Fr. Barron on Anti-Catholic Prejudice Then and Now

See also Fr. Barron's article, "Why Anti-Catholic Prejudice Ought to Bother Everyone."

Covering Catholicism

Look Out, Nuns! Ideology Trumps Science and Logic at the Lancet - Again

As Hanley shows below, the British medical journal, the Lancet, has published another article that is so intent on its ideological agenda that it seems unaware of its internal contradictions and the sheer irresponsibility of its recommendations.  

Look Out, Nuns!

By Matthew Hanley

The highly prestigious medical journal the Lancet recently published an article encouraging some women to take steps to address the “hazards of their nulliparity” – that is to say, of their never having children, which is a risk factor for several cancers, particularly of the breast.   You might be thinking: we just went through the annual pink ribbon exercise in breast cancer awareness, yet we never heard about the hazards of never having children. Or beginning to have them later in life. Or that bearing several children, beginning at an early age, and breastfeeding them all is quite protective against breast and other cancers.  I suppose it’s not a recommendation that sells, either literally (at the cash register) or figuratively (as is evident by astoundingly low fertility rates).  So has the Lancet finally repudiated its descent into the kind of politically correct obfuscation that would have once been recognized as an unconscionable abdication of the very scientific integrity from which medical journals derive their credibility?   Unfortunately they have done nothing that constructive.   The upshot of their article is that nuns, who “pay a terrible price for their chastity,” should get on the birth control pill; all distinction between chastity and nulliparity (the subject they are examining) escapes the two Australian authors’ attention. A woman with eight children, for example, can lead a perfectly chaste life.   The pill seems a curious remedy to propose, even if it can lower the risk of some relatively rare cancers, since it causes other and more common cancers, and has a litany of other serious side effects.   Supposing for a moment that all nuns began taking the pill religiously and a modest number of ovarian and uterine cancers – already quite rare among nuns – were averted as a result, we would also see a considerable increase in cancers of the breast, liver and cervix.  The pill would also double a nun’s risk of stroke – and increase her likelihood of blood clots and heart attack. It could also adversely affect her mood, her weight, her blood pressure, and so forth. The authors base their argument upon the dubious claim that the pill lowers the overall mortality rate, citing a study that has been convincingly refuted by a veteran authority on the matter.  Their own data also show that nuns, prior to age 70, actually have a lower risk of ovarian and uterine cancers, though after age 80, nuns do have higher mortality rate from these cancers. Breast cancer is generally more prevalent among nuns, but the authors brazenly claim that the pill does not increase the risk of breast cancer.   There is compelling evidence that the pill is linked with the sharp increase in breast cancer in recent decades, and the reasons why the pill, as well as induced (though not spontaneous) abortion increase breast cancer risk are not beyond the reach of the layperson to understand. The authors make haste to remind us that the Catholic moral tradition allows an action (i.e. artificial contraception) to be taken in some circumstances for therapeutic reasons when it would not otherwise be permissible. But they are on very shaky ground in pressing for indiscriminate contraceptive use for preventiverather than selectively therapeutic purposes – not because they appeal to Catholic moral reasoning, but because the medical evidence, of which they are custodians, indicates this would not be very wise.  But no matter:  headlines around the world conveyed the impression that contraceptives are on balance a lifesaver – a multi-purpose health booster. Proselytizing comes first, and there will be more rejoicing at the Lancet over the one who comes to believe in the wisdom of contraception than the ninety-nine who already so fervently believe.  The Lancet may have also left some with the impression that it is nobly riding to the defense of selfless women who might be laboring in the Lord’s vineyard, but nonetheless remain, unlike the liberated masses, oppressed by the very Church they naïvely serve.   No stranger to promoting bad science in the service of a predetermined ideology, the Lancet in 2004 published a seriously contorted meta-analysis conducted by Oxford scientists intent on denying the link between induced abortion and breast cancer. This has allowed everyone – from governmental health bodies (such as the National Cancer Institute) to breast cancer advocacy groups – to cite that Lancet study and safely hide behind a false veneer of scientific credibility. A new study conducted in Armenia by an international team of researchers (including members from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins) published in October found that abortion basically triples (2.86) the risk of developing breast cancer. It also found that each year of delay in giving birth increased risk of breast cancer, and any birth to be protective. These findings are generally consistent with the preponderance of evidence going back decades, which the Lancet, through its 2004 “study,” still gets away with denying.   One wonders if the authors of the Armenian study, sitting on eye-popping findings of such great public health import, wished to have them published in theLancet or another big name medical journal, but concluded that a submission with such unwanted findings, though worthy of global headlines, would simply be rejected. We should be grateful that they saw the light of day at all.   Coming from a journal bent on keeping everyone in the dark about the link between breast cancer and elective abortion – chosen by more than a million women a year in the United States alone – professing the desire merely “to give nuns’ plight the recognition it deserves” seems a touch disingenuous.  Were they actually faced with the prospect of social or legal rebuke, such disregard for the truth would take real chutzpah. Matthew Hanley is, with Jokin de Irala, M.D., the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. His latest report, The Catholic Church & The Global AIDS Crisis is now available from the Catholic Truth Society, publisher to the Holy See in the U.K. © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Retrieved January 12, 2012 from http://ht.ly/1gFH3p

A Hateful Outrage: Media Assault on the Santorum Family

A Hateful Outrage

By Robert Royal

MONDAY, 09 JANUARY 2012

Electoral politics is dirty business. Most decent people would have nothing to do with it – if there were any other reasonable way to select leaders in modern democracies. But even in popular election campaigns, there are limits. And last week those limits were crossed in unbelievably crass ways out of ideological hatred towards presidential candidate Rick Santorum.
         Even some of the media figures who defended him, like Ross Douthat in the New York Times, have been so sucked into the bad habits of the neighborhood that Douthat concludes Santorum shouldn’t complain:  “In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen.”

Weird is putting it mildly. For once, Douthat’s colleague at the Times, Maureen Dowd, was comparatively modest, just mocking Santorum for his “antediluvian abrasiveness” on moral questions like homosexuality. For La Dowd, the moral sentiments of the whole human race in virtually every age and culture until quite recently – that homosexuality is a moral aberration – is merely some collective delusion, now remedied by the superior moral delicacy of our day. And the opinions of teenagers in New Hampshire campaign events prove it. The really weird stuff came out last week beginning with Alan Colmes(who later apologized) and Eugene Robinson (who didn’t really – and you can see on the Internet by Googling him how slander spreads beyond anyone’s ability to recall). They weren’t content with criticizing Santorum’s traditional Catholic morals and conservative economics and politics. That’s too much like regular campaign commentary.  After Iowa, Santorum had to be destroyed. They attacked the Santorum family’s bringing home the body of their child, who died shortly after birth, as something incomparably bizarre, like the Mexican cult of death. Actually, I think both commentators, politically correct liberals, would have commended a brief visit with a dead child as a humane alternative to the American bourgeoisie’s denial of death – if it had been practiced in another, non-American culture. Instead, despite the fact, as was later reported, that several American medical groups recommend such closure, some of our most prestigious media figures felt they were authorized to wade into this sad story because it confirmed just how weird those traditional Catholics and their cult of the fetus really are – and the voting public ought to know it. And then there was the story put out by several pro-abortion groups that the Santorums chose to abort the child when Mrs. Santorum had complications during the pregnancy. The implication, of course, is that they’re hypocrites, like all pro-lifers, and jettison their principles when it’s convenient. The truth, however, was that the pregnancy was one of those hard cases anticipated by and quite well thought through in Catholic medical ethics. Both mother and child were going to die if an infection was not treated with antibiotics, which had the potential to induce labor.              Closure and memorial: Victorian kids photographed with a dead sibling The political perspective on these sorts of situations is quite crude. We hear about the need for abortion exceptions in cases of “rape, incest, and life of the mother.” But these are not at all the same thing morally. Rape and incest are sexual crimes, but a child conceived as a result does not merit destruction in the womb. Questions of “life of the mother” are more complicated. Some abortion advocates think the phrase means everything from a pregnancy that will kill the woman to missing a semester abroad during college.  In more serious analysis, where a mother’s life really is threatened by a problem pregnancy, it’s morally licit in certain circumstances to save her life and, indirectly, cause the death of the fetus. In the ethical literature, this is called the principle of double effect – a situation will produce two undesired outcomes, so you choose one good goal accepting, but not intending, the unfortunate secondary effect that will follow. Many people don’t understand this especially as applied to problem pregnancies. A doctor, a former president of the St. Luke’s Physician Guild in Washington, told me years ago that his colleagues at a local hospital would mock him for performing “abortions” in such cases, even though he was a vocal opponent of abortion. No amount of explanation on his part had any effect on the other doctors. They have been brainwashed to think that abortion is just a certain medical procedure. It’s all the same, medically, whatever motives or rationalizations you attach to the brute fact. Politicians are even more obtuse about such things. We might have expected that Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House, and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, both of whom attended Catholic schools – and Trinity College in Washington – would have heard something about double effect. But both seem instead to have heard only about female autonomy – i.e., the right to choose to kill babies – during their Catholic educations. Sebelius recently spoke to a NARAL Pro-Choice fundraiser about “the war” they are in – together. And Pelosi has argued that repealing Obamacare’s abortion provisions may kill women. It’s not surprising that wild charges such as that the Santorums are “weird” and had an “abortion” are plausible to some very ignorant people. But those who put in motion such vicious and patently false attacks on a campaigning politician bear grave moral responsibilities.  There’s plenty to debate about Santorum’s record and vision (He made a troubling mistake in supporting pro-abortion Senator Arlen Specter a few years ago to preserve the Republican majority). But you can oppose someone’s politics without hateful smears.  Further, Santorum’s socially conservative views – coupled, be it said, with some real compassion for the unfortunate, which have been criticized by some conservatives as “big government conservatism” – were popular in Iowa and also resonate with tens of millions of Catholic, evangelical, Orthodox Jewish, and Muslim voters.  Painting those views, once the standard throughout the entire country, as somehow “weird” divides the American populace unnecessarily in hatred, and we will not be easily healed. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, now available in paperback from Encounter Books. © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved January 9, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Media Bias and Falsely Accused Priests

Today at Catholic World Report, Dave Pierre discusses his work exposing anti-Catholic bias in media coverage of the sexual abuse of minors, which often treats accused priests as “guilty until proven innocent” and distorts public perception of where exactly children today are in most danger of abuse.

In an exclusive interview with CWR, Pierre—a contributor to the media-watchdog blog NewsBusters.org and author of several books—argues: “We must continue to demand justice and compassion to victims of clergy abuse. This is not optional. However, the demand for honesty, fairness, and perspective in the reporting of the Catholic Church abuse narrative is a separate matter.”

Pierre points to the fact that while major media outlets frequently down-play or ignore accusations of child abuse occurring in public schools, a 2004 report from the US Department of Education found that “nearly 9.6 percent of [public school] students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.”

“Another section of that report chronicled an early 1990s study that revealed that zero of 225 cases of teacher sex abuse in New York were reported to police,” says Pierre. “Two hundred and twenty-five abusers. None of them reported to police. By all measures, this would be defined as a cover-up. Yet the media has never seemed too motivated to follow up on this.”

Click here to read all of CWR’s interview with Dave Pierre, “The Truth About Falsely Accused Priests.”

Who will sue over Same Sex OWS Tents

Elizabeth Scalia has a sharp eye for the absurdities, hypocrisies, and class nature both of the OWS movement and of the media's double-standards (except for the NY Post) bending-over-backwards sympathetic coverage of it. Here is a sample from her The Anchoress blog. 

Who will sue over Same Sex OWS Tents?

Nov 6th, 2011 by Elizabeth Scalia

Sexual assaults and rapes are apparently so numerous at Zuccotti Park in the New York “occupation” that the occupiers are installing single-sex tents:

It’s a safe house from the sex fiends.

Zuccotti Park has become so overrun by sexual predators attacking women in the night that organizers felt compelled to set up a female-only sleeping tent yesterday to keep the sickos away.

The large, metal-framed “safety tent” — which will be guarded by an all-female patrol — can accommodate as many as 18 people and will be used during the day for women-only meetings, said Occupy Wall Street organizers.

“This is all about safety in numbers,” said Becky Wartell, 24, a protester from Portland, Maine.

You’ll want to read the whole story. One woman was groped after trustingly accepting a man’s offer to sleep in his tent. Are we raising a generation of absolute naifs?

On this issue of single-sex tents, I think a more immediate concern might be: when does the sex discrimination suit kick in?

As Kamilla Ludwig, (a feisty lady whom I don’t really know, sorry) tweeted:

“…isn’t CUA getting sued for returning to single-sex dorms?”

Why yes indeed, Kamilla Ludwig, yes Catholic University of America is being sued for sex discrimination because it is returning to single sex dorms.

Single-sex sleeping accommodations are only sexist when Catholics initiate them, it seems. If others arrange them, it is wisdom.

CUA, a Pontifical University, is also being sued for being too insular, too representative ofwhat it is, and therefore not creating Catholic-Free prayer areas on its campuses.

Meanwhile, at Zuccotti Park news, plans are in the works to advance segregation, so that people can be more insular, more representative of who they are.

You can read the whole piece here.

There they go again! 2: PBS does Holy Week

PBS is celebrating Holy Week by dredging up a decades-old but terrible scandal of clergy abuse in Alaska. Far from being "a little-known chapter of the Catholic Church sex abuse story," as the network claims, the New York Times did several articles on it and the Los Angeles Times made it into a huge front-page story. Not satisfied with its earlier lengthy episode on the abuse scandal ("Hand of God," January 2007), PBS's Frontline is piling it on with this new attack, well timed to undermine the Catholic Church during the most holy week of her liturgical year.

As Dave Pierre, author of Double Standard says, the scandal was real and shocking -

However, media outlets like PBS have surpassed the point where they are merely reporting a story. They are using the scandals as a tool to single out and further tarnish the Church.

When will PBS’ Frontline investigate the massive child abuse and cover-ups happening today - not decades ago - in our nation's public schools? How about the recent cover-ups of abuse by Orthodox rabbis in New York City?

See Pierre's blog at http://www.themediareport.com

Anne Rice Abandons Reason for Rant

It is truly sad to see a writer of Anne Rice's talents, who just a few years ago wrote a fine Catholic spiritual memoir, descend to such depths of scurrility as in the personal anti-Catholic rants on her recent blog posts, where she accuses those who disagree with her of the basest motives, and without offering the slightest evidence or giving reasons for her views.

One is tempted to follow her own example and ascribe personal motivations to explain her turn to relentless and bitter attack on the Church. But the slew of hate-filled denunciations that her threads routinely elicits from commenters creates an environment of vitriolic anti-Catholicism. For whatever personal reasons, Rice herself simultaneously feeds off and sustains this environment.

At the same time, as Francis J. Beckwith points out, she exhibits an apparently irremediable incapacity to sustain a coherent argument. He says:

Anne Rice, I am sad to say, cannot distinguish her visceral dislike for Catholic moral theology with a sustained argument against it. Her case, which is apparently universal in scope, is no wider than a first person rant: “some Catholics are bad people, and thus I (that is, Anne Rice, famous ex-con-revert),cannot believe that what the Church claims is good is in fact good.” Does anyone with a fully functional set of cognitive faculties take such literary tourettes seriously? It would be like saying that Anne Rice is a bad novelist because she is a bad reasoner. She is indeed the latter, but the latter does not establish the former.

These sorts of distinctions are essential for clarity of thought and integrity of argument. Thus, we can only conclude that she has no interest in either.

Beckwith's comment, and mine, came in response to a frank exchange of views between Carl Olson of Insight Scoop and Anne Rice on amazon.com and Facebook. See Olson's post at http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2011/04/is-there-a-sinister-agenda-behind-the-ignatius-blogs-attack-on-me-personally-wha.html#comments where he rightly observes, among other things,

And so the critics, instead of responding to reasonable defenses by Catholics resort to innuendo and insinuation and suspicion.

Sad to see Anne Rice joining this ignoble throng.

The Bigotry of the UK's Channel 4

There is nothing surprising about the fact that Peter Tatchell, a gay rights activist and sometime advocate of man-boy sex* hates the Church and the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. What is or ought to be extraordinary, as Thompson says, is his complete lack of integrity and Channel 4’s complete failure to use its research capacity to correct any of Tatchell’s lies and distortions—ones that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the Church and its doctrines would know to be false.

What is also striking is the blatant bias in Channel 4's religion coverage, pandering sycophancy toward Islam and Islamists, while promoting the worst kind of anti-Christian, and specifically anti-Catholic bigotry and hate.

*Prof Gilbert Herdt points to the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea, where all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood. Far from being harmed, Prof Herdt says the boys grow up to be happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers.

The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.

Tatchell, before the clergy abuse scandal, in a 1997 letter to the Guardian. He still favors lowering the age of consent in Britain from 16 to 14.
###



Peter Tatchell's Channel 4 hatchet job on the Pope is so crude that it misses its target

By Damian Thompson Last updated: September 8th, 2010

Peter Tatchell’s Channel 4 documentary about Pope Benedict XVI, The Trouble with The Pope, scheduled to be broadcast next Monday, begins with an incredibly dirty trick.

Within seconds of introducing Benedict as the leader of the Catholic Church, the film switches into the testimony of a woman describing a sexual assault by a British priest decades ago, before Ratzinger was even a bishop. “He was slobbering all over me … I felt something inside me.” It’s a vile juxtaposition whose subliminal message verges on incitement to religious hatred.

Another cheap trick: right at the start, the voice of a young German man is heard asking, “Do I want to be part of a Church in which people deny the Holocaust?” As it happens, I think revoking the excommunication of Richard Williamson was an act of shockingly stupid naivety. But to imply subtly that this suspended bishop’s views on the Holocaust are acceptable to Pope Benedict is a smear tactic, plain and simple. (There is a major world religion in which Holocaust denial is extremely popular, but don’t expect a TV documentary on that any time soon.)

I know that Tatchell profoundly disagrees with Catholic teaching. Fair enough. But I also thought he had enough integrity not to misrepresent key concepts such as papal infallibility, which he implies means that no decision of the Pope can be questioned – a schoolboy error. Tatchell also claims that the Pope’s previous role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave him control over Church doctrines. That last statement is so ignorant that I could hardly believe I was hearing it. Did Channel 4 not employ any researchers for this project?

Throughout the film, Tatchell twists the truth again and again. “To this day, Richard Williamson remains a member of the Catholic Church approved by the Pope,” he says. I’m sorry, but a bishop who is barred from exercising his episcopal orders is not approved by the Pope. If a crazed Marxist bishop were similarly suspended, he would be presented by Channel 4 as a persecuted martyr, not “approved”.

“The Pope has done enormous damage to his moral authority,” says Tatchell. I think the Williamson blunder did do damage, yes – but Tatchell’s own slender claims to moral authority (and he has campaigned bravely for his causes) are also damaged by a film that doggedly misleads its audience.

The teachings of the Catholic Church on sexual morality are NOT innovations of Joseph Ratzinger. He inherited them, he is faithful to them, and even if he wished to permit artificial birth control, abortion or extra-marital sexual acts he could not do so. Tatchell finds Catholic doctrines in these areas to be “incomprehensible”. But there is no evidence that he has made any attempt to understand them – or, for that matter, the subtle and complex theology of Ratzinger. (Tatchell sniffily describes the Pope’s thinking as “black and white,” which suggests to me that he hasn’t read a single book by the man he is supposed to be profiling.)

Instead, Tatchell mostly interviews people who share his views, or represent those of a liberal lobby within the Catholic Church. One of the few exceptions is a woman called Fiona O’Reilly from the mainstream group Catholic Voices, who – alone among Tatchell’s interviewees – is not allowed to finish her sentences without being interrupted.

And clerical sex abuse? The charge that Benedict XVI covered up the crimes of paedophile priests falls apart under close examination. Journalists have tried very hard to implicate this Pope in conspiracies to silence victims; they have failed to do so, though we do now know that Pope John Paul II was not nearly attentive enough to the scandal. But that doesn’t fit Tatchell’s script, so after a perfunctory attempt to suggest that Benedict “has form” in this area we move swiftly on.

It is inconceivable that Channel 4 would have sanctioned such a poorly researched hatchet job on, for example, a Muslim leader. Still, I can’t say that The Trouble with The Pope left me feeling any more anxious about the Pope’s visit than I already am. A more nuanced, imaginative and accurate programme could have done real damage. You missed a trick there, Peter.

Retrieved September 9, 2010 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100052875/peter-tatchells-channel-4-hatchet-job-on-the-pope-is-so-crude-that-it-misses-its-target/#disqus_thread

Not What You Might Think

Brendan O’Neill
The Secular Inquisition

The campaign to arrest the pope is the product of an increasingly desperate secularism, which can only find meaning through ridiculing the religious.

Not the work of your typical papal apologist (like me!).

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8526/

The New York Times and Pope Benedict XVI: How it looks to an American in the Vatican

by Cardinal William J. Levada
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

In our melting pot of peoples, languages and backgrounds, Americans are not noted as examples of “high” culture. But we can take pride as a rule in our passion for fairness. In the Vatican where I currently work, my colleagues – whether fellow cardinals at meetings or officials in my office – come from many different countries, continents and cultures. As I write this response today (March 26, 2010) I have had to admit to them that I am not proud of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness.

I say this because today’s Times presents both a lengthy article by Laurie Goodstein, a senior columnist, headlined “Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest,” and an accompanying editorial entitled “The Pope and the Pedophilia Scandal,” in which the editors call the Goodstein article a disturbing report (emphasis in original) as a basis for their own charges against the Pope. Both the article and the editorial are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.

In her lead paragraph, Goodstein relies on what she describes as “newly unearthed files” to point out what the Vatican (i.e. then Cardinal Ratzinger and his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) did not do – “defrock Fr. Murphy.” Breaking news, apparently. Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Fr. Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims.”

But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Fr. Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that Church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”? By her own account it seems clear that criminal authorities had been notified, most probably by the victims and their families.

Goodstein’s account bounces back and forth as if there were not some 20 plus years intervening between reports in the 1960 and 70’s to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and local police, and Archbishop Weakland’s appeal for help to the Vatican in 1996. Why? Because the point of the article is not about failures on the part of church and civil authorities to act properly at the time. I, for one, looking back at this report agree that Fr. Murphy deserved to be dismissed from the clerical state for his egregious criminal behavior, which would normally have resulted from a canonical trial.

The point of Goodstein’s article, however, is to attribute the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of to diocesan decisions at the time. She uses the technique of repeating the many escalating charges and accusations from various sources (not least from her own newspaper), and tries to use these “newly unearthed files” as the basis for accusing the pope of leniency and inaction in this case and presumably in others.

It seems to me, on the other hand, that we owe Pope Benedict a great debt of gratitude for introducing the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors. These efforts began when the Pope served as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and continued after he was elected Pope. That the Times has published a series of articles in which the important contribution he has made – especially in the development and implementation of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, the Motu proprio issued by Pope John Paul II in 2001 – is ignored, seems to me to warrant the charge of lack of fairness which should be the hallmark of any reputable newspaper.

Let me tell you what I think a fair reading of the Milwaukee case would seem to indicate. The reasons why church and civil authorities took no action in the 1960’s and 70’s is apparently not contained in these “newly emerged files.” Nor does the Times seem interested in finding out why. But what does emerge is this: after almost 20 years as Archbishop, Weakland wrote to the Congregation asking for help in dealing with this terrible case of serial abuse. The Congregation approved his decision to undertake a canonical trial, since the case involved solicitation in confession – one of the graviora delicta (most grave crimes) for which the Congregation had responsibility to investigate and take appropriate action.

Only when it learned that Murphy was dying did the Congregation suggest to Weakland that the canonical trial be suspended, since it would involve a lengthy process of taking testimony from a number of deaf victims from prior decades, as well as from the accused priest. Instead it proposed measures to ensure that appropriate restrictions on his ministry be taken. Goodstein infers that this action implies “leniency” toward a priest guilty of heinous crimes. My interpretation would be that the Congregation realized that the complex canonical process would be useless if the priest were dying. Indeed, I have recently received an unsolicited letter from the judicial vicar who was presiding judge in the canonical trial telling me that he never received any communication about suspending the trial, and would not have agreed to it. But Fr. Murphy had died in the meantime. As a believer, I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.

Goodstein also refers to what she calls “other accusations” about the reassignment of a priest who had previously abused a child/children in another diocese by the Archdiocese of Munich. But the Archdiocese has repeatedly explained that the responsible Vicar General, Mons. Gruber, admitted his mistake in making that assignment. It is anachronistic for Goodstein and the Times to imply that the knowledge about sexual abuse that we have in 2010 should have somehow been intuited by those in authority in 1980. It is not difficult for me to think that Professor Ratzinger, appointed as Archbishop of Munich in 1977, would have done as most new bishops do: allow those already in place in an administration of 400 or 500 people to do the jobs assigned to them.

As I look back on my own personal history as a priest and bishop, I can say that in 1980 I had never heard of any accusation of such sexual abuse by a priest. It was only in 1985, as an Auxiliary Bishop attending a meeting of our U.S. Bishops’ Conference where data on this matter was presented, that I became aware of some of the issues. In 1986, when I was appointed Archbishop in Portland, I began to deal personally with accusations of the crime of sexual abuse, and although my “learning curve” was rapid, it was also limited by the particular cases called to my attention.

Here are a few things I have learned since that time: many child victims are reluctant to report incidents of sexual abuse by clergy. When they come forward as adults, the most frequent reason they give is not to ask for punishment of the priest, but to make the bishop and personnel director aware so that other children can be spared the trauma that they have experienced.

In dealing with priests, I learned that many priests, when confronted with accusations from the past, spontaneously admitted their guilt. On the other hand, I also learned that denial is not uncommon. I have found that even programs of residential therapy have not succeeded in breaking through such denial in some cases. Even professional therapists did not arrive at a clear diagnosis in some of these cases; often their recommendations were too vague to be helpful. On the other hand, therapists have been very helpful to victims in dealing with the long-range effects of their childhood abuse. In both Portland and San Francisco where I dealt with issues of sexual abuse, the dioceses always made funds available (often through diocesan insurance coverage) for therapy to victims of sexual abuse.

From the point of view of ecclesiastical procedures, the explosion of the sexual abuse question in the United States led to the adoption, at a meeting of the Bishops’ Conference in Dallas in 2002, of a “Charter for the Protection of Minors from Sexual Abuse.” This Charter provides for uniform guidelines on reporting sexual abuse, on structures of accountability (Boards involving clergy, religious and laity, including experts), reports to a national Board, and education programs for parishes and schools in raising awareness and prevention of sexual abuse of children. In a number of other countries similar programs have been adopted by Church authorities: one of the first was adopted by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in response to the Nolan Report made by a high-level commission of independent experts in 2001.

It was only in 2001, with the publication of Pope John Paul II’s Motu proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (SST), that responsibility for guiding the Catholic Church’s response to the problem of sexual abuse of minors by clerics was assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This papal document was prepared for Pope John Paul II under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Contrary to some media reports, SST did not remove the local bishop’s responsibility for acting in cases of reported sexual abuse of minors by clerics. Nor was it, as some have theorized, part of a plot from on high to interfere with civil jurisdiction in such cases. Instead, SST directs bishops to report credible allegations of abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is able to provide a service to the bishops to ensure that cases are handled properly, in accord with applicable ecclesiastical law.

Here are some of the advances made by this new Church legislation (SST). It has allowed for a streamlined administrative process in arriving at a judgment, thus reserving the more formal process of a canonical trial to more complex cases. This has been of particular advantage in missionary and small dioceses that do not have a strong complement of well-trained canon lawyers. It provides for erecting inter-diocesan tribunals to assist small dioceses. The Congregation has faculties allowing it derogate from the prescription of a crime (statute of limitations) in order to permit justice to be done even for “historical” cases. Moreover, SST has amended canon law in cases of sexual abuse to adjust the age of a minor to 18 to correspond with the civil law in many countries today. It provides a point of reference for bishops and religious superiors to obtain uniform advice about handling priests’ cases. Perhaps most of all, it has designated cases of sexual abuse of minors by clerics as graviora delicta: most grave crimes, like the crimes against the sacraments of Eucharist and Penance perennially assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This in itself has shown the seriousness with which today’s Church undertakes its responsibility to assist bishops and religious superiors to prevent these crimes from happening in the future, and to punish them when they happen. Here is a legacy of Pope Benedict that greatly facilitates the work of the Congregation which I now have the privilege to lead, to the benefit of the entire Church.

After the Dallas Charter in 2002, I was appointed (at the time as Archbishop of San Francisco) to a team of four bishops to seek approval of the Holy See for the “Essential Norms” that the American Bishops developed to allow us to deal with abuse questions. Because these norms intersected with existing canon law, they required approval before being implemented as particular law for our country. Under the chairmanship of Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and currently President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, our team worked with Vatican canonical experts at several meetings. We found in Cardinal Ratzinger, and in the experts he assigned to meet with us, a sympathetic understanding of the problems we faced as American bishops. Largely through his guidance we were able to bring our work to a successful conclusion.

The Times editorial wonders “how Vatican officials did not draw the lessons of the grueling scandal in the United States, where more than 700 priests were dismissed over a three-year period.” I can assure the Times that the Vatican in reality did not then and does not now ignore those lessons. But the Times editorial goes on to show the usual bias: “But then we read Laurie Goodstein’s disturbing report . . .about how the pope, while he was still a cardinal, was personally warned about a priest … But church leaders chose to protect the church instead of children. The report illuminated the kind of behavior the church was willing to excuse to avoid scandal.” Excuse me, editors. Even the Goodstein article, based on “newly unearthed files,” places the words about protecting the Church from scandal on the lips of Archbishop Weakland, not the pope. It is just this kind of anachronistic conflation that I think warrants my accusation that the Times, in rushing to a guilty verdict, lacks fairness in its coverage of Pope Benedict.

As a full-time member of the Roman Curia, the governing structure that carries out the Holy See’s tasks, I do not have time to deal with the Times’s subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting of Goodstein’s “disturbing report.” But about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.

Retrieved March 31, 2010 from http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_card-levada2010_en.html

Scoundrel Time(s): NY Times Reaches a New Low

Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly. Proverbs 26:11.

This information was found online at:
http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4114/pub_detail.asp

For more on this topic, see the Ethics and Public Policy Center website, particularly these links:

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4116/pub_detail.asp (Spreading the Big Lie)

and

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4106/pub_detail.asp

and especially the excellent column by Elizabeth Scalia replete with further helpful links

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/theanchoress/2010/03/29/praying-for-the-pope-for-all/



Scoundrel Time(s)
By George Weigel
Posted: Monday, March 29, 2010


ARTICLE
First Things -- On the Square
Publication Date: March 29, 2010


The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child's mother-thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years-some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests -- a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops' annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog's behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down -- and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.

The Church itself is in some measure responsible for this. Reprehensible patterns of clerical sexual abuse and misgovernance by the Church's bishops came to glaring light in the U.S. in 2002; worse patterns of corruption have been recently revealed in Ireland. Clericalism, cowardice, fideism about psychotherapy's ability to "fix" sexual predators -- all played their roles in the recycling of abusers into ministry and in the failure of bishops to come to grips with a massive breakdown of conviction and discipline in the post-Vatican II years. For the Church's sexual abuse crisis has always been that: a crisis of fidelity. Priests who live the noble promises of their ordination are not sexual abusers; bishops who take their custody of the Lord's flock seriously, protect the young and recognize that a man's acts can so disfigure his priesthood that he must be removed from public ministry or from the clerical state. That the Catholic Church was slow to recognize the scandal of sexual abuse within the household of faith, and the failures of governance that led to the scandal being horribly mishandled, has been frankly admitted-by the bishops of the United States in 2002, and by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland. In recent years, though, . . .

Read the full piece online at First Things, http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/03/scoundrel-times

George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church (Basic Books).

Less than meets the eye: Planned Parenthood head thanks rebellious nuns

The story of the rebellious nuns who, in opposition to the Bishops, signed a letter about the health care legislation then in Congress is a sad commentary in so many ways. One way has to do with the nuns themselves and the deterioration of their orders. But another has to do with the uncritical way in which their gross misrepresentation of who they are and what they represented was taken up uncritically and amplified through the mainstream media without retraction or apology, as far as I have seen.

From the CNA article linked below:

"The group NETWORK claimed in a March 17 letter to the House of Representatives that it represented 59,000 women religious across the U.S. It urged members of Congress to support the bill.

"Their statement was uncritically reported by the Associated Press. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and others working to pass the legislation invoked the sisters’ endorsement for support.

"On March 18 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) spokeswoman Sr. Mary Ann Walsh said NETWORK “grossly overstated” their numbers.

“'The letter had 55 signatories, some individuals, some groups of three to five persons. One endorser signed twice,” she added. “There are 793 religious communities in the United States,' Sr. Walsh said.

"Another group of women religious, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR), issued a statement saying it represented 10,000 sisters and supported the U.S. bishops’ criticisms of the Senate health care bill."

Planned Parenthood head thanks rebellious nuns
Planned Parenthood head thanks religious sisters for ‘critical support’ of health care bill :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

so what just happened?

We may be forgiven for wondering what the health bill as voted on by the House and signed by the President actually says and means in terms of federal funding for abortion and a big increase (or decrease) in abortions carried out in the U.S. Time will tell on the last point. A good FAQ explanation of the first can be found at First Things:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/03/23/a-final-faq-on-healthcare-and-abortion/#more-14000

A confused situation was muddied further by an appalling column by Maureen Dowd in the NYT at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21dowd.html

Dowd makes much of the public disagreement of a group of dissident nuns (absurdly misrepresented by Newsweek and the Washington Post to represent 59,000 sisters, about the total of all nuns in the U.S.) over the meaning of the Senate bill and whether or not it allowed for federal funding of abortion. This is an empirical question that could have been addressed by examining the Bishops' statement (at http://www.usccb.org/comm/health-care-life-all.shtml), reading the bill, and determining who was right. It is not that hard to do.

Instead, so typically for the NYT and to the delight of its readers, Dowd pays no attention whatever to the facts of the matter and launches into a tirade against the leaders of the Church, the bishops and the Pope, dragging in their handling of sex abuse scandals, and claiming that therefore [really!] the nuns had more authority to instruct the faithful on the contents of the bill. The argument is silly on so many levels and so completely ducks the factual point at issue, that one ought perhaps to be amazed at the way it was heralded by so many as a wonderful column. If the column leaves its readers completely uninformed on the matter at hand, it tells us much about the anti-Catholic prejudices of the NYT and its secular-liberal readers. Also about the dire state of the older religious orders of women which, inspired by the spirit of feminism and New Age religion, have gone off in some very strange directions. One result of this is that these orders are shrinking and aging at an extraordinary rate, while newer, orthodox orders are full of young sisters and are thriving. Why after all, take the trouble to commit to the rigors of a consecrated religious life in order to end up looking and sounding for all the world like an aging Unitarian? Another result is that the orders are being investigated by the Vatican--and not a moment too soon--both in terms of their practices and beliefs, and because they are withering on the vine.

That people could find the column persuasive--one colleague sent it to me with a note urging me to read it and THINK about it (in block caps, no less)--is testament to two things in my opinion. One is the poisoning of any discussion involving religion in general and Catholicism in particular by the prevailing secular-liberal assumption that people of faith are terminally stupid and therefore the use of rational argument and evidence is neither necessary nor useful. A couple of knock-down arguments about other topics is all you need to silence your religious interlocutor. The other thing is the catastrophic decline of catechesis of lay Catholics over the past forty years as experiential learning replaced clarity and substance of instruction.

It is little wonder that there are so many adult Catholics in high places who seem neither to understand nor believe the central tenets of the faith and who have no idea of the structure of authority in the Church. In the end, as the term "cafeteria Catholics" denotes, you pick and choose those teachings on faith and morals you feel "comfortable" with, elevating your own opinions above the teaching of the Church.

And then, as Philip Jenkins says in his The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, anti-Catholicism in the U.S. is nothing new. What is different this time around is the extent to which many the fiercest anti-Catholic writers themselves claim to be Catholic, while rejecting every identifiable aspect of Catholic faith, morals, and tradition. Little wonder then, with the failure of the Church to catechize its members since the heady days of the Sixties and Vatican II, the abandonment by "progressive" nuns of their habits (literally) and their vows of obedience, and the new phenomenon of vitriolic anti-Catholic Catholics like James Carroll, that the likes of Nancy Pelosi can claim to be Catholic and sneer dismissively that no bunch of bishops was going to tell her she was or wasn't. (But of course, that is precisely a question within the jurisdiction of her bishop.)

The language and loopholes of the Senate bill are matters of fact. But if the Senate Bill really left the Hyde restrictions in place as these nuns claimed, why make such a fuss about refusing language that made the fact clear--that's all Stupak and the Bishops asked?