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"The
Truth Behind the Inaccurate Secular
News Reporting About Pope Benedict
XVI" |
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Attacking the Church and Double
Standards
Posted By William Kilpatrick On April 29, 2010
@ 12:23 am In FrontPage Magazine
In the war against jihad it might seem that
President Obama’s plan to remove all discussion of
Islam and jihad from our national security document
would rank higher as a threat to Western security
than recent attempts to link the pope to 40 year-old
sex crimes in Milwaukee. But the perfect storm that
has hit the Catholic Church may turn out to be of
greater consequence for the West’s survival. For
that reason it’s important to sort out how much of
the current indignation toward Rome represents
justified anger, and how much of it represents a
larger anti-Christian agenda.
Non-Catholic Christians who think the recent media
blitz against the Catholic Church is mainly about
sex abuse should think again. Likewise, Christians
would be naïve to think that those who would like to
discredit the Catholic Church will be content,
should they succeed, to leave the rest of
Christianity alone. The attack on the Catholic
Church should be seen as part of a larger attack
against Christianity itself. Of course, there have
been attacks on Christianity before, but never
before have the stakes been so high. From the
standpoint of the West’s survival it would be
difficult to imagine a worse time for the pundits to
launch a campaign to undermine Christian belief.
There is much to suggest that media criticism of the
Church is fueled less by outrage over pedophilia,
and more by another agenda. There wasn’t much
outrage over Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13 year-old
girl a number of years ago. When attempts were made
last year to bring Polanski back to the U.S. to
serve his sentence, many of the same cultural elites
who are now condemning the Church, leapt to his
defense. Likewise, there has never been much media
outrage over the apparent crimes of celebrated sex
researcher Alfred Kinsey. The media continued to
lionize Kinsey long after it was revealed that he
had collaborated with pedophiles in order to gather
data. “What did Kinsey know and when did he know
it?” has never been a pressing question for CNN or
The New York Times.
In 1996—several years before the priestly sex
scandal broke—Mary Eberstadt wrote the first of two
in-depth articles on “Pedophilia Chic” for the
Weekly Standard. She made a convincing case that
liberal elites were moving in the direction of
tearing down the taboo against pedophilia. The only
thing that stopped them, she suggests in a recent
article, was the opportunity to use priestly
pedophilia as a weapon to demonize the Church. Of
course, there was no pause in the liberal media’s
campaign to normalize homosexuality, and this may
account for the fact that much of the media coverage
conveniently ignored the homosexual nature of the
abuse—something that should have been difficult to
ignore, given that about 90 % of male abuse victims
were teenage boys, not young children. While
criticizing the Church for cover-ups, media pundits
had no compunctions about their own calculated
cover-up of a major aspect of the abuse.
Though sexual abuse remains a problem in the
Catholic Church, enormous strides have been made in
rooting it out, due in large part to a crackdown
that originated with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001. So,
the venomous attacks on him and the church he
represents, suggest that something else is afoot.
When a major Canadian newspaper features a piece
claiming that the pope’s “whole career has the
stench of evil,” it’s time to reach for the decoding
machine. That particular quote comes from
Christopher Hitchens, who has made a career in
recent years of questioning the legitimacy, not just
of Catholicism, but of Christianity, itself.
Hitchens aside, there is plenty of other evidence
that Catholics are not the only ones being targeted
for de-legitimization. In Canada and in Europe,
Christian pastors have been fined or jailed for
expressing their beliefs from the pulpit. In
Birmingham, England, Christian evangelists were
warned by police that distributing gospel leaflets
in a Muslim section would be considered a hate
crime. A survey of history textbooks for American
schoolchildren reveals that they present
Christianity as a purveyor of bigotry and violence.
On college campuses, Christian clubs are routinely
banned. Meanwhile, Christianity is often the butt of
vulgar comedy routines, and of crude cartoons that
make the infamous Muhammad cartoon look benign by
comparison.
Why the outrage? Read between the lines of a typical
assault column and you’ll find that what the
columnist really hates about Catholicism and about
Christianity in general is not the moral failings of
Christian leaders, but the fact that Christianity
still proposes moral absolutes. It is not sexual
misbehavior that galls, but rather that the churches
dare to put limits on sexual behavior. Christian
churches are the main obstacle to the dominance of
secular gods such as moral relativism and absolute
sexual liberation. While Christians and
non-Christians are rightly disturbed by the sex
scandals in the Catholic Church, they also ought to
be disturbed at the motives behind some of the
criticism.
As Brendan O’Neill, himself an atheist, writes,
“Many contemporary opinion-formers are not concerned
with getting to the truth [of what happened]…rather
they want to milk incidents of abuse and make them
into an indictment of religion itself.” What draws
militant secularists and atheists toward the
Catholic-abuse story? O’Neill says it is “their
belief that religion is itself a form of abuse.” As
atheist Richard Dawkins writes, “Odious as the
physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly
is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting
damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up
Catholic in the first place.” But, as O’Neill points
out, if religious upbringing is a form of abuse,
then “authorities must protect children not only
from religious institutions but from their own
religious parents, too.” The dismantling of
Christianity can proceed that much more smoothly if
enough people can be convinced that, “It’s for the
children’s sake.”
There is, of course, a major exemption from media
condemnation of child abuse. It appears that the
abuse of children is much more acceptable to the
opinion-makers when it is protected by the shield of
multiculturalism. The media has been much less
willing to criticize the widespread child abuse that
occurs in Islamic cultures, or to note that, in the
case of Islam, the abuse is religiously sanctioned.
For example, although one can find plenty of
criticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s political
views, rarely does one see a condemnation of his
views on sex. The one-time spiritual leader of Iran
not only endorsed sex with children in his writings,
but he also took to himself a 13 year-old bride.
Here we come to the world-historical turning point
of which the frenzied assaults on the Catholic
Church are only a part. The drive to undermine the
Church’s moral authority, and the threat posed by
Islam are linked in an ironic way. For many
centuries the Catholic faith was the main bulwark
against the Islamization of Europe. Now that
Christianity is in decline in Europe, Islam is on
the move again. And with the growing presence of
Islam has come an increase in child abuse—or what
the West considers as child abuse. The sexual
exploitation of children is considered a far less
serious offense in Islamic societies, and is often
protected by the force of sharia law. Muhammad, who
consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was
nine years-old, is considered by all Muslim
authorities to have provided a “beautiful pattern of
conduct.” That’s why, whenever a Muslim country
tries to ban child marriages (as recently happened
in Yemen), you can be sure that the imams will rise
up to insist on their right to marry minors.
And the exploitation of girls is only half the
story. There also appears to be some justification
in the Koran for the culture of pederasty, which
Phyllis Chesler points out is “epidemic in the
Muslim world.” A recent edition of PBS Frontline
reported on the phenomenon of the dancing boys of
Afghanistan—youngsters who are recruited, usually at
age nine or ten, to provide entertainment and sex
for men. While Islam frowns on adult homosexuality,
pederasty is a different matter. Perhaps this has to
do with several passages in the Koran which promise
men that in addition to the dark-eyed maidens that
await them in paradise, “there shall wait on them
young boys of their own as fair as virgin pearls”
(52: 22). Since the boys are mentioned in
conjunction with the maidens, and since they are
described in the same way—“graced with eternal
youth,” “fair as virgin pearls”—it seems likely that
they are there for the same purpose.
The dancing boys haven’t yet been imported to
Europe, but Europe’s waltz with the multicultural
devil has already whirled it into unfamiliar
territory. A United Nations NGO study estimates that
there are now 10,000 cases of female genital
mutilation in Switzerland, with hundreds of
thousands of cases elsewhere in Europe. According to
a National Police Chiefs report an estimated 17,000
girls and women in the UK are victims of honor
crimes or forced marriages each year. In the British
Midlands girls in their early teens are routinely
flown to Pakistan to marry men they have never met.
Europe’s Muslim girls are being mutilated and forced
into marriages… therefore, according to the twisted
logic of the opinion molders, it must be time to go
after the Vatican for possible cover-ups of long
ago. It’s a strange juxtaposition. Not that the
abuse scandals aren’t newsworthy stories. But there
are two ways to frame them. You can angrily focus on
what wasn’t done in the past, or you can point out
how much the Church has done in recent years to root
out the problem. Unlike the public schools (which
have a much higher incidence of abuse) the Catholic
Church has actually done something about its abuse
problem. That’s why almost all the cases highlighted
by the media took place decades ago.
Judging by the way the story has been handled, it’s
difficult to avoid the impression that the Western
elites want to do as much damage as possible to the
Church—which, when you think about it, betrays an
almost suicidal impulse. It really does seem that
the fate of Europe is bound up with the fate of
Christianity in Europe. Europe is in trouble in
large part because it has rejected its Christian
heritage and embraced moral and cultural relativism,
instead. In the end, cultural relativism is a
suicidal policy which is why Pope Benedict has
frequently cautioned the West about the dangers
inherent in a “culture of relativism.”
Relativism is the ultimate justification for never
having to say you’re sorry. As the climate of
opinion changes in a relativist society, so will the
consensus about what’s right and wrong. And if
Catholic Christianity is swept aside in Europe, the
climate of opinion will increasingly be dictated by
Islam. Some may think that once Europe is free of
its Catholic/Christian influence, children in
lederhosen will once again romp freely through the
meadows. But don’t count on it. Instead, look for
children in hijabs being hurried into the local
government approved clitorectomy clinic.
A lot of people find it difficult to fathom the
motives of suicide bombers. It may be time to also
ponder the motives of the suicide pundits who have
declared open season on the religion that built
their civilization, while treating as a protected
species the religion which aims to dismantle it.
William Kilpatrick’s articles on Islam have
appeared in Front Page Magazine, Jihad Watch,
Catholic World Report, the National Catholic
Register, World, and Investor’s Business Daily.
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POPE'S CRITICS
LACK EVIDENCE
Catholic League
president Bill Donohue comments on the latest
falsehoods being told about the pope:
Much of the accusation against Pope Benedict XVI in
the case of Wisconsin priest Fr. Lawrence Murphy
rests on his alleged disinterest in pushing for
Murphy to be defrocked. Contradicting this smear is
the judge in the Murphy trial and the New York Times
itself.
Fr. Thomas Brundage was the judicial vicar for the
Milwaukee Archdiocese who presided over the trial of
Fr. Murphy from 1996-1998. Never once did the New
York Times contact him, but had they done so they
would have learned the following. "At no time in the
case, at meetings that I had at the Vatican, in
Washington, D.C. and in Milwaukee" says Brundage,
"was Cardinal Ratzinger's name ever mentioned."
Brundage adds that he was "shocked" when the media
tried to connect Ratzinger's name to the case.
Murphy died, by the way, when he was still a
defendant in a church criminal trial.
Even the New York Times has acknowledged that there
is no evidence that in 1996 Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger (the pope) was even aware of proceedings
against Murphy. Moreover, the investigation did not
even have to be launched given that the statute of
limitations had expired.
We know what's going on. There are those who are
wholly unimpressed by the evidence—they just want to
get the pope. No doubt there was wrongdoing done in
the Murphy case, but it is morally outrageous to lay
it at the foot of the pope. Indeed, the pope's
critics look rather enfeebled given what Fr.
Brundage and the Times say about his complicity.
I challenge anyone to produce a single piece of
evidence that the pope did anything wrong.
Jeff Field
Director of Communications
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
450 Seventh Avenue
New York, NY 10123 |
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Journalists abandon
standards to attack the Pope
We're off and running once
again, with another completely phony story
that purports to implicate Pope Benedict XVI
in the protection of abusive priests.
The exclusive story which has been released
by AP, which has been dutifully passed along
now by scores of major media outlets, would
never have seen the light of day if normal
journalistic standards had been in place.
Careful editors should have asked a series
of probing questions, and in every case the
answer to those questions would have shown
that the story had no "legs."
First to repeat the bare-bones version of
the story: in November 1985, then-Cardinal
Ratzinger signed a letter deferring a
decision on the laicization of Father
Stephen Kiesle, a California priest who had
been accused of molesting boys.
Now the key questions:
- Was Cardinal Ratzinger responding to the
complaints of priestly pedophilia? No. The
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
which the future Pontiff headed, did not
have jurisdiction for pedophile priests
until 2001. The cardinal was weighing a
request for laicization of Kiesle.
- Had Oakland's Bishop John Cummins sought
to laicize Kiesle as punishment for his
misconduct? No. Kiesle himself asked to be
released from the priesthood. The bishop
supported the wayward priest's application.
- Was the request for laicization denied?
No. Eventually, in 1987, the Vatican
approved Kiesle's dismissal from the
priesthood.
- Did Kiesle abuse children again before he
was laicized? To the best of our knowledge,
No. The next complaints against him arose in
2002: 15 years after he was dismissed from
the priesthood.
- Did Cardinal Ratzinger's reluctance to
make a quick decision mean that Kiesle
remained in active ministry? No. Bishop
Cummins had the authority to suspend the
predator-priest, and in fact he had placed
him on an extended leave of absence long
before the application for laicization was
entered.
- Would quicker laicization have protected
children in California? No. Cardinal
Ratzinger did not have the power to put
Kiesle behind bars. If Kiesle had been
defrocked in 1985 instead of 1987, he would
have remained at large, thanks to a light
sentence from the California courts. As
things stood, he remained at large. He was
not engaged in parish ministry and had no
special access to children.
- Did the Vatican cover up evidence of
Kiesle's predatory behavior? No. The civil
courts of California destroyed that evidence
after the priest completed a sentence of
probation-- before the case ever reached
Rome.
So to review: This was not a case in which a
bishop wanted to discipline his priest and
the Vatican official demurred. This was not
a case in which a priest remained active in
ministry, and the Vatican did nothing to
protect the children under his pastoral
care. This was not a case in which the
Vatican covered up evidence of a priest's
misconduct. This was a case in which a
priest asked to be released from his vows,
and the Vatican-- which had been flooded by
such requests throughout the 1970s -- wanted
to consider all such cases carefully. In
short, if you're looking for evidence of a
sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church,
this case is irrelevant.
We Americans know what a sex-abuse crisis
looks like. The scandal erupts when evidence
emerges that bishops have protected abusive
priests, kept them active in parish
assignments, covered up evidence of the
charges against them, and lied to their
people. There is no such evidence in this or
any other case involving Pope Benedict XVI.
Competent reporters, when dealing with a
story that involves special expertise, seek
information from experts in that field.
Capable journalists following this story
should have sought out canon lawyers to
explain the 1985 document-- not merely
relied on the highly biased testimony of
civil lawyers who have lodged multiple suits
against the Church. If they had understood
the case, objective reporters would have
recognized that they had no story. But in
this case, reporters for the major media
outlets are far from objective.
The New York Times-- which touched off this
feeding frenzy with two error-riddled
front-page reports-- seized on the latest
"scoop" by AP to say that the 1985 document
exemplified:
-The sort of delay that is fueling a renewed
sexual abuse scandal in the church that has
focused on whether the future pope moved
quickly enough to remove known pedophiles
from the priesthood, despite pleas from
American bishops.
Here we have a complete rewriting of
history. Earlier in this decade, American
newspapers exposed the sad truth that many
American bishops had kept pedophile priests
in active ministry. Now the Times, which
played an active role in exposing that
scandal, would have us believe that the
American bishops were striving to rid the
priesthood of the predators, and the Vatican
resisted!
No, what is "fueling a renewed sexual abuse
scandal" is a media frenzy. There is a
scandal here, indeed, but it's not the
scandal you're reading about in the mass
media. The scandal is the complete collapse
of journalistic standards in the handling of
this story.
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The Tablet - 8 April 2010
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/14543
Timothy Radcliffe
Feature Article
Clerical-abuse scandal
Should I stay or should I go?
As the scandal of child sexual abuse and its
cover-up swirls around the Church, some
Catholics are considering their options as
regards their very membership of the
institution. Here a former Master of the
Dominicans explains why the Church is stuck
with him, whatever happens
Fresh revelations of sexual abuse by priests
in Germany and Italy have provoked a tide of
anger and disgust. I have received emails
from people all around Europe asking how can
they possibly remain in the Church? I was
even sent a form with which to renounce my
membership of the Church. Why stay?
First of all, why go? Some people feel that
they can no longer remain associated with an
institution that is so corrupt and dangerous
for children. The suffering of so many
children is indeed horrific. They must be
our first concern. Nothing that I will write
is intended in any way to lessen our horror
at the evil of sexual abuse. But the
statistics for the US, from the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice in 2004, suggest
that Catholic clergy do not offend more than
the married clergy of other Churches.
Some surveys even give a lower level of
offence for Catholic priests. They are less
likely to offend than lay school teachers,
and perhaps half as likely as the general
population. Celibacy does not push people to
abuse children. It is simply untrue to
imagine that leaving the Church for another
denomination would make one’s children
safer. We must face the terrible fact that
the abuse of children is widespread in every
part of society. To make the Church the
scapegoat would be a cover-up.
But what about the cover-up within the
Church? Have not our bishops been shockingly
irresponsible in moving offenders around,
not reporting them to the police and so
perpetuating the abuse? Yes, sometimes. But
the great majority of these cases go back to
the 1960s and 1970s, when bishops often
regarded sexual abuse as a sin rather than
also a pathological condition, and when
lawyers and psychologists often reassured
them that it was safe to reassign priests
after treatment. It is unjust to project
backwards an awareness of the nature and
seriousness of sexual abuse which simply did
not exist then. It was only the rise of
feminism in the late 1970s which, by
shedding light on the violence of some men
against women, alerted us to the terrible
damage done to vulnerable children.
But what about the Vatican? Pope Benedict
has taken a strong line in tackling this
issue as prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and since
becoming Pope. Now the finger is pointed at
him. It appears that some cases reported to
the CDF under his watch were not dealt with.
Isn’t the Pope’s credibility undermined?
There are demonstrators in front of St
Peter’s calling for his resignation. I am
morally certain that he bears no blame here.
It is generally imagined that the Vatican is
a vast and efficient organisation. In fact
it is tiny. The CDF only employs 45 people,
dealing with doctrinal and disciplinary
issues for a Church which has 1.3 billion
members, 17 per cent of the world’s
population, and some 400,000 priests. When I
dealt with the CDF as Master of the
Dominican Order, it was obvious that they
were struggling to cope. Documents slipped
through the cracks. Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger lamented to me that the staff was
simply too small for the job.
People are furious with the Vatican’s
failure to open up its files and offer a
clear explanation of what happened. Why is
it so secretive? Angry and hurt Catholics
feel a right to transparent government. I
agree. But we must, in justice, understand
why the Vatican is so self-protective. There
were more martyrs in the twentieth century
than in all the previous centuries combined.
Bishops and priests, Religious and laity
were assassinated in Western Europe, in
Soviet countries, in Africa, Latin America
and Asia.
Many Catholics still suffer imprisonment and
death for their faith. Of course, the
Vatican tends to stress confidentiality;
this has been necessary to protect the
Church from people who wish to destroy her.
So it is understandable that the Vatican
reacts aggressively to demands for
transparency and will read legitimate
requests for openness as a form of
persecution. And some people in the media
do, without any doubt, wish to damage the
credibility of the Church.
But we owe a debt of gratitude to the press
for its insistence that the Church face its
failures. If it had not been for the media,
then this shameful abuse might have remained
unaddressed.
Confidentiality is also a consequence of the
Church’s insistence on the right of everyone
accused to keep their good name until they
are proved to be guilty. This is very hard
for our society to understand, whose media
destroy people’s reputations without a
thought.
Why go? If it is to find a safer haven, a
less corrupt Church, then I think that you
will be disappointed. I too long for more
transparent government, more open debate,
but the Church’s secrecy is understandable,
and sometimes necessary. To understand is
not always to condone, but necessary if we
are to act justly.
Why stay? I must lay my cards on the table;
even if the Church were obviously worse than
other Churches, I still would not go. I am
not a Catholic because our Church is the
best, or even because I like Catholicism. I
do love much about my Church but there are
aspects of it which I dislike. I am not a
Catholic because of a consumer option for an
ecclesiastical Waitrose rather than Tesco,
but because I believe that it embodies
something which is essential to the
Christian witness to the Resurrection,
visible unity.
When Jesus died, his community fell apart.
He had been betrayed, denied, and most of
his disciples fled. It was chiefly the women
who accompanied him to the end. On Easter
Day, he appeared to the disciples. This was
more than the physical resuscitation of a
dead corpse.
In him God triumphed over all that destroys
community: sin, cowardice, lies,
misunderstanding, suffering and death. The
Resurrection was made visible to the world
in the astonishing sight of a community
reborn. These cowards and deniers were
gathered together again. They were not a
reputable bunch, and shamefaced at what they
had done, but once again they were one. The
unity of the Church is a sign that all the
forces that fragment and scatter are
defeated in Christ.
All Christians are one in the Body of
Christ. I have deepest respect and affection
for Christians from other Churches who
nurture and inspire me. But this unity in
Christ needs some visible embodiment.
Christianity is not a vague spirituality but
a religion of incarnation, in which the
deepest truths take the physical and
sometimes institutional form. Historically
this unity has found its focus in Peter, the
Rock in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the
shepherd of the flock in John’s gospel.
>From the beginning and throughout history,
Peter has often been a wobbly rock, a source
of scandal, corrupt, and yet this is the one
– and his successors – whose task is to hold
us together so that we may witness to
Christ’s defeat on Easter Day of sin’s power
to divide. And so the Church is stuck with
me whatever happens. We may be embarrassed
to admit that we are Catholics, but Jesus
kept shameful company from the beginning. |
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Click on the
links below
for more articles about the
inaccurate secular news reporting. |
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