CAN urges UN to stop sectarian killings in Iraq

Amplify’d from www.vanguardngr.com

CAN urges UN to stop sectarian killings in Iraq

By Sam EYOBOKA PEEVED by the continued massacre of Christians in Iraq, the umbrella body of Christians in Nigeria, the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, has appealed to the United Nations, UN, to intervene and save the lives of the Christian hostages in interest of world peace.

Speaking in an interview, the National President of CAN, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor also appealed to the Muslim fundamen-talists in that country to take advantage of the Muslim feast of Eid el Kabir to ensure that lasting peace reigns in that region.

Pastor Oritsejafor who played host to the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, RCCG, Pastor Enoch Adeboye in his Warri base, con-demned the capture and the systematic annihilation of Christians and their leaders in an alleged retaliation for some women being held by certain Christians in Egypt.

According to the CAN president, current unwarranted sectarian violence in the Iraq targeted at innocent Christians is absolutely unacceptable because “it is barbaric, inhuman, and cannot be described as a Godly act,” urging the UN to act fast to save a very ugly situation from degenerating to major crises in other parts of the world.

The CAN president, who despatched a congratu-latory message to the Nigerian Muslim Comm-unity for the successful flag off of this year’s Hajj to Mecca, hoped that the pilgrims would use the occasion to pray for the peaceful co-existence among the peoples of the world irrespective of creed and race.

Wishing the Muslims happy Sallah celebration, he charged adherents of Islam to con-tinue to im-bibe the teachings of Prophet Mohammed and live up to the tenets of their faith through acts of charity, peaceful co-existence with their neighbours, obedience to the injunctions of the Holy Qu’oran and sacrifice as exemplified by Prophet Ibrahim whose spirit of obedience was demonstra-ted through his submiss-ion to the will of Allah even in very difficult circum-stances.

Recent reports claimed that another bomb attack in northern Iraq killed a Christian man and his 6-year old daughter, the latest in a series of strikes targeting the coun-try’s dwind-ling Christ-ian popula-tion. The in-cident occurred in Mosul, a multi-ethnic city in Nine-veh prov-ince-long the home of significant Christian enclaves.

A flurry of attacks in the north over the last 24 hours is a sign that the recent sectarian violence targeting Christians is spreading from Baghdad. The man and his daughter were killed Tuesday afternoon when an explosive attached to a vehicle detonated, local police said.

Monday night, attackers went into two homes occupied by Christian families in the Tahrir neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, killed the two male heads of the households, and then drove off, the interior ministry official said.

It will also be recalled that at least 37 Christians including two priests were killed two weeks ago in a Baghdad cathedral and many more since then in an attempt to free dozens of hostages held by Al-Qaeda gunmen. While an agency reporter claimed that the attack was lead by three American soldiers in assault gear, Sameer al-Shuaili, spokesman of Iraq’s anti-terror unit, said that no Americans were involved in the attack.

“The anti-terror forces are the only forces who raided the church, there were no Americans at all,” he told AFP. “We came here to help the police and army free the hostages, and we released them with the help of the Americans,” a member of Iraq’s anti-terrorist unit told AFP at the scene on Sunday.

Among those killed in the carnage were five women, seven children and two priests, an interior ministry official and wit-nesses said. Ten women, eight children and a priest were among the wounded. Five attackers were killed and eight arrested, the official said, adding there had been more than 100 worshippers at the cath-edral in central Baghdad when the gunmen stormed in.

The Vatican, Italy and France were among the first to condemn the hostage-taking in Bagh-dad. Around 800,000 Christians lived in Iraq in 2003 but their number has since shrunk to 550,000 as members of the comm-unity have fled abroad, according to Christian leaders.

Iraqi Christians have frequently been the target of violence, including murder and abductions. Hundreds have been killed and several churches attacked since the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003. Read more at www.vanguardngr.com

 

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Benedict XVI discusses the scandals that have rocked the Church, papal fallibility, the saints he calls friends

Is the Pope really “infallible”, in the sense that the media sometimes bandy that term about? An absolute ruler whose thinking and will are law?



It goes without saying that the Pope can have private opinions that are wrong. But when he speaks as the supreme pastor of the Church, fully aware of his responsibility, then he no longer says something that is personally his, whatever happens to occur to him. Then, conscious of this great responsibility and at the same time of the Lord’s protection, he knows that he is not misleading the Church in such a decision but, rather, is guaranteeing its unity with the past, the present, and the future and, above all, with the Lord. This is what it is about, and this is also what other Christian communities sense.

Amplify’d from www.telegraph.co.uk

The Pope in his own words

In an extraordinarily candid interview with Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI discusses the scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, papal fallibility, the saints he calls friends, and a fondness for old films

Faith and friendship: 'It goes without saying that the Pope can have private opinions that are wrong'

By Peter Seewald

On your 78th birthday, in 2005, you said how much you were looking forward to your retirement. Three days later, you were leader of the universal Church, with 1.2 billion followers. Not exactly a project that one saves for his old age.

Actually, I had expected finally to have some peace and quiet. The fact that I suddenly found myself facing this tremendous task was, as everybody knows, a shock for me. The responsibility is, in fact, enormous.

You said later there was a moment when you felt just as though a “guillotine” was coming down on you.

Yes, the guillotine thought occurred to me; it falls down and hits you. I had been so sure that this office was not my calling, and that God would grant me some peace and quiet after strenuous years. But then I could only say to myself: God’s will is apparently otherwise, and something new and completely different is beginning for me. He will be with me.

What was going through your head in the so-called Room of Tears [the small red room in the Vatican next to the Sistine Chapel where the elected pope dons his cassock for the first time], where so many new pontiffs are said to have broken down? Does one wonder: why me? What does God want of me?

Actually, at that moment, one is first of all occupied by very practical, external things. One has to deal with the robes and such. Moreover, I knew that very soon I would have to say a few words out on the balcony, and I began to think about what I could say. Besides, even at the moment when it hit me, all I was able to say to the Lord was simply: “What are you doing with me? Now the responsibility is yours. You must lead me! I can’t do it. If you wanted me, then you must also help me!” In this sense, I stood, let us say, in an urgent dialogue relationship with the Lord: if he does the one thing, he must also do the other.

Did Pope John Paul II want to have you as his successor?

That I do not know. I think he left it entirely up to the dear Lord.

Nonetheless, he did not allow you to leave office. That could be taken as an “argumentum e silentio”, a silent argument for his favourite candidate.

He did want to keep me in office; that is well-known. As my 75th birthday approached, which is the age limit when one submits one’s resignation [as required by church law], he said to me: “You do not have to write the letter at all, for I want to have you to the end.” That was the great and undeserved benevolence he showed me from the very beginning. He had read my Introduction to Christianity (published in 1968). Evidently, it was an important book for him. By the time he became Pope, he had made up his mind to call me to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He had placed a great, very cordial and profound trust in me, as the guarantee, so to speak, that we would travel the right course in the faith.

You visited Pope John Paul II on his deathbed. What, if anything, did he say to you?

He was suffering much and, nevertheless, very alert. He said nothing more, though. I asked him for his blessing, which he gave me. So we parted with a cordial handshake, conscious that that was our last meeting.

You did not want to become a bishop, you did not want to become prefect, you did not want to become Pope. Isn’t it frightening when things repeatedly happen quite against your own will?

It is like this: when a man says “yes” during his priestly ordination, he may have some idea of what his own charism [spiritual qualification] could be, but he also knows: I have placed myself into the hands of the bishop and ultimately of the Lord. I cannot pick and choose what I want. In the end, I must allow myself to be led. I had, in fact, the notion that being a theology professor was my charism, and I was very happy when my idea became a reality.

But it was also clear to me: I am always in the Lord’s hands, and I must also be prepared for things that I do not want. In this sense it was certainly surprising suddenly to be snatched away and no longer to be able to follow my own path.

But, as I said, the fundamental “yes” also contained the thought that I remain at the Lord’s disposal and perhaps will also have to do things someday that I myself would not like.

You are now the most powerful Pope of all time. Never before has the Catholic Church had more believers, never before such extension, literally to the ends of the earth.

Naturally, these statistics are important. They indicate how widespread the Church is and how large this communion is, which encompasses races and peoples, continents, cultures, and people of every kind. But the Pope does not have power because of these numbers.

Why not?

Communion with the Pope is something of a different sort, as is membership in the Church, of course. Among those 1.2 billion Catholics are many who inwardly are not there. Saint Augustine said there are many outside who seem to be inside, and there are many inside who seem to be outside.

In a matter like faith – like membership in the Catholic Church – inside and outside are mysteriously intertwined with each other. Stalin was right in saying that the Pope has no divisions and cannot issue commands. Nor does he have a big business in which all the faithful of the Church are his employees or his subordinates. In that respect, the Pope is, on the one hand, a completely powerless man. On the other hand, he bears a great responsibility.

He is to a certain extent the leader, the representative, and at the same time the one responsible for making sure that the faith that keeps people together is believed, that it remains alive, and that its identity is inviolate. But only the Lord himself has the power to keep people in the faith as well.

For the Catholic Church, the Pope is the “Vicarius Christi”, Christ’s representative on earth. Can you really speak for Jesus?

In proclaiming the faith and in administering the sacraments, every priest speaks on behalf of Jesus Christ, for Jesus Christ. Christ entrusted his Word to the Church. This Word lives in the Church. And if I accept interiorly the faith of this Church and live, speak and think on the basis of it, when I proclaim Him, then I speak for Him — even though, of course, there can always be shortcomings in the details. The important thing is that I do not present my ideas, but rather try to think and to live the Church’s faith, to act in obedience to his mandate.

Is the Pope really “infallible”, in the sense that the media sometimes bandy that term about? An absolute ruler whose thinking and will are law?

It goes without saying that the Pope can have private opinions that are wrong. But when he speaks as the supreme pastor of the Church, fully aware of his responsibility, then he no longer says something that is personally his, whatever happens to occur to him. Then, conscious of this great responsibility and at the same time of the Lord’s protection, he knows that he is not misleading the Church in such a decision but, rather, is guaranteeing its unity with the past, the present, and the future and, above all, with the Lord. This is what it is about, and this is also what other Christian communities sense.

Acting in contrary ways is a feature of your entire life story. It began in your childhood home, where resistance to atheism was a hallmark of your family’s Christian life. In the seminary, you were helped by a rector who was detained at Dachau. As a priest, you began in a parish in Munich, where both your predecessors were executed by the Nazis for fighting in the Resistance. During the Council, you opposed the excessively narrow preliminary texts of the Church leadership. As a bishop, you warned about the dangers of an affluent society. As a cardinal, you fought against modification of core Christian doctrines by trends foreign to the faith. Does this contrariness also influence the way in which you are shaping your pontificate?

Naturally, experience leaves its mark on thought and action. I was not always simply against things, exclusively and as a matter of principle. There were many wonderful situations of agreement. Ultimately, someone who is always only in opposition could probably not endure life at all.

But, at the same time, the Gospel stands in opposition to powerful constellations. In my childhood and youth, until the end of the war, of course, this was so in an especially drastic way. In the years after [the social revolutions of] 1968, the Christian faith came into conflict with a new concept of society, so that it repeatedly had to stand against powerful, triumphal opinions. Enduring hostility and offering resistance, to bring to light what is positive, are therefore part of it.

Has your faith changed since becoming responsible for Christ’s flock as the supreme shepherd? Sometimes people get the impression that now it has become more mysterious somehow, more mystical.

I am no mystic. But it is correct that as Pope one has even more cause to pray and to entrust oneself entirely to God. For I see very well that almost everything I have to do is something I myself cannot do at all. That fact already forces me, so to speak, to place myself in the Lord’s hands and to say to him: “You do it if you want it!” In this sense, prayer and contact with God are now even more necessary, more natural and self-evident than before.

And how does Pope Benedict pray?

As far as the Pope is concerned, he too is a simple beggar before God – even more than all other people. Naturally, I always pray first and foremost to our Lord, with whom I am united simply by old acquaintance, so to speak. But I also invoke the saints. I am friends with Augustine, with Bonaventure, with Thomas Aquinas. One says to such saints: “Help me!” In this sense, I commend myself to the communion of saints. With them, strengthened by them, I then talk with the dear Lord also, begging, for the most part, but also in thanksgiving – or quite simply being joyful.

The Pope on... where he gets his energy at 83

The demands of this job really overtax an 83-year-old man. Thank God there are many good co-workers. Everything is developed and implemented in a common effort. I trust that our dear Lord will give me as much strength as I need to be able to do what is necessary. But I also notice that my forces are diminishing.

Of course, one must organise one’s time correctly. And make sure that one gets enough rest. So that then one is suitably alert at the times when one is needed. In short: so that one follows the rhythm of the day in a disciplined way and knows when one will need energy.

And does he use his exercise bike, which was set up by his former physician?

No, I don’t get to it at all - and don’t need it at the moment, thank God.

The Pope on... dealing with scandals within the church

Right now, in the midst of the scandals, we have experienced what it means to be very stunned by how wretched the Church is, by how much her members fail to follow Christ. That is the one side, which we are forced to experience for our humiliation, for our real humility. The other side is that, in spite of everything, he does not release his grip on the Church. In spite of the weakness of the people in whom he shows himself, he keeps the Church in his grasp, he raises up saints in her, and makes himself present through them. I believe that these two feelings belong together: the deep shock over the wretchedness, the sinfulness of the Church – and the deep shock over the fact that he doesn’t drop this instrument, but that he works with it; that he never ceases to show himself through and in the Church.

The Pope on... drugs

Many, many bishops, above all from Latin America, tell me that wherever the road of drug production and trafficking passes – and that includes large sectors of these countries – it is as if an evil monster had its hand on the country and had corrupted the people. I believe we do not always have an adequate idea of the power of this serpent of drug trafficking and consumption that spans the globe. It destroys youth, it destroys families, it leads to violence and endangers the future of entire nations.

This, too, is one of the terrible responsibilities of the West: that it uses drugs and that it thereby creates countries that have to supply it, which in the end exhausts and destroys them. A craving for happiness has developed that cannot content itself with things as they are. And that then flees into the devil’s paradise, if you will, and destroys people all around.

And then there is a further problem. The destruction that sex tourism wreaks on our young people, the bishops say, is something we cannot even begin to imagine. The destructive processes at work in that are extraordinary and are born from the arrogance and the boredom and the false freedom of the Western world.

You see, man strives for eternal joy; he would like pleasure in the extreme, would like what is eternal. But when there is no God, it is not granted to him and it cannot be. Then he himself must now create something that is fictitious, a false eternity.

The Pope on... his spare time

Of course, even in his free time [the Pope] must study and read documents. There is always a great deal of work left over. But with the papal family, with the four women from the Memores Domini community [who live in the papal apartments and see to the Pope’s household needs] and the two secretaries, there are meals in common, too. Those are moments of relaxation.

I watch the news with the secretaries, but sometimes we watch a DVD together as a group. There is a very beautiful film [Two Suitcases] about St Josephine Bakhita, an African woman, which we watched recently. And then we like to watch Don Camillo and Peppone [a series of 1950s films featuring a priest constantly at odds with the communist mayor, below].

We celebrate Christmas together, listen to the holiday music, and exchange gifts. The feast days of our patron saints are celebrated, and occasionally we also sing Evening Prayer together. Besides our common meals, there is, above all, Holy Mass in the morning. That is an especially important moment in which we are all with each other in a particularly intense way in the light of the Lord.

The Pope on... his clothes

My Junghans watch, which I always wear, belonged to my sister, who left it to me when she died.

[On always wearing a cassock, even in his free time]. That is a legacy left to me by the former second secretary of Pope John Paul II, Monsignor Mieczysław Mokrzycki, who told me: “The Pope always wore a cassock, and so must you.”

Related Articles Pope summons cardinals to Vatican to discuss abuse 20 Nov 2010 Pope consecrates Barcelona's Sagrada Familia Church with strong defence of 'traditional family' 20 Nov 2010 Thousands of Australians turn out for country's first saint 20 Nov 2010 Cardinal Newman was much more than a 'reluctant saint' 20 Nov 2010 Vatican says women priests a 'crime against faith' 20 Nov 2010 Barack Obama in 'frank' discussions with Pope 20 Nov 2010 Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk

 

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Church to use pulpit against RH bill, sex ed | Vatican stranglehold | ‘Consensus’ bill

Amplify’d from newsinfo.inquirer.net

Church to use pulpit against RH bill, sex ed

By Philip Tubeza

MANILA, Philippines—Catholic priests said they would use the pulpit to step up their campaign against the proposed Reproductive Health (RH) bill as its proponents rallied their own local and international troops to urge its passage.

Caloocan Bishop Deogracias Iniguez said the priests would expound on the alleged dangers posed by the RH bill in their homilies in time for the Feast of Christ the King today.

The Church is against the bill’s promotion of modern methods of birth control, which it denounces as “abortifacient,” and the mandating of sex education in schools.

Iniguez said Church homilies “should really emphasize the need to let God reign in our hearts but maybe they could also include some discussion about the RH bill,” Iniguez said in an interview.

The Church successfully blocked attempts in past Congresses to pass the RH bill but members of the influential Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines have admitted that they may have a hard time campaigning against it in the present Congress.

Vatican stranglehold

On the other side, Dr. Martha Campbell, of the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability of the University of California, Berkeley, noted that “the Philippines is the only remaining country where the Catholic Church has real control over women’s health. Or to say it in another way, the Philippines is the last bastion of the Vatican (where it) still (has) a stranglehold on women’s health.”

Catholic European countries have become secularized and no longer follow the Church’s teaching on birth control while Latin America—including the biggest Catholic country in the world, Brazil—has decided to slow down their population growth rate, said Campbell, lending support to the local RH campaigners.

“We can still benefit from the beauty of the spirituality of the Catholic church without having to buy into mythology that causes great pain and suffering, particularly of women and children and the fathers,” she said.

“This is supposed to be a church about life and it makes me very sad that a religion that claims to be about life is inadvertently causing so many deaths—deaths of mothers and deaths of children,” Campbell added.

RH advocates say that more than 10 women die daily due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications and unsafe abortions and over half (56 percent) of yearly maternal deaths are unreported.

They said passing the RH bill, and making available contraceptives, would cut by half the number of illegal abortions in the country, estimated at around 500,000 annually.

‘Consensus’ bill

An attempt at a compromise position has been presented by former Sen. Vicente Paterno. He said some business groups want to propose a “consensus” bill that would ban only those contraceptives that the Department of Health would consider as “abortifacient.”

“We hope that more progressive bishops will appreciate that providing access to information on family planning and giving the poorest families, at least those in the lowest quintile, the means they chose to implement their (family) plans is truly an act of social justice,” Paterno said.

DOH officials said the poorest segment of Filipinos include 5.2 million families whose average monthly income is P3,460. Read more at newsinfo.inquirer.net

 

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Amplify’d from ca.reuters.com

Jewish group urges pope to ban Holocaust denier

PARIS (Reuters) - A Holocaust survivors group urged Pope Benedict on Saturday to ban an arch-traditionalist bishop from the Catholic Church because he hired a lawyer close to neo-Nazi groups to defend him in court in Germany.

Bishop Richard Williamson, one of four rebel bishops re-admitted to the Church in January 2009, recently hired a far-right lawyer to conduct his appeal against a 12,000 euro fine imposed last year for denying the Holocaust.

His ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which is now negotiating its return to the Church with Vatican officials, also threatened to expel Williamson from its ranks if he did not distance himself from Nahrath.

Williamson's re-admission to the Church only days after he denied the Holocaust on Swedish television sparked protests across Europe and created major problems for Pope Benedict, especially with Jewish groups outraged by the move.

In a book due out next week, Benedict says he would not have lifted the 22-year excommunication ban on Williamson if he had known of his far-right views. The pope said the Vatican's poor communications in that row was a "total meltdown."

"Holocaust survivors call on Pope Benedict to categorically assert moral authority and reinstate the excommunication of Bishop Williamson which was lifted last year," Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said in a statement.

"Williamson's grotesque comments denigrating the tragedy of the Holocaust are now compounded by his engaging a notorious right-wing extremist as his lawyer," he said.

British-born Williamson, 70, said on Swedish television in January 2009 that no more than 300,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust and that there were no gas chambers.

The consensus among historians is that the Nazis killed six million Jews. Denying the Holocaust is a hate crime in Germany.

The SSPX in Germany issued a statement saying its leader, Bishop Bernard Fellay "has expressly ordered Bishop Williamson to withdraw this decision (to hire the lawyer) and not let himself be used by political theses that have absolutely nothing to do with his tasks as a Catholic bishop in the service of the society."

It said the lawyer "openly maintained links to the neo-Nazi movement in Germany and similar groups."

Williamson and three other bishops, including Fellay, were excommunicated in 1988 when they accepted ordination from the SSPX's rebel founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, despite the Vatican's clearly expressed opposition.

They were readmitted in January 2009 after Fellay wrote to the Vatican pledging they accepted the pope as head of the Church.

Benedict said in a new book, Light of the World, that Williamson was "never Catholic in the proper sense" because he converted from Anglicanism to the SSPX. "That means that he has never lived in the great Church" under papal authority, he said. Read more at ca.reuters.com

 

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Unpacking the media’s role in Church abuse crisis

Amplify’d from ncronline.org

The press and the sex abuse crisis of 2010

Under the best of circumstances, the Vatican and the secular media struggle to understand each other, and the first half of 2010 was hardly the best of times. As a new wave of the sexual abuse crisis swept across Europe and raised critical questions about Pope Benedict XVI, Vatican officials accused the press of bias, while news reports and editorial pages blasted the Vatican for dishonesty and denial.

Now that the dust has begun to settle, thoughtful figures on both sides realize the need to take a dispassionate look back. Many in the news business want to know if they got the story right, and at least some in Rome — not to mention frustrated Catholics elsewhere — wonder if the Vatican's crisis management strategy, such as it was, backfired.

On Monday, I was in Miami Beach for a gathering of journalists from mainstream secular outlets, sponsored by the "Faith Angle" project of the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. Papal biographer George Weigel and I were asked to lead a discussion of coverage of the crisis, especially its most recent wave.

Among the 20 or so reporters on hand was Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times, whose pieces digging into Benedict's record have been both widely read and controversial. Critics include American Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who called a March 24 story by Goodstein on the Vatican's handling of the case of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting deaf children "deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness."

The conversation in Miami didn't produce an artificial consensus — and it wasn't designed to — but it did have a lot to say about where things stand vis-à-vis the church and the fourth estate.

Weigel said that in his view, coverage of the American sexual abuse crisis of 2002 largely got the story right, forcing the church to confront a reality that had been "ignored or downplayed" for too long. By way of contrast, he argued, the coverage in 2010, which focused more on the Vatican and the pope, was marred by "errors in reporting and editorial bias."

Weigel laid out what he called seven "flawed assumptions" which, in his view, ran through much of the 2010 coverage.

Assumption One: The "Omni-Competence of the Papacy"

Weigel said the pope is often styled as an absolute monarch, wielding total control over Catholic life. That's not true either in theory or practice, Weigel insisted. In theory, a pope's power is limited by all sorts of things: church tradition, the Code of Canon Law, the sacramental system, even the rules of logic.

In reality, Weigel said, a pope's influence is also limited by factors such as the competence of his aides and his own shrewdness in diagnosing situations and making appointments. He added that the latter point is part of the dynamic of the papacy of Benedict XVI — this "world-class theological mind," Weigel said, doesn't always seem to have an aptitude for picking subordinates.

Assumption Two: The "World-Class Competence of the Roman Curia"

Weigel said people often succumb to the notion that Vatican officials must be the cream of the Catholic crop, including the notion that they operate "the world's best intelligence service." In reality, Weigel said, the quality of heads of Vatican offices is not notably higher than other systems with which he's familiar — say, the governments of the United States or the United Kingdom — and in some cases it's "much lower."

As an illustration, Weigel claimed that Pope John Paul II was four months behind the news when the sexual abuse crisis broke out in the United States during spring 2002, because of the poor quality of information reaching him through Vatican channels. In general, Weigel argued, the small circle of senior Vatican officials who wield real power, probably no more than 20, do not live in the same "24/7 media universe" as the rest of us.

Assumption Three: A "General Hermeneutic of Suspicion"

Outsiders sometimes conclude, Weigel said, that "there is a will to deceive at the highest levels" of the Vatican. In reality, he said, much of what looks like deception is actually bungling — bred by naiveté, misinformation, or just plain being in over one's head.

A hermeneutic of suspicion, Weigel argued, breeds contorted conspiracy theories, thereby missing "the simplest and truest explanation, which is that these guys were blindsided and scrambled to respond."

Assumption Four: "Institutionalized Hypocrisy"

Many people already don't like the sexual teachings of the Catholic church, Weigel argued, and when violations of that teaching by clergy are not immediately met by draconian penalties, it fuels "gotcha" reporting.

When hypocrisy is presumed to be the root of everything, he said, important bits of context are overlooked. Weigel offered three examples:

A 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law was designed to protect priests from arbitrary abuses of power by bishops, but it also made it harder for bishops to discipline abuser priests.

In debates over laicization (popularly known as "defrocking"), some experts caution against it on the grounds that once the church cuts ties with a priest, it loses any ability to monitor and control him.

Weigel also criticized attempts to link the crisis to priestly celibacy, asserting that 50 to 60 percent of the sexual abuse of children occurs in the family — and is therefore committed by people who have never taken vows of celibacy.

Assumption Five: Sex abuse is "a distinctively Catholic problem, and an institutional Catholic problem."

That may be true of Ireland, Weigel said, but it's not in the United States, where data suggests the incidence of abuse among Catholic priests is no higher than among comparable professional groups such as public school teachers — even though sex abuse in other environments doesn't draw anything like the same saturation coverage.

In 2010, Weigel argued, "the Catholic church is arguably the safest environment for young people and adolescents in the country," but there remain other "non-safe environments" that will not be exposed so long as public perceptions treat the sexual exploitation of children as a "Catholic problem."

Assumption Six: "A lack of skill in reading church statements and documents"

The inability of some observers to adequately decode Vatican-speak, Weigel said, sometimes leads to "missing the real stories." He cited Pope Benedict's letter to the Catholics of Ireland, which Weigel said, for the first time begins to "dig into real problems of ecclesiastical culture" underneath the crisis. That point was missed, he said, amid sensational but often ill-informed commentary from the likes of Sinead O'Connor.

Assumption Seven: Confusion about who's a reliable source

Weigel complained that in some news coverage, critics of Benedict XVI have been presented as seemingly neutral "experts." He complained, for example, that victims' attorney Jeffrey Anderson is routinely cited without mention of his "direct financial interest" in sex abuse litigation. He also offered the example of Italian Catholic writer and scholar Alberto Melloni, an exponent of a school of interpretation of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) rejected by Benedict XVI. To present Melloni as an objective source, Weigel argued, is a distortion.

More broadly, Weigel warned against relying too much on alleged Roman insiders — who, he said, are often "low-level munchkins who have no idea what's going on, but are happy to talk over a free cappuccino or a Campari and soda."

All of that, Weigel argued, illustrates the need for "serious reform in press coverage of the Catholic church."

On the church's side of the ledger, Weigel argued that two chronic problems have to be addressed: 1) What he called "the Vatican's communications debacle," and 2) the lack of "a mechanism for dealing with manifest incompetence, or worse, from bishops." Weigel said that many "serious Catholics," including regular church-goers and big-time donors, have deep reservations these days about the competence of some local bishops. He called the inability to get rid of problem bishops in a timely fashion the church's "single biggest management problem."

Both issues, he said, will have to be faced the next time the cardinals gather in a conclave to elect a pope, because it's not realistic to expect they will be resolved under Benedict XVI.

In my comments, I raised what has long struck me as the central puzzle about the crisis of 2010: How is it that Pope Benedict XVI, whom insiders regard as the great reformer on the sex abuse issue, somehow became the global symbol of the problem?

I laid out my reading of Benedict's record, which is that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger underwent a sort of conversion experience around 2001, when the sex abuse crisis was dumped in his lap by John Paul II. His willingness to face what he once memorably called the "filth in the church" was fueled by studying case files from all over the world, including the testimony of victims, and by listening to his deputies who met with victims. The story as I know it boils down to this: before 2001, Ratzinger was essentially another cardinal in denial; afterwards, he became the leading force inside the Vatican for a more aggressive response.

Measured not against the sweeping programs for reform that some critics of the church have advanced, but against what was realistically possible, Ratzinger moved the ball farther and faster than most people anticipated, often against strong internal opposition.

If that's so, then why did a handful of cases from decades ago, which came to light earlier this year, cause such an earthquake in public perceptions?

In addition to the flawed assumptions flagged by Weigel, I suggested two other factors — both of which, I think, impeded the Vatican from making a more effective case on the pope's behalf.

First, I argued, the Vatican drew a bad hand, in that the first case to come to light was also the most serious. It involved Peter Hullermann, a German priest who came into the Munich archdiocese for therapy, while facing charges of abuse, when then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was in charge. Hullermann ended up in a Munich parish where he committed other acts of abuse, for which he was eventually convicted criminally.

When the story broke in early March, the immediate response in church circles, both in Munich and in Rome, was to try to insulate Benedict from blame — insisting that the decision to assign Hullermann to a parish was made at lower levels, without the future pope's knowledge. Whether true or not, that response rang hollow for many people, because a bishop still has to take responsibility for decisions made in his name.

Benedict could have said something like, "I'm heartsick over what happened, and with the benefit of hindsight it's clear I should have been more vigilant. I intend to reach out to Hullermann's victims to apologize, and this terrible tragedy illustrates the importance of the reforms we've put into place." Had that been the tone, outsiders might have been more inclined to listen to a defense of the pope on other cases — especially because in the handful of other instances which have drawn coverage, his role was often minor and after-the-fact. Instead, an impression of blanket denial was created, which became the prism for everything else.

More deeply, I also speculated that the Vatican has been hampered in defending Benedict's record because it would imply indicting other senior Vatican officials, and perhaps ultimately tainting the memory of Pope John Paul II. That's a psychological and cultural bridge, I said, that many in the Vatican aren't ready to cross.

Weigel was asked to comment on whether the crisis indeed represents a stain on John Paul's legacy. He conceded the crisis wasn't handled well, especially towards the end when John Paul was already in decline. At the same time, Weigel argued, that breakdown has to be seen in the context of John Paul's broader renewal of the priesthood. Both John Paul and Benedict XVI, Weigel said, have inspired a new generation committed to a "heroic ideal of the priesthood," which, he said, suggests there will be few incidents of abuse down the line.

Understandably, Goodstein wanted to join the conversation. She said that when she began reporting on the latest wave of the crisis, she largely accepted the claim of "Ratzinger the Reformer," based partly on things that I and others had written.

Yet, she said, the 2010 stories upended that narrative, which placed the responsibility entirely on bishops for the failure to report and remove abusers. This year we learned of one case after another, she said, in which bishops were pleading urgently with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Ratzinger to laicize a known molester, and the CDF rejected those requests. And, she added, we were always told that the CDF had nothing to do with these cases until 2001, but that turned out to be false also. In fact, they were handling them all along.

As a footnote, Goodstein said that much of the reporting was based on documents — though she didn't add this herself, usually documents obtained from victims' lawyers. Those documents, she said, are the most revelatory evidence we have. The documents come from attorneys, she said, because the church sure is not handing them over.

Goodstein's question thus was: Didn't the reporting of 2010 add something to what we thought we knew?

I said that for me, the reporting fleshed out the picture, but didn't fundamentally alter it.

First, it's still true that pre-2001, most sex abuse cases never reached Rome because bishops relied on informal remedies rather than laicization (which requires Vatican approval, and was seen by many bishops as a cumbersome, expensive, and uncertain process). We already knew that before 2001, Ratzinger's approach to the few cases which reached his desk wasn't notably different from other senior Vatican personnel. Thus to produce a 1985 letter in which he urges caution in laicizing Stephen Kiesle of Oakland, for example, is certainly interesting, but not a paradigm-changer.

That go-slow approach in the 1980s and 1990s, I argued, still has to be balanced against expedited handling of hundreds of cases beginning in 2003, when Ratzinger obtained "special faculties" from John Paul II allowing him to waive a canonical trial and to remove an abuser from the priesthood more efficiently.

One can certainly argue that his awakening came late, and that not enough has yet been done — perhaps especially in terms of matching the new accountability for priests with similar accountability for bishops. The fact remains, however, that the Vatican is today more committed to a "zero tolerance" policy because of Ratzinger's impact, both before and after his election.

If that point sometimes got lost earlier this year, it's probably one part a media failure to keep the whole picture in focus, and one part the Vatican's inability to project a different narrative.

Weigel threw in a couple of interesting footnotes. In terms of the response to the crisis under John Paul II, Weigel said that during the late pope's long illness, there was effectively no one in charge — on sex abuse or almost anything else. The then-Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was either "unprepared or unwilling," Weigel said, "to become a sort of prime minister as the king was dying."

Weigel also asserted that another element in understanding Vatican culture vis-à-vis the crisis is "the odd influence of the Latin American mind," which he described as "riddled with conspiracy theories." He was likely referring to suggestions from a few Latin American cardinals that media reporting on the crisis, especially in the United States, was calculated to stifle the church's advocacy on issues such as support for a Palestinian homeland.

We spent a fair bit of time in Miami doing some basic exercises in Vaticanology, which prompts a warning about relations between the Vatican and the media.

Several people, for instance, asked why there never seem to be consequences when somebody in Rome obviously screws up. To take one example, Sodano explosively compared criticism of the pope on the crisis to "petty gossip" during the 2010 Easter Sunday Mass, and yet he continues merrily along as dean of the College of Cardinals. (When Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Austria, later criticized Sodano, he actually got his knuckles rapped.)

I explained that in the culture of the Vatican, the way they typically signal disapproval of a statement from someone at Sodano's level isn't by overtly repudiating it, but rather by not repeating it. Insiders know that silence speaks volumes, although the outside world usually concludes that the guy got away scot free.

Two reactions from reporters are worth recording.

One said that while such insider scoop is interesting, it's of limited journalistic value. Editors won't tolerate sticking in four paragraphs of "Vatican context" into stories to explain every statement or decision that comes down the pike, this reporter said, because it smacks too much of apologetics — i.e., trying to get the Vatican off the hook.

Another reporter made the point that when it comes to the crisis, media outlets have a limited appetite for nuance, because of the stark moral nature of the underlying issue — the sexual exploitation of vulnerable children. In that regard, this reporter said, the media can be as "unchanging and relentless as the church."

The take-away seemed to be that unless the Vatican wants a perpetual war with the press, it needs to become more adept at translating its internal culture for the outside world.

[John L. Allen Jr. is NCR senior correspondent. He can be reached at jallen@ncronline.org.] Read more at ncronline.org

 

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About The King

Amplify’d from daringadventist.wordpress.com

About The King

When I was baptized I attended some Bible studies. They were all about “our beliefs” and nothing about Christ. The Kingdom of God is not about Adventism. Nor is it about Christianity. It’s not about being able to operate in the gifts of the Spirit. It’s not even about morality. The book of Galatians was penned to liberate and empower those who had begun in the Spirit and were reverting to the law. We either live in Christ or we live in religion. If you are living in religion the last sentence will be making you mad. If Christ is your life you will be at peace. You will also be advancing into the fullness of Christ.

“He shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all [ye] workers of iniquity” Luke 13.27 KJV.

The Kingdom of God is about the King. It is about worshiping God’s Son Jesus: You in Him and He in you. This is not accomplished by assent to beliefs but by the Spirit – the Spirit of Christ around and in you. Unless we get this we will become progressively wooden, estranged from the Father and eventually anti-Christ. It would be sad to be among those unable to distinguish between themselves and God. To advance His Kingdom we need to be among those who are known and authorized by Christ. The Kingdom of God is populated by the sons of God – people who live in the Spirit and for whom Christ is their life.

‘Those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God’ Romans 8.14 NIV.

NB. One definition of iniquity is the propagation of religion in the name of God and in place of God. Read more at daringadventist.wordpress.com

 

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