A Response to the New York Times - Father Raymond J. de Souza

The New York Times, always anti-Catholic, has now launched a vicious and apparently concerted campaign againt Pope Benedict. This response from Father Raymond de Souza, addresses one aspect of the campaign. Maureen Dowd has written two extraordinarily nasty columns (the latest at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28dowd.html?hp ) attacking the pope in an uninformed and almost uncontrolled way. She and the dissident nuns she praises provide cover for those who hate and deride the Church on other grounds. These are the anti-Catholic Catholics who, whenever the Church comes under attack from the forces of secularism, join the attack.

Almost giving the impression of fairness, the NYT publishes a column today ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28allen.html?src=me&ref=general ) by the liberal catholic reporter John Allen, who himself wrote a highly critical biography of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now the Holy Father. Allen has since come to a more sympathetic and insightful understanding of the pope, and in his column points out how no Church leader has done more than Ratzinger/Benedict to change the culture and practices of the Church with regard to dealing with sexual abuse seriously as a criminal activity, not simply an internal matter.

Dowd, incidentally, complains of the Vatican's visitations of women's religious orders in the U.S. as bullying, but ignores the earlier visitations of American seminaries, which had become infested with a sexually casual gay subculture that sneered at popular devotion and regarded priestly (or other) chastity as outmoded and unattainable, repelled good, pious men from the priesthood (see Michael S. Rose, Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church . It was this spirit of the 60s and the so-called "spirit of Vatican II" (which contradicted what the Council actually said) that created the environment 40 years ago for the sexual abuse that ensued, not the many centuries-old traditions of priestly celibacy.

The changes resulting from the Vatican investigations were highly positive and made the seminaries once again habitable by young orthodox committed and enthusiastic Catholics, who came in time to be known as JPII priests. To the dismay of the aging Catholic or more commonly ex-Catholic veterans of the 1960s sexual revolution, secular liberalism, and moral relativism--the sources of vigor and renewal in the Church, its priests and consecrated religious men and women, and the youth who love Benedict as they did JPII and study his writings, all stand in opposition to the path of accommodation and dissolution.


A Response to the New York Times - Father Raymond J. de Souza - The Corner on National Review Online