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Compiled by Steve Jalsevac
Note:This on-going series of both positive and negative news briefs are presented to help LSN readers better understand the significance of this controversy. The context for us is the culture war and the immense role of the Catholic Church in that war. LSN does not assume that all readers are Catholic or necessarily even Christian, but believes most readers are interested in this issue given its crucial importance for efforts to defend life, family, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. Here we attempt to provide significant alternative information to that already saturating the mainstream media on the same subject.
The Pope's Track Record on Abuse: Looking Better and Better By Phil Lawler
There is a clear pattern here: a pattern of dogged determination to drive molesters out of ministry.
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=634
Swedish Bishop 'ready to resign' over sex abuse silence
Bishop Anders Arborelius has said that he is “prepared to take the consequences” over the failure to investigate the alleged abuse of two sisters by a paedophile priest, first brought to the Catholic Church's attention in 1990.
https://www.thelocal.se/26282/20100426/
Belgian Bishop Resigns Because of Sexual Abuse
“When I was still just a priest, and for a certain period at the beginning of my episcopate, I sexually abused a minor from my immediate environment,” Bishop Vangheluwe confessed in a public statement announcing his resignation.
Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Brugges has resigned because of sexual abuse in which he was personally involved. The 73-year-old prelate was appointed Bishop of Brugges—one of the nation’s eight dioceses—in 1984.
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6116
Real Catholic TV Video Clip on Dietrich von Hildebrand Indictment of Bishops' Negligence
Dietrich von Hildebrand stated,“One of the most horrifying and widespread diseases in the Church today is the lethargy of the guardians of the Faith of the Church. …
I am thinking [here] of the … numerous bishops … who make no use whatever of their authority when it comes to intervening against heretical theologians or priests, or against blasphemous performances of public worship. …
But it is most especially infuriating when certain bishops who themselves show this lethargy toward heretics, assume a rigorously authoritarian attitude towards those believers who are fighting for orthodoxy, and who are thus doing what the bishops ought to be doing themselves! …
The drivel of the heretics, both priests and laymen, is tolerated; the bishops tacitly acquiesce to the poisoning of the faithful.
But they want to silence the faithful believers who take up the cause of orthodoxy, the very people who should by all rights be the joy of the bishops’ hearts, their consolation, a source of strength for overcoming their own lethargy.
Instead, these people are regarded as disturbers of the peace. …
The insult to God which is embodied in heresy is often not as tangible and irritating for them as a public act of rebellion against their authority.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RJV0Yj-yhU ( Title is “Sloth : Not just a strange beast from South America”)
Anti-Catholicism, Again – By Joseph Bottum
…the younger priests, formed in the light of John Paul II’s papacy, seem vastly more faithful to Catholic spiritual practice and moral teaching.
The bishops who ruled over those corrupt priests in the 1970s and 1980s catastrophically failed to act when they needed to. The lawyers told the bishops, as lawyers do, never to admit anything, and the psychologists told them not to be so medieval.
There’s an irony when the 2009 Murphy Report, the official Irish investigation, noted, “The Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon-law rules” on defrocking and trying priests. From the 1950s through the 1970s, those same Church authorities were blamed for having the old canon-law rules, which lacked compassion and didn’t recognize the psychiatric profession’s supposed advances in curing pedophilia. And so, instead of being defrocked, guilty priests were often sent off to treatment facilities and, once pronounced cured, were reassigned.
The much larger portion of the failures came simply from the bishops’ desire to avoid bad publicity and, like military officers, to protect the men in their unit when those men get themselves into trouble.
“I don’t like it when Catholic leaders fall back on the ‘child abuse happens everywhere’ defense,” Ross Douthat observed on the New York Times website. “I do like it, however, when mainstream media outlets do their job and report that there’s no evidence that the rate of sex abuse is higher among the Catholic clergy than among any other group.” In fact, it’s lower. If the John Jay study is right, the rate of clerical abuse over the past 50 years, including the peak of the crimes around 1975, was considerably lower by Allen’s figures, and much lower by Smith’s figures, than the abuse rate of the general male population.
Then there’s Ireland. Out of the hundreds of thousands of students who passed through Catholic schools in the 85 years from 1914 to 1999, the commission managed to gather 381 claims—with 35 percent of those charges made against lay staff and fellow pupils rather than priests. “Very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.”
https://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/anti-catholicism-again?page=8
Ecclesiastical Culture: Walking the Walk – By Jeff Mirus
…the Castrillon Hoyos affair demonstrates the degree to which the episcopal culture around the world reflects the curial culture in Rome. One step down, the same principle—that the rest of the Church largely reflects the episcopal culture—is demonstrated by Bishop Lawrence Brandt’s exceptional refusal to allow dissident nuns to advertise for vocations in his diocesan media. The sad truth is that, over the past generation or so, ecclesiastical culture from the very top down has been strong on talking the talk. But as for walking the walk, well, not so much.
What Rome taught was often actively undermined by the administrative example and administrative signals which routinely emanated from both the pope and the curia as to how local bishops should actually behave with respect to the many challenges the Church faced, especially those from within her own ranks.
In this light, the 2001 Castrillon Hoyos letter (praising a bishop who refused to turn a pedophile priest over to civil authorities) is very likely a perfect example of curial business as usual at the time. Fortunately, it represents a curial culture which Benedict XVI immediately made it a high priority to change, but it is further evidence of the problem that while still a Cardinal his efforts to change things were often unsuccessful because he simply did not have the necessary clout.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the culture of saying the right thing at the highest levels in the Church is being replaced by a culture of doing the right thing. This is evidenced most often now by the increasing number of positive disciplinary steps taken by various bishops in their own dioceses, steps which mirror the new culture higher up.
Many religious orders are so far gone that it is uncertain whether they can be brought back or will have to be jettisoned.
It is unquestionable that the great achievements of John Paul II—his ability to project a remarkably attractive personality through the mass media, his tireless teaching on every subject imaginable, his generally superior episcopal appointments (compared with his predecessors), his inspiration of an increasingly militant laity as well as a new cadre of committed young priests—all established a firmer foundation for this transformation from talk to action. But for whatever combination of reasons, John Paul was not generally able to make the transition himself. It is somewhat ironic that the elderly and supremely professorial Joseph Ratzinger is now emerging as the first pope in fifty years to move beyond talking the talk and actually begin to walk the administrative walk.
There is, of course, a very long way to go. But doing trickles down faster than teaching
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=439
Pope will make historic apology for abuse – The Independent
Vatican hopes unprecedented act of penance at June jamboree will defuse anger over worldwide claims. What is being prepared now would be the first time a pope seeks to atone publicly for the extent to which paedophilia has been a major stain on the modern history of the church touching a constellation of countries, say the sources at the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy.
Vatican sources said the Pope considers the jamboree with the priests in June an appropriate occasion for him to lead the whole church in a “Day of Request for Pardon” of the victims and their families for the wrong done by a small percentage of priests in abusing children and minors in many countries, and the wrong done by bishops in covering up that abuse or protecting the predators. He seems to be developing a theological and spiritual frame for reading and dealing with this shameful and humbling reality in the life of the church in the 21st century and discerning an exit strategy from it.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-will-make-historic-apology-for-abuse-1953600.html
The Man, the Motive, the Media – By Phil Lawler
Jeffrey Anderson is suing the Pope. What's unusual about this case, however, is that the lawsuit was filed only after the climate had been prepared, with a series of media attacks on the Pope. And those attacks began in earnest with a questionable New York Times story, for which the most important source was the same Jeffrey Anderson. In other words, Anderson skillfully used the media to rouse negative publicity about the Pope, then capitalized by filing a lawsuit—which, sure enough, garnered still more publicity.
What's truly fascinating is that in the several media accounts of the lawsuit that I read today, not one mentioned that Anderson the plaintiff's lawyer is also Anderson the media source.
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=635
Bring the Pope to Justice By Christopher Hitchens (Newsweek)
The case for bringing the head of the Catholic hierarchy within the orbit of law is easily enough made. All it involves is the ability to look at a naked emperor and ask the question “Why?” Mentally remove his papal vestments and imagine him in a suit, and Joseph Ratzinger becomes just a Bavarian bureaucrat who has failed in the only task he was ever set—that of damage control
This is a question of crime—organized crime, by the way—and therefore of punishment. Or perhaps you would rather see the shade of Mussolini thrown protectively over the Vicar of Christ? The ancient Roman symbol of the fish is rotting—and rotting from the head.
https://www.newsweek.com/id/236934
Hitchens Boasts About Anti-Papal Stunt in Newsweek; Hints Vatican is Fascist – Newsbusters
Newsweek continued its campaign against the Catholic Church on Friday by letting one of the leading atheist (not to leave out anti-Catholic) voices internationally, Christopher Hitchens, spout half-truths and smears about Pope Benedict XVI and the Church. Most egregiously, Hitchens inaccurately stated that Vatican City “was created by Benito Mussolini,” thus trying to tie Catholicism to fascism.
By focusing on who signed the Lateran Treaty on behalf of Italy, and omitting the long history of diplomacy between states and the Holy See, Hitchens is spinning the facts in order to wage his vendetta against the Catholic Church, a vendetta Newsweek is fully taking part in.
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2010/04/26/hitchens-boasts-about-anti-papal-stunt-newsweek-hints-vatican-fascist
NEW YORK TIMES PROTECTS WEAKLAND – Catholic League president Bill Donohue
Weakland was a champion of liberal causes, the media were giving him a pass for his delinquency in not contacting the Vatican about Murphy for two decades.
https://www.catholicleague.org/release.php?id=1841