Friday April 30, 2010
News Briefs on Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse VI
* Disclaimer: The linked items below or the websites at which they are located do not necessarily represent the views of LifeSiteNews.com. They are presented only for your information.
Compiled by Steve Jalsevac
Some Further Tidying Up Regarding Hitchens Claims – Father Raymond J. de Souza, National Post
My dispute with Hitchens is not about ecclesiology or spirituality. It is about journalism and telling the truth.
In his March 18 column, Hitchens wrote that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to all the bishops of the world about sexual abuse cases in May 2001. Hitchens then described and quoted from the contents of that letter in his customarily disingenuous way. Actually more than customarily, as what he presented as coming from Ratzinger’s pen in 2001 was actually from a 1962 document that Ratzinger did not write
More recently, Hitchens wrote on April 13: “Ever since the church gave refuge to Cardinal Law of Boston to spare him the inconvenience of answering questions under oath, it has invited the metastasis of this horror.” Law returned voluntarily to the United States soon thereafter, and in fact testified before the criminal grand jury on Feb. 25, 2003, for eight hours. He then took up residence in a retreat centre in Clinton, Md. Maryland does not offer asylum from Massachusetts.
On July 23, 2003, the Attorney General issued a damning report, but his investigation “did not produce evidence of recent or ongoing sexual abuse of children” and “did not produce evidence sufficient to charge the Archdiocese or its senior managers with crimes.” The investigation issued 53 subpoenas, took 100 hours in testimony from more than 31 witnesses, including Law, and examined tens of thousands of pages of documents. Fifteen months after his testimony before the grand jury, Law was still in Maryland when he received his appointment in Rome on May 27, 2004. A fugitive?
https://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=4304c7dd-a9e6-4323-b8c8-bb09f6235ed3&p=2
Kenneth L. Woodward: “The New York Times isn’t fair.”
The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive litigator on behalf of clergy-abuse victims. Fairness dictates that the Times give Anderson at least a co-byline. …the Times has created its own version of the scandal as if they had discovered something new. They haven’t.
https://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/04/kenneth-l-woodward-the-new-york-times-isnt-fair.html
Money, Scandal, and Rome By George Weigel
It was virtually inevitable that the media firestorm over Benedict XVI’s handling of sexually abusive clerics — even if the insinuations against the Pope were unsubstantiated and unfair — would spill backwards toward the late John Paul II. It was also inevitable that the point of attack would be John Paul’s endorsement of the work of Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ.
https://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4139/pub_detail.asp
Attacking the Church and Double Standards by William Kilpatrick
Non-Catholic Christians who think the recent media blitz against the Catholic Church is mainly about sex abuse should think again. Likewise, Christians would be naïve to think that those who would like to discredit the Catholic Church will be content, should they succeed, to leave the rest of Christianity alone.
Read between the lines of a typical assault column and you’ll find that what the columnist really hates about Catholicism and about Christianity in general is not the moral failings of Christian leaders, but the fact that Christianity still proposes moral absolutes. It is not sexual misbehavior that galls, but rather that the churches dare to put limits on sexual behavior. Christian churches are the main obstacle to the dominance of secular gods such as moral relativism and absolute sexual liberation.
…although one can find plenty of criticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s political views, rarely does one see a condemnation of his views on sex. The one-time spiritual leader of Iran not only endorsed sex with children in his writings, but he also took to himself a 13 year-old bride.
The drive to undermine the Church’s moral authority, and the threat posed by Islam are linked in an ironic way. For many centuries the Catholic faith was the main bulwark against the Islamization of Europe. Now that Christianity is in decline in Europe, Islam is on the move again. And with the growing presence of Islam has come an increase in child abuse—or what the West considers as child abuse. The sexual exploitation of children is considered a far less serious offense in Islamic societies, and is often protected by the force of sharia law.
https://frontpagemag.com/2010/04/29/attacking-the-church-and-double-standards/
British Foreign Office Suspends Diplomat Anjoum Noorani Over Memo Mocking Pope
The diplomat who authorised a memo mocking the Pope has been suspended by the Foreign Office after Catholics reacted with fury to its contents. When the memo was first leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, the Foreign Office said the civil servant had merely been “moved to other duties.” But high-ranking Catholics both here and in the Vatican expressed dismay that more serious disciplinary action had not been taken, putting the Foreign Office under immense pressure to respond.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/7652089/Foreign-Office-suspends-diplomat-Anjoum-Noorani-over-memo-mocking-Pope.html
Legionary official says founder’s misdeeds were evident by 2006
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6178
The Vatican’s Crisis Response Strategy Needs Help – InsideCatholic.com
The overall consensus at the end of the conference was that the Vatican lacks a strategy, fails in telling its own bad news, has not decided on a clear message, and is constrained to defend itself. The official Vatican spokesman does at least three jobs and does not have regular contact with Pope Benedict. In short, the Church’s mode in trying to respond to the crisis is akin to plugging a hole in a dike with your thumb.
Certainly there is a failure on the part of the Curia. Clerics who are inculturated into the world of the Vatican are often out of touch with the reality of life for the ordinary lay faithful. Many have never worked in the world and don’t understand it. It’s simply undeniable that there’s a curial culture that has allowed for cover-ups and an overall lack of communication from the Vatican itself. This is (very slowly) changing as more lay people are brought in to work at the Vatican.
https://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Vatican-Communications-and-the-Year-of-the-Priest.html&Itemid=127
Cardinal William Levada Said to Have Left Abusive Priest in Pastor Job
https://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iBU9rD_mDfrtHE9qRdEwC71MqcVwD9FCAKV81
Washington Post: Archbishop Burke ‘kicked upstairs’ because of handling of abuse allegations
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6161
Local dad’s cry of the heart became memo that helped change the Catholic Church
https://www.stlbeacon.org/content/view/102010/143/
New York Times Acknowledges: Lawyer Steered Coverage of Abuse story
The Times report also quoted Jeffrey Lena, an attorney representing the Vatican in American courts, who observed that Anderson had courted publicity to favor his lawsuits. “It shows how you can both create a media frenzy, and then capitalize on it,” Lena said.
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6163
A Frenzied Pace for Lawyer Behind Vatican Suits
Jeffrey R. Anderson, the lawyer whose pursuit of the Roman Catholic Church has been perhaps the loudest, is the center of his own tornado. As employees race in and out of his ornate offices, Mr. Anderson is planning a news conference in Los Angeles about an abusive priest, answering calls from the family of a victim of another from Florida, and preparing a lawsuit in Milwaukee naming the Vatican and the pope as defendants. And this is only a Monday. Mr. Anderson, 62, has been filing suits against priests and bishops since 1983 and, at least once before, against the Vatican itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/us/28lawyer.html?pagewanted=2
Attacking the Last Taboo – 1980 Time Magazine Article Presented Positive Views on Incest With Children
Says John Money of Johns Hopkins, one of the best-known sex researchers in the nation: “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.”
Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the original Kinsey reports on males and females, is far more blunt. “It is time to admit that incest need not be a perversion or a symptom of mental illness,” he says. “Incest between . . . children and adults . . . can sometimes be beneficial.”
James W. Ramey: “We are roughly in the same position today regarding incest as we were a hundred years ago with respect to our fears of masturbation.” Ramey, a researcher who has worked with many of the leading sex investigators, says the incest taboo owes something to “a peculiarly American problemthe withdrawal of all touching contact.”
Rutgers Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen offers a simplified pseudohistorical argument: the taboo is a holdover of a primitive need to form personal alliances and trade agreements beyond the family.
How did the lobby against the taboo come about? One strain of its philosophy springs from the fringes of the children’s rights movement, which insists that small children be granted all the rights of adults.
Says Larry Constantine, an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at Tufts, one such self-styled sexual radical: “Children have the right to express themselves sexually, even with members of their own family.”
https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,923966-2,00.html
‘All the Pope’s Priests? Movie
Deal To Develop Catholic Church Scandal Film From POV Of Boston Globe Journalism Team
https://www.deadline.com/2010/04/producers-plan-pedophile-catholic-priest-feature-from-vantage-point-of-boston-globe-team-that-exposed-the-scandal/