The Pope's Apology. Does it go far enough?

[sauronsfinger]

this is from the first article linked to by Solicitr

The Catholic Church is probably the safest place for children at this point in history.

I guess only time will tell if that is true or not. I find it incredibly sad that the last five words needed to be added to qualify the statement. Too bad it were not true for the past 100 years also.

[solicitr]

Meanwhile, back at the press ranch:

CNN brings on as an "expert" guest to discuss Catholicism- Sinead O'Connor.

Maybe next they'll have a Passover roundtable with Hassan Nasrallah....

[Lurker]

this is from the first article linked to by Solicitr

The Catholic Church is probably the safest place for children at this point in history.

I guess only time will tell if that is true or not. I find it incredibly sad that the last five words needed to be added to qualify the statement. Too bad it were not true for the past 100 years also.

I have to agree with that quote since Priests and Nuns no longer teach in Catholic Schools, they are just administrators. My school used to have Priests as teachers in Math, Sciences, PE etc... now they don't even teach religion anymore. Bible studies, communion rites, confirmation rites, mentoring altar boys/girls are now taught by the religious laity mostly women not the Priests so there is little to no contact to children these days within the parish.

[Lurker]

Meanwhile, back at the press ranch:

CNN brings on as an "expert" guest to discuss Catholicism- Sinead O'Connor.

Maybe next they'll have a Passover roundtable with Hassan Nasrallah....

Soli,
You still watch that one-sided network CNN? Man, I haven't turned on that channel eversince Lou Dobbs left.

[River]

Not that I think the current Pope should take the fall for what's obviously been an ongoing poorly-handled problem within the Catholic Church , but, even if he were to respond to this by resigning, would he even be allowed to without damning his soul to hell? Wasn't there a Pope somewhere in the distant past (like, when the Popes lived in Avignon distant past) who abdicated and ended up being named an apostate or some such?

[solicitr]

No, a Pope can resign, generally understood as being for reasons like ill-health, although if that's ever happened it's been a long, long time.

Now, back in the Middle Ages quite a few Popes "abdicated" involuntarily- and were promptly condemned by the successors who ousted them.

And there was one (Formosus) whose successor (Stephen VI) had his corpse dug up, propped in a chair and placed on trial for usurpation and perjury!

[solicitr]

Lurker:

CNN lost “almost half” of their viewers in the last year

[Primula Baggins]

I certainly haven't found them worth watching, not for quite a while.

[Lidless]

From soli's link:

We proceeded to start a trial against Father Murphy. I was the presiding judge in this matter and informed Father Murphy that criminal charges were going to be levied against him with regard to child sexual abuse and solicitation in the confessional.

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem people are having with the Catholic apparatus. This was an internal trial. Nothing was handed over to the police. And what's with the word 'trial'? Only civil authorities and reality shows can have trials. Companies and other organisations do not have 'trials'. The mindset that the Catholic Church can act as a legitimate alternative set of law and order outside that of the rest of society should have been out of date hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.

In my interactions with Father Murphy, I got the impression I was dealing with a man who simply did not get it. He was defensive...

I get the impression we are dealing with a man-made hierarchy who simply does not get it. They are defensive...

Soli suggests there is a mind-set against the Catholic Church. Perhaps, but not because of their religious beliefs. If a hedge fund were to admit that after an internal investigation and trial, one of their fund managers had been found guilty of embezzling millions from investors, and as a result they didn't tell the authorities but demoted him to the post room instead, well, yes, I would have a mind-set against that fund too and would be investing my wealth elsewhere.

You know, it has just occurred to me that (established) religious organisations do see themselves as hedge funds. Their aim is to increase, nurture (and control the direction of) the faith / wealth of their investors / believers (fuelled by cash injections from them) hoping to buck the trend of real-life disasters. Any religious / financial irregularities that are made public would be a disaster - a loss of investors both current and future.

[sauronsfinger]

Lidless has a very good point. It is the people who run the Church who in many ways just do not get it. The very idea that they can handle all these problems within their own province and even go as far as to separate themselves from legal authority, is evidence of that.

Regarding the claim by Solicitr that there is anti-catholic Church prejudice.....
as a person who was born, raised and educated Catholic, I find the strongest negative opinions voiced about Catholic Church matters come from people who are Catholic. This is not a case of traditional prejudice or bigotry coming from someone who was raised to hate The Other. In fact, to call it prejudice or bigotry is to put the wrong label upon the feelings. These are people who know the Church well because they lived lives within in. For one reason or another, they developed issues with the Church and found that there was no way to resolve those issues within the Church given its authoritarian and patriarchal structure. Then they read and view news about the Church and this further alienates them.

And I am not just referring to news about sex scandals and cover-ups but touch on other issues as well. A story like this one is rather upsetting for someone who wants to see progressive changes in the Church

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 215.column

I do not feel comfortable seeing the Church given over to secret societies who want to turn back the clock to previous centuries.

Historically, there indeed was a great deal of anti-Catholic prejudice and it came from various Protestant sects as a leftover from the Reformation period. In addition, the USA saw a great deal of it especially as it related to the issue of immigration of peoples from Southern and Central Europe who tended to be Catholic much more than did the earlier wave of immigrants from Western Europe. It is worth noting that the Klan singled out Catholics and Jews as well as their favorite target of African Americans.

But that is not what we have today when many voice strong opinions about Church failings. It is generally not anti-Catholic hate or bigotry at work like it was in previous historical eras.

[solicitr]

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem people are having with the Catholic apparatus. This was an internal trial. Nothing was handed over to the police.

That is simply untrue. Why didn't the Church go to the police in 1974? THEY DID. The police, however, chose not to believe the children, as would be done today; it was the DA who elected not to pursue the case. By 1996 Wisconsin's statute of limitations had run out; there was no action the civil authorities could take.

The Church, however, had removed Murphy from parochial duties and sent him to live with his mother in unofficial retirement for the last twenty years of his life. The canonical trial was initiated at the request of the victims and their families, who wanted to see Murphy defrocked and deprived of burial as a priest.

What's infuriating about the New York Times spin, picked up on by most of the media, is the claim, entirely false, that then-Cardinal Ratzinger intervened to stop the canonical trial, which is absolutely false.

Burying the role that the civil authorities played in the middle of the ninth paragraph of the story, sandwiched in between two sentences about Church officials' failure to act, cannot be chalked up to bad reporting. It is, as any good writer or editor would know, a deliberate act.

In fact, it was Ratzinger who removed canonical appeals from the Rota, where typically they stagnated for years unending, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which processes them with expedition.

[Cerin]

But someone tried to stop the trial, if I understand what 'abate' means in that context.

[sauronsfinger]

The central issue to which the Catholic Church is failing in this is the issue of moral leadership. How can a religion tell the rest of the world how to live when it has such a poor record within its own house? Once any religion is perceived as hypocritical in this regard, people will vote with their feet. And they have been doing just that. I honestly feel that most Catholics are really sad about this entire fiasco and it is not something they enjoy discussing or treating like a criminal trial in a courtroom or a debate contest.

For many it is not an issue of who did what on what day in what case and who knew or did not know or some other legalistic details. The whole thing simply does not pass a simple common sense smell test.

[solicitr]

But someone tried to stop the trial, if I understand what 'abate' means in that context.

Yes- Murphy's lawyers. Effectively, they succeeded in running out the clock.

[Cerin]

But someone tried to stop the trial, if I understand what 'abate' means in that context.

Yes- Murphy's lawyers. Effectively, they succeeded in running out the clock.

Here's that section from the article:

Additionally, in the documentation in a letter from Archbishop Weakland to then-secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone on August 19, 1998, Archbishop Weakland stated that he had instructed me to abate the proceedings against Father Murphy. Father Murphy, however, died two days later and the fact is that on the day that Father Murphy died, he was still the defendant in a church criminal trial. No one seems to be aware of this. Had I been asked to abate this trial, I most certainly would have insisted that an appeal be made to the supreme court of the church, or Pope John Paul II if necessary. That process would have taken months if not longer.

My point was that someone from the Church tried to stop the trial, which means that at that point at least, the circle-the-wagons mentality was still in effect.

[solicitr]

Weakland's reasoning (which I disagree with) was that proceedings should be put on hold because Murphy was a dying man. This happens in the criminal courts, too, if a defendant becomes too ill to participate effectively in his own defense. However, the case was brought *specifically* because his victims didn't want him buried as a priest, and so IMO Weakland was wrong.

Don't however expect me to defend Weakland, perhaps the most despised and reviled ex-bishop in America if not the whole Church. Among his many malfeasances was embezzling $450,000 of diocesan funds as hush-money for his mistress. He was loathed by both Pope John Paul and then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who succeeded in forcing him into early retirement. It is possible Weakland was also motivated because a trial would have brought out things he didn't want to come out, but that's just speculation. He was in any event one of the bad'uns.

How can a religion tell the rest of the world how to live when it has such a poor record within its own house?

How can a government tell the rest of the country how to live when it has such a poor record within its own house?

[River]

Well, as far as the question of "how should I live my life" goes, there are more options than government or the Catholic Church...

[Primula Baggins]

Yes, there are lots of highly sensible people here who will tell you that kind of thing, too.

[solicitr]

What I was suggesting was that all institutions are necessarily prone to some degree of corruption, venality and vice; and therefore any institution which even attempts to provide guidance is going to be guilty of a measure of hypocrisy. It's the way of the fallen world.

Congress still has the power to make laws, despite being habitually corrupt, venal, vice-ridden and mendacious. The Church is still (for Catholics) the vehicle of the Sacraments, despite a 2000-year history of moral sludge.

Notwithstanding the above, there's no excuse for the continued existence of the corrupt, venal, vice-ridden, mendacious and above all useless UN. But I digress.

[Lidless]

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem people are having with the Catholic apparatus. This was an internal trial. Nothing was handed over to the police.

That is simply untrue. Why didn't the Church go to the police in 1974? THEY DID.

Link please? I understood that the victims went to the police, not the Church.

And even if you can find a link to this particular priest, what percentage of incidents known by the Church till, say 2000, were passed on to the police before the victims already had?

I would hazard less than a third, and that is being obscenely generous. It is endemic, soli. The Church sees its priests as diplomats - workers for the Church in a foreign country, and not bound by that country's laws but only to their own.

It has always been thus.