting to the total dominance of the Kennedys in Boston politics.
But then I realized she meant "everyone that matters," and in
her frame of reference was being quite accurate.
Others of our friends
were younger Catholic professionals (lawyers, surgeons) in Wellesley and
Newton, which was still another world.
During a season like
Christmas, my wife and I often found ourselves visiting a stunning array
of these enclaves, made poignantly aware by the nuances of jokes and humorous
asides of potential conversational land mines to be avoided. Boston seemed
to me a region of islands, an archipelago of mutually mistrustful rivals.
A fascinating and lovable city, but a little more content in its multiple
insularity than one would have liked. Wouldn't a kind of open meritocracy
have been easier on everybody, without so much reliance on who had which
roots?
One of my teachers,
the beloved David Reisman, warned me more than once about the fierce anti-Catholicism
that seeped from the roots of the ancient trees in Harvard Yard and Boston
Commons, "the ghosts of Puritan Boston." This pervasive anti-papist
feeling was compounded by generations of ethnic rivalry (and not only
on this side of the ocean), and again by monetary differentials, and differences
of manners. Not to put to fine a point upon it, the later arriving Irish
and Italians were looked down upon, and not really liked, by the old-timers.
You can see this genteelly put in one of Emerson's essays, invidiously
describing the faces of the Irish of Boston, as compared with the rosier
faces of London.
The tragic fall of
Cardinal Law has brought all these old memories to the surface. His fall
is tragic because it was through a weakness of his own (a weakness internal
to one of his virtues) that he did himself in. He believed it a bishop's
duty to be a father to his priests, to be especially compassionate to
them, to nurse them along — and he did so, the record shows, most
unwisely, and in the end destructively, both of some of them and of himself,
and of the reputation of the archdiocese. Meanwhile, he lost sight for
far too long of the gaping wounds inflicted on vulnerable young people,
on families, on the confidence and trust of the laity. His priests kept
letting him down, he became preoccupied with the priests, he forgot the
flock they were pledged to have been guarding. Some few shepherds —
but far too many for any one place — ran with the wolves. A bishop
is not merely a company commander, in charge of officers immediately below
him; his foremost duty is to his people, all of them, to protect them
from the wolves and guide them, to instruct them, and to bring them to
holiness.
The reputation for
lax discipline that had started long before Cardinal Law's time did not
compel his immediate attention on his arrival in Boston. In fact, he never
did really, deeply challenge and uproot it. Perhaps he never even diagnosed
it. Perhaps, having peered into it, he gave up, not finding in himself
the Herculean moral strength a real housecleaning would have entailed.
Perhaps he hoped to change it by small steps and gradual degrees.
I have learned from
friends in Boston these days that from the beginning Cardinal Law faced
four huge moral deficits in the Archdiocese of Boston. The first is an
unusually tribal and mutually protective, ranks-drawn-up clergy, circling
around its own three-generation tradition of moral fault; a pattern of
"weakness" or "corruption" in some few, but covered
over and unpoliced by the others, in a long-standing and defensive posture.
The second is a 40-year
period of massive moral dissent from Catholic moral teaching, especially
in regard to sexual and "gender" questions, in the principal
Catholic institutions of learning in Boston, including conspicuously Boston
College and the (Jesuit) Weston School of Theology. This fairly systematic
dissent, through which some have boldly called the theology of Pope John
Paul II (and Paul VI before him) wrong, mistaken, and based on untruths,
has had the inevitable effect of weakening the sense of right and wrong
in those faced with severe sexual temptations. It is hard enough to show
fidelity when right and wrong are clear. But in the mists and fogs of
inner uncertainty, driven rapidly ahead by passion, one most easily jumps
the curb, smashes into trees, plunges over cliffs.
Third is a laity
in very large numbers living in open dissent and rebellion, and encouraged
in this by many clerical voices — even among their own pastors —
first on many small things but gradually on many increasingly large things,
too. In fact, one can hardly be certain, listening to them parade their
utterly self-confident convictions, why they don't become Congregationalists
(and elect their own pastors), or Baptists, or Unitarians, or, at least
Episcopalians. They seem to abhor the most-distinctive features of the
Catholic Church, most notably full communion with Peter, the bishop of
Rome. They seem embarrassed also by her traditional and not-at-all-new
teachings of embodied personhood, the physical/sacramental nature of reality,
the full and rich sexuality of Catholic teaching (expressed in so many
great works of literature, painting, and music down the ages), the nature
of matrimony, and most obviously the tradition of celibacy and chastity
as high ideals affecting the lives of all. Does it go without saying that
the First Family of Catholicism in Massachusetts is led by Senator Kennedy,
and that his open and unrebuked dissents down the years have taken a great
public toll on the faith of others?
Finally, least significant
but not unreal, the aforementioned bitter and unrelenting anti-Catholicism
of Boston's elites and the media over which they seem to have almost total
control. To be sure, these elites are no longer purely, or even mostly,
Brahmin. On the contrary, liberals of all stripes stand upon the heights,
looking down upon the Church they find most contemptible, that lowly stumbling
block to their own ambitions. Included in their number, alas, is a fairly
large number of anti-Catholic Catholics.
And the worst thing
about the recent, rushed disclosures of the sins of the Catholic Church
of Boston is that they have dramatically verified the darkest Maria Monk
suspicions of Boston's oldest elites, concerning the inexorability of
Catholic moral corruption.
I will leave for
another time any mention of the McCarthyism in the legal procedures involved
in forcing these revelations out into public for public delectation (calling
to mind the practice of public humiliation in the stockades in the Commons
of old). These procedures, many of them gross violations of due process,
Boston's elite have here tolerated, because aimed at the Catholic Church.
They would never tolerate these abuses were their own interests threatened.
I leave these to the conscience of the Boston legal community, which will
one day pay for these precedents.
Providentially, it
is better for the Catholic community that the worst abuses come to light
now, all at once, so that no one will ever doubt how bad things have been,
or fail to gauge their exact dimensions. One day, comparisons will be
made with other institutions in Boston and elsewhere. Even if many recent
procedures have been unjust, still, this is a wound that the Catholic
community gave itself. It can be blamed on no one else.
Some years ago, a
priest called me aside after one of my lectures in the Northeast and begged
me to write something about the spread of homosexual abuses of young men
by priests. He described it as a scourge, covered over and protected by
those priests who knew better but were uncertain of being backed up by
their bishops, if they reported their confreres. I was stricken by his
remarks. I did not doubt him, but I did not have the evidence he seemed
to have. All I had was hearsay. I couldn't see how to proceed.
My interlocutor was
right. Something needed to be done. I left it for others.
Do you agree with
me, that we all have reason to stand accused in our own consciences for
our role in abetting, and refusing to confront, the "sexual revolution"
of the last 40 years? It was not only the Catholic clergy that was at
fault. So also were we, the laity.
May God have mercy
on us all.

[cantfindagoodscreenname]

I continue to live under the presumption that the first amendment applies to me and therefore I will note the names and posts of all bigots for future reference.

I'm just reading this discussion for the first time on FR, so please help me out. Why do you need to collect a list of names? Will you be publishing them somewhere or is it just for your own personal use? If so, then why would anyone care if you collect names?

I don't understand what the big deal is here. Some people on a message board think that the Pope has done something wrong. It won't bring the Pope down. I doubt he even reads FR. I wouldn't let it get to you.

[livius]

Thanks for posting that excellent article, LadyDoc.

I lived in Boston very briefly, years ago, and even at that time it struck me that the Church there was not in great shape. I think Novak accurately identified some of the reasons for this, particularly the "circle the wagons" mentality that immigrant Catholics in Boston tended to have as a response to hostility from English-descended Bostonians. This meant that it was essential at all costs to defend anything or anyone Catholic, regardless of the circumstances.

But the moral and ethical structure of the Church simply disappeared one day about 40 years ago, so Catholics wound up defending an organization that no longer had any standards for its own behavior, except that of doing whatever would let it survive. Naturally, this doesn't mean that all Catholics fell into the same moral errors, much less that the Church officially adopted them. But many of the clergy certainly did, and they, after all, are the ones responsible for this scandal.

I lived in Boston in the early 70's, and I remember visiting a poor parish where a friend was doing volunteer social work, only to find the young priest smoking dope in the parish center with his hand on the knee of a teenage boy. He was completely unabashed by being found like this; my friend, who was not Catholic, told me that some older parishioners had complained, but nothing had happened. What was even odder was that he had told my friend that he had once been very "old fashioned" but that now, after Vatican II, he felt free to "be who he really was." She asked me about this because she wasn't sure exactly what Vatican II was, and what it had done that had changed things in the Catholic Church. It was very hard to answer her, and it has gotten even harder as the years have gone by.

[Jim Noble]

>>He has done a very good job in other respects like many of his encyclicals and particularly Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of the Truth) and Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life).<<

I am particularly fond of Ut Unum Sint.

Have a very Merry Christmas.