Saturday, April 17, 2010

Happy Birthday PBXVI

The news about Pope Benedict has been relentless and filled with misleading statements. I came across an interesting article written by an "atheist libertarian" that included:
It's worth asking why otherwise fairly intelligent thinkers get so dementedly exercised over the Pope and the Catholic Church. What exactly is their beef? What are they objecting to?

Very few (if any) of the Pope-hunters were raised Catholic, so this isn't about personal vengeance for some perceived slight by a priest or nun. And despite their current lowdown, historically illiterate attempt to equate a priest fondling a child with a state's attempt to obliterate an entire people under the collective tag "crime against humanity", the truth is that some of these Pope-hunters don't really think child abuse is the worst crime in the world. In 2006, Dawkins criticised "hysteria about pedophilia" and said that, even though he was the victim of sexual abuse at boarding school, he would defend his abusive former teachers if "50 years on they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers". Yet now he wants to put abusive priests on a par with genocidaires.

And another article by PJPII's biographer, George Weigel, where he points out that we as Catholics can now speak our confidently and forcefully after having cleaned house of it's "filth", as PBXVI called it:
Reasonable people whose perceptions are not warped by the toxin of anti-Catholicism or who are not pursuing other (often financially-driven) agendas now recognize that the Church in the U.S. and Canada has bent enormous efforts towards cleaning up what Cardinal Ratzinger called in 2005 its “filth,” to the point where the Catholic Church today can be empirically shown to be the safest environment for young people and children in North America. The paralyzing drumbeat of one ghastly new story after another that went on all during 2002 has not been repeated. What we now have is, largely, the recycling of old material, usually provided to the press by contingent-fee attorneys whose strategic goal is to build a public “narrative” of conspiracy that will shape American courts’ decisions as to whether the Vatican and its resources can be brought within range of U.S. liability law.

The realization among serious Catholics that this is not 2002 and that things have changed dramatically since 2002, has led to a far more confident effort to fight back against misrepresentations such as those the Times perpetrated on March 25. There is a danger here: to recognize that this is not 2002 cannot blind us to the fact that there are wounds that remain to be healed, reforms of priestly formation that remain to be completed, bishops whose failures remain to be recognized and dealt with, new norms for the selection of bishops to be implemented, and accounts rendered as to why the Vatican, prior to Ratzinger’s taking control of the issue of clerical sexual abuse in the late 1990s, was sometimes sluggish in its response to scandalous behavior by priests and deficient leadership by bishops.

Assuming, however, that Benedict XVI has set in motion processes that will lead to all those lingering issues being forcefully addressed, a serious question can now be credibly posed: Are those most vigorously agitating these abuse/misgovernance issues today genuinely interested in the safety of young people and children, or are they using the failures of the past to cripple the moral credibility of the Catholic Church in the present and future? That question would have rightly struck many people as a dodge in 2002. It cannot be credibly regarded as a dodge today, because of what the Church has done since 2002 (and, indeed, since the 1990s, when the plague of abuse within the Church began to recede).

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