"It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.
Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.
The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.
This week of special confessions and penance services is unfolding as the pope resists pressure from Catholics around the globe for his own confession and penance about the cascade of child sexual abuse cases that were ignored, even by a German diocese and Vatican office he ran." Dowd
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Tough times in the Church business. A lot of people in the Catholic Church are fed up with the monarchical, medieval style in religion that present practice in the Church embodies. 2000 years of liturgical, structural and legal encrustations are not amusing any longer in the context of the knowledge of widespread sexual molestation of children (mostly boys) by Religious (brothers) and Clergy (priests).
Catholics were brought up to trust clergy and religious. Sure, there were always a few that seemed dubious, but in the main the priestly image among the laity was a composite of the little guy in "The Bells of St. Mary's," the whiskey priest in Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory," and Bishop Fulton Sheen. In other words, other worldly people who were not self oriented.
That's gone now. The archbishop of New York is wrong if he thinks we believe his claim that only "a few" priests have been involved in widespread immorality. This is obviously a widespread phenomenon, one in which men trusted by parents with their children conspired to ravage these children, and the most guilty of the conspirators were the bishops who served as enablers and who continue to protect their caste of unmarried and largely unaccountable managers of tax exempt institutions.
The Europeans thought it was vaguely amusing when this scandal was revealed in the US a dozen years ago. They implied in their comments that this was somehow a peculiarly American problem. Who laughs last, etc...
Pope Benedict and the bishops should start listening to the people of God. Massive reform, not in teaching, but in practice is clearly needed. pl
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/opinion/31dowd.html?src=me
