The only thing offered from FRoman Catholics on this thread is personal criticisms and whining about the NYT.
This is a GREAT article and should be read and bookmarked by anyone who cares about the truth.
The visiting bishops had reached the boiling point. After flailing about for 20 years, with little guidance from Rome, as stories about pedophile priests embroiled the church in lawsuits, shame and scandal, they had flown in to Rome from Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, the United States and the West Indies.Many came out of frustration: the Vatican had too often thwarted bishops’ attempts to oust pedophile priests in their jurisdictions. Yet they had high hopes that they would make the case for reform. Nearly every major Vatican office was represented in the gathering, held in the same Vatican hotel that was built to house cardinals electing a new pope.
“The message we wanted to get across was: if individuals are to hide behind church law and use that law to impede the ability of bishops to discipline priests, then we have to have a new way of moving forward,” said Eamonn Walsh, auxiliary bishop of Dublin, one of 17 bishops who attended from overseas. (He was one of several Irish bishops who offered the pope their resignations last year because of the abuse scandal, but his has not been accepted.)
Yet many at the meeting grew dismayed as, over four long days in early April 2000, they heard senior Vatican officials dismiss clergy sexual abuse as a problem confined to the English-speaking world, and emphasize the need to protect the rights of accused priests over ensuring the safety of children, according to interviews with 10 church officials who attended the meeting.
Nuff said.
“The only thing offered from FRoman Catholics on this thread is personal criticisms and whining about the NYT.”
This is just wrong. Anyone can just read the thread and see that description of this thread is wrong.
“This is a GREAT article and should be read and bookmarked by anyone who cares about the truth.”
I think it is funny on a conservative website that such praise is heaped on an article that contains such liberal gems as:
” Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine. Later, he also reined in a Dutch theologian who thought lay people should be able to perform priestly functions, and an American who taught that Catholics could dissent from church teachings about abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality.”
Mean ol’ Ratzinger fighting socialism and homosexualists...
It is not an evenhanded article, it doesn’t even mention the John Jay report or why the steep decrease in instances of abuse coincide with then Cardinal Ratzinger’s heading of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In fact, it gives the opposite impression, that only after the public scandal did anything start to get done to combat the scandal. That doesn’t seem too evenhanded to me, to not even address that point.
Freegards