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).
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
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)
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)
Monday, March 29, 2010
Media Attacks on Pope Benedict and Responses
http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=5871
More on the NYT Campaign Against the Pope: From the Benedict Blog
SATURDAY, MARCH 27, 2010
Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI and "The Murphy Case"
First, the charge:
• Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys, by Laurie Goodstein (New York Times March 24, 2010) charges that "Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church":
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal. ...
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.
The Times cites as evidence " letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy andminutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican."
According to the Times, "Father Murphy 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":
Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.
Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.
From the Vatican, the full text of the statement given to the New York Times on Wednesday by Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office:
The tragic case of Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, involved particularly vulnerable victims who suffered terribly from what he did. By sexually abusing children who were hearing-impaired, Father Murphy violated the law and, more importantly, the sacred trust that his victims had placed in him.
During the mid-1970s, some of Father Murphy's victims reported his abuse to civil authorities, who investigated him at that time; however, according to news reports, that investigation was dropped. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not informed of the matter until some twenty years later.
It has been suggested that a relationship exists between the application of Crimen sollicitationis and the non-reporting of child abuse to civil authorities in this case. In fact, there is no such relationship. Indeed, contrary to some statements that have circulated in the press, neither Crimen nor the Code of Canon Law ever prohibited the reporting of child abuse to law enforcement authorities.
In the late 1990s, after over two decades had passed since the abuse had been reported to diocesan officials and the police, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was presented for the first time with the question of how to treat the Murphy case canonically. The Congregation was informed of the matter because it involved solicitation in the confessional, which is a violation of the Sacrament of Penance. It is important to note that the canonical question presented to the Congregation was unrelated to any potential civil or criminal proceedings against Father Murphy.
In such cases, the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties, but recommends that a judgment be made not excluding even the greatest ecclesiastical penalty of dismissal from the clerical state (cf. Canon 1395, no. 2). In light of the facts that Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith suggested that the Archbishop of Milwaukee give consideration to addressing the situation by, for example, restricting Father Murphy's public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts. Father Murphy died approximately four months later, without further incident.
Further responses
• "Shame on the New York Times" says Michael Sean Winters (America):
... I will grant that there is something to the argument that the victims’ right to have their story told, to receive justice for the crimes against them, demanded a canonical trial of the priest no matter his physical condition. I will grant that there is a coldness in the correspondence that seems more focused on the reputation of the Church than on the rights of the victims. I will grant that it was the victims of this priest’s abuse, not Cardinal Ratzinger, who had a right to decide when and how to show mercy to Father Murphy. It is not difficult to see that Cardinal Ratzinger might have made the wrong decision in this case, but I submit that there is nothing in the documents the Times presents that suggests Cardinal Ratzinger’s moral culpability for the abuse itself or for any cover-up of that abuse. And the Times article certainly suggests moral culpability even though the documents do not support the charge.
• The Pope and the Murphy case: what the New York Times story didn't tell you - Phil Lawler (CatholicCulture.com) examines the evidence and finds that
... his is a story about the abject failure of the Milwaukee archdiocese to discipline a dangerous priest, and the tardy effort by Archbishop Weakland--who would soon become the subject of a major scandal himself--to shift responsibility to Rome.
Lawler lists six notable points:
1. The allegations of abuse by Father Lawrence Murphy began in 1955 and continued in 1974, according to the Times account. The Vatican was first notified in 1996: 40 years after Church officials in Wisconsin were first made aware of the problem. Local Church leaders could have taken action in the 1950s. They didn't.
2. The Vatican, following the standard procedures required by canon law, kept its own inquiries confidential. But the CDF never barred other investigations.
3. Milwaukee's Archbishop Cousins could have suspended Father Murphy from priestly ministry in 1974, when he was evidently convinced that the priest was guilty of gross misconduct. He didn't.
4. Having called the Vatican's attention to Murphy's case, Archbishop Weakland apparently wanted an immediate response, and was unhappy that the CDF took 8 months to respond. But again, the Milwaukee archdiocese had waited decades to take this action.
5. This was, in effect, the final result of the Vatican's inquiry in this case; Father Murphy died just months later.
6. The correspondence makes it clear that Archbishop Weakland took action not because he wanted to protect the public from an abusive priest, but because he wanted to avoid the huge public outcry that he predicted would emerge if Murphy was not disciplined.
• Damien Thompson (The Times UK) "smells a stitch up":
Murphy? Guilty as hell. Various bishops? Likewise. But the fact that in 1996 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger may have approved the decision not to pursue complex canonical procedures against Murphy on the grounds that the guy was dying anyway doesn’t strike me as much of a smoking gun.
I do, however, get the very strong feeling that the Pope’s enemies, including his enemies in the Church, are trying desperately hard to discover serious complicity on his part in a child abuse case. Because that would be just so convenient, wouldn’t it?
• As Riccardo Cascioli of Avvenire concludes: The documentation published by The New York Times contradicts its own thesis, which accuses Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of not being sufficiently energetic in the case of an American priest who the Church punished for acts of pederasty.
Retrieved March 28, 2010 from http://popebenedictxvinews.blogspot.com/
Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI and "The Murphy Case"
First, the charge:
• Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys, by Laurie Goodstein (New York Times March 24, 2010) charges that "Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church":
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal. ...
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.
The Times cites as evidence " letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy andminutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican."
According to the Times, "Father Murphy 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":
Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.
Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.
From the Vatican, the full text of the statement given to the New York Times on Wednesday by Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office:
The tragic case of Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, involved particularly vulnerable victims who suffered terribly from what he did. By sexually abusing children who were hearing-impaired, Father Murphy violated the law and, more importantly, the sacred trust that his victims had placed in him.
During the mid-1970s, some of Father Murphy's victims reported his abuse to civil authorities, who investigated him at that time; however, according to news reports, that investigation was dropped. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not informed of the matter until some twenty years later.
It has been suggested that a relationship exists between the application of Crimen sollicitationis and the non-reporting of child abuse to civil authorities in this case. In fact, there is no such relationship. Indeed, contrary to some statements that have circulated in the press, neither Crimen nor the Code of Canon Law ever prohibited the reporting of child abuse to law enforcement authorities.
In the late 1990s, after over two decades had passed since the abuse had been reported to diocesan officials and the police, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was presented for the first time with the question of how to treat the Murphy case canonically. The Congregation was informed of the matter because it involved solicitation in the confessional, which is a violation of the Sacrament of Penance. It is important to note that the canonical question presented to the Congregation was unrelated to any potential civil or criminal proceedings against Father Murphy.
In such cases, the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties, but recommends that a judgment be made not excluding even the greatest ecclesiastical penalty of dismissal from the clerical state (cf. Canon 1395, no. 2). In light of the facts that Father Murphy was elderly and in very poor health, and that he was living in seclusion and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith suggested that the Archbishop of Milwaukee give consideration to addressing the situation by, for example, restricting Father Murphy's public ministry and requiring that Father Murphy accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts. Father Murphy died approximately four months later, without further incident.
Further responses
• "Shame on the New York Times" says Michael Sean Winters (America):
... I will grant that there is something to the argument that the victims’ right to have their story told, to receive justice for the crimes against them, demanded a canonical trial of the priest no matter his physical condition. I will grant that there is a coldness in the correspondence that seems more focused on the reputation of the Church than on the rights of the victims. I will grant that it was the victims of this priest’s abuse, not Cardinal Ratzinger, who had a right to decide when and how to show mercy to Father Murphy. It is not difficult to see that Cardinal Ratzinger might have made the wrong decision in this case, but I submit that there is nothing in the documents the Times presents that suggests Cardinal Ratzinger’s moral culpability for the abuse itself or for any cover-up of that abuse. And the Times article certainly suggests moral culpability even though the documents do not support the charge.
• The Pope and the Murphy case: what the New York Times story didn't tell you - Phil Lawler (CatholicCulture.com) examines the evidence and finds that
... his is a story about the abject failure of the Milwaukee archdiocese to discipline a dangerous priest, and the tardy effort by Archbishop Weakland--who would soon become the subject of a major scandal himself--to shift responsibility to Rome.
Lawler lists six notable points:
1. The allegations of abuse by Father Lawrence Murphy began in 1955 and continued in 1974, according to the Times account. The Vatican was first notified in 1996: 40 years after Church officials in Wisconsin were first made aware of the problem. Local Church leaders could have taken action in the 1950s. They didn't.
2. The Vatican, following the standard procedures required by canon law, kept its own inquiries confidential. But the CDF never barred other investigations.
3. Milwaukee's Archbishop Cousins could have suspended Father Murphy from priestly ministry in 1974, when he was evidently convinced that the priest was guilty of gross misconduct. He didn't.
4. Having called the Vatican's attention to Murphy's case, Archbishop Weakland apparently wanted an immediate response, and was unhappy that the CDF took 8 months to respond. But again, the Milwaukee archdiocese had waited decades to take this action.
5. This was, in effect, the final result of the Vatican's inquiry in this case; Father Murphy died just months later.
6. The correspondence makes it clear that Archbishop Weakland took action not because he wanted to protect the public from an abusive priest, but because he wanted to avoid the huge public outcry that he predicted would emerge if Murphy was not disciplined.
• Damien Thompson (The Times UK) "smells a stitch up":
Murphy? Guilty as hell. Various bishops? Likewise. But the fact that in 1996 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger may have approved the decision not to pursue complex canonical procedures against Murphy on the grounds that the guy was dying anyway doesn’t strike me as much of a smoking gun.
I do, however, get the very strong feeling that the Pope’s enemies, including his enemies in the Church, are trying desperately hard to discover serious complicity on his part in a child abuse case. Because that would be just so convenient, wouldn’t it?
• As Riccardo Cascioli of Avvenire concludes: The documentation published by The New York Times contradicts its own thesis, which accuses Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of not being sufficiently energetic in the case of an American priest who the Church punished for acts of pederasty.
Retrieved March 28, 2010 from http://popebenedictxvinews.blogspot.com/
Sunday, March 28, 2010
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
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
Friday, March 26, 2010
A Secularist's View of Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity
Not all atheists hate Christianity! Some even consider it useful as providing an ethical basis for society that secularism/atheism cannot supply. This is an interesting article from the American Thinker, a "daily internet publication." The author, an atheist who sees himself as free of the religious illusions of the masses, nevertheless argues a point often argued by Catholic and other Christian intellectuals--that the success and survival of Western civilization rest upon the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Secularism offers no basis for a shared morality or a free society, but renders those who confidently abandon the faith of their fathers ideologically and morally helpless in the face of the enemies of both Christianity and secularism. Cicero held a similar position--he did not believe in the gods himself, but thought that general belief in and public recognition of them essential to the survival of Rome. What the Roman gods provided was different, however--a political glue that held the polis together, not a moral foundation for ethical behavior--that, after all, was not something the Roman gods were known for!
This essay reminds me too of the exchange between a Pacific Islander and Christopher Hitchens in the 2007 debate between Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza. The debate brought out how the transformation of cultures throughout the world by Christianity represented a great gift (and not just or only an alien imposition) as it established the equal and intrinsic dignity and worth of all as a recognized, if not always practiced universal principle. One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man was asking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism [from my post of September 4, 2009].
Habermas, also a secularist who is tolerant of Christianity and sees its centrality as the foundation of Europe, puts it like this: 'Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter' [also quoted in my September 4 blog. But note the comment by Thomas Gregersen of denmark and my response].
American Thinker: Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity
This essay reminds me too of the exchange between a Pacific Islander and Christopher Hitchens in the 2007 debate between Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza. The debate brought out how the transformation of cultures throughout the world by Christianity represented a great gift (and not just or only an alien imposition) as it established the equal and intrinsic dignity and worth of all as a recognized, if not always practiced universal principle. One of the most interesting questions in the debate was posed to Hitchens by a man from Tonga. Before the Christians came to Tonga, he said, the place was a mess. Even cannibalism was widespread. The Christians stopped this practice and brought to Tonga the notion that each person has a soul and God loves everyone equally. The man from Tonga asked Hitchens, "So what do you have to offer us?" Hitchens was taken aback, and responded with a learned disquisition on cannibalism in various cultures. But he clearly missed the intellectual and moral force of the man's question. The man was asking why the Tongans, who had gained so much from Christianity, should reject it in favor of atheism [from my post of September 4, 2009].
Habermas, also a secularist who is tolerant of Christianity and sees its centrality as the foundation of Europe, puts it like this: 'Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter' [also quoted in my September 4 blog. But note the comment by Thomas Gregersen of denmark and my response].
American Thinker: Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity
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