Do You Believe in Miracles?
10 Exercises to Stay Spiritually Fit
20 Scriptures That Bring Hope to Any Situation
5 Ways to Revive Your Dream!
7 Ways to Plant Seeds of Greatness in Your Life
20 Powerful Declarations to Fight Discouragement
5 Ways to Stay Healthy This Summer
5 Tips for Better Sleep
7 Top Health Issues Facing Today’s Women
Celebrities Who Won't Back Down
Words of Wisdom from Dr Joyce Brothers
A Conversation with Minnesota Wild Center Matt Cullen
Yes, Gratitude Works!
10 Ways to To Handle Life Changes With Courage
The Fruits of Desire
Nurturing a Healthy Marriage
10 Ways to Get Over a Hurtful Past
Ten Things Every Dad Should Tell His Son
Brody File
CAPITAL J
Christianity Today Politics Blog
CNN Belief Blog
Daniel Schultz
David Gibson
dotCommonweal
Faith and Reason
James Besser’s Political Insider
In All Things
NCR Today
Religious Connections
RD Blog: The Devil’s Advocate
Episcopal Café: The Lead
Talk to Action
Under God
Whispers in the Loggia
Because GetReligion’s Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I’ve offered
the “best defense” of the Goodstein/Halbfinger NYT article
on Pope Benedict’s performance as head of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough
to smack
her around a little in a subsequent post, let me acknowledge the
validity of her latest grounds for criticism.
First, G/H may fairly be charged with taking a swipe at then-Cardinal
Ratzinger’s position on Liberation Theology. Here’s what they wrote:
As Father Gauthe was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal
Ratzinger
was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that
the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the
cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine.
OK, if I’d been their editor I would have changed that to read “…for
preaching that empowering the poor and oppressed was the church’s
central mission….” In the context of the article as a whole, I count
this venial sin.
Second, and more importantly, Hemingway claims that the G/H time-line
regarding when the CDF “dithered” is “a mess.” With respect to the
paragraph above, for example, her point is that the prosecution of
Father Gauthe and the crackdown on liberation theologians took place in
1980s, but that knowledge of the CDF’s full responsibility for abuse
cases indicated in a letter from 1922 didn’t surface until some time in
the 1990s.
I’ll stipulate that there is indeed considerable fuzziness about when
the 1922 letter came to be known inside the Roman Curia. For all we
know, the CDF’s staff canonists may have been aware of it all along. But
that’s not the point. The CDF had some considerable responsibility for
abuse cases all along. And we know in
detail from the Kiesle case in the early 1980s that the CDF under
Ratzinger didn’t merely dither; it brought to a standstill a proceeding
that had been moving forward. As I noted, G/H allude to the Kiesle case
(which Goodstein and Michael Luo looked
at earlier this year). Had I been the editor, I would have made a
little space to name and describe it.
posted July 12, 2010 at 1:40 pm
The Kiesle case is a red herring. You obviously have not looked at the substantive rebuttals brought by various sources against the unfair and wild accusation made by the Times about that case. Catholic News Service lays it out here: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1001517.htm; a blog by Jesuits here: http://whosoeverdesires.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/the-times-take-3-the-stephen-kiesle-files/; and Catholic World News’ Phil Lawler here: http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=632.
“OK, if I’d been their editor I would have changed that to read ‘…for preaching that empowering the poor and oppressed was the church’s central mission….’ In the context of the article as a whole, I count this venial sin.” But it was one venial sin piled on a 3,000 word stack of other venial sins to become mortal. It was part of the whole mortal intention of the article — to smear Pope Benedict. The implication is clear — Ratzinger was more concerned about dealing with uppity clergy who were taking care of the poor and oppressed than he was about child molesters. That’s bull, but it was just like the first 3,000 words of that piece — accusations tossed out without any backing.
posted July 12, 2010 at 3:55 pm
In re: Kiesle, I beg to differ, Mr. Szyszkiewicz, and ask that you take a look at my analysis of the documents: http://www.spiritual-politics.org/2010/04/the_kiesle_case.html#more.