Posted on 04/21/2010 9:56:09 AM PDT by NYer
Thanks! I’m usin’ that!
LOL! Sam wouldn’t mind. He was quite a character, difficult in some aspects but a true and loyal friend to those who could put up with his quirks. I would have liked to have met him.
Thanks. I know about those Masses.
I'm trying to find out when the non-advertised Traditional Masses are said at the Shrine.
That isn't exactly true. He can't discuss anything that would identify an individual penitent or associate that individual penitent with a specific sin. He can make general statements about the confessions he hears as a group, but not specific statements about what specific individuals have told him.
There's a classic old Alfred Hitchcock movie about this theme, called I Confess.
The priest can make going to the police a condition of absolution. However, he cannot do or say anything that would tie a particular sin (or anything else said in confession) to a particular penitent.
(It would seem to me that in some circumstances he could attempt to deflect suspicion from someone he knew to be innocent, since that's not necessarily tying a sin to a particular penitent. He just couldn't say anything more about how he had acquired that information.)
As has been pointed out, in a traditional confessional setting, the priest often does not know the identity of the penitent anyway, since he or she is behind a screen.
Very good.
I have always thought that there was more to this story than the press reports.....
I am praying for the Cardinal and for the truth to come to the light.
Much as the Cardinal's actions might have been canonically correct, we have to look past that sometimes, because we're dealing with a media situation here, whether we like it, or not. I'm sure there is someone else the Vatican can find to do the Latin Mass in honor of the Pope's fifth anniversary in the Pontificate.
Cardinal Law never molested anyone, so he couldn't have been arrested, tried, or convicted of a crime. Therefore, he shouldn't have been 'defrocked', because he never committed a crime. Even after his extensive testimony, in which he accepted responsibility for not being more responsive to the matters, which were actually handled by his Auxiliary Bishops, there was never any legal accusation against him.
The District Attorney was HOPING there would be something with which to charge Cardinal Law, and he even stated plainly, after the hearings, that he wished he could have found something. THAT tells me that they this was planned to be a media circus that would damage the credibility of the Church when speaking on other issues, most specifically homosexual marriage, which was making its way up to the Supreme Judicial Court. The Church was the most outspoken opponent to homosexual marriage, but after the abuse scandal broke, any statement the Church made was accompanied by a comment about the priest abuse, so credibility WAS lost.
Cardinal Law resigned, and, if I'm not mistaken, he is the ONLY Bishop, Archbishop or Cardinal in charge of a Diocese that has had these cases, who HAS resigned. He was in the States for over a year before being reassigned to Rome
LOL! That's the best description of Confession I think I've ever heard!
We humans have an enormous propensity for self-justification, and it's only when confronted, and we have to look at our souls in the mirror of the Confessional, if you will, that we can really admit to ourselves what we've done.
What Cardinal Law did was look the other way. He new crimes were taking place and innocent children were being raped and he did nothing. From the evidence I saw he did not care. Some leader he was. The church certainly has a low threshold for defrocking. The media didn’t create this mess.
Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angelos recently resigned. Cardinal Seán Brady of Ireland will be resigning soon.
Just for the record, he testified before a grand jury and the grand jury chose not to indict him.
Only because at the time Massachusetts had no law requiring the reporting of a crime. Crazy but true. It is still no excuse that Law is still a leader in the church living it up in Rome. That is a big problem for the church.
This has since changed.
http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/119-51a.htm
Today he Law would be in jail for not reporting child rape.
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