The Nihilists and the Pope: A Jewish Perspective

David P. Goldman offers a Jewish perspective on the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI that is remarkably similar to my own Conservative Protestant perspective.

The article is from his Spengler blog at First Things. It is entitled: "Cultural Obamalypse: the Attack on the Pope."

The Obamalyptic mood in the White House seems to have infected the cultural left generally. Thirty-year-old news is dragged daily into the headlines to make it appear that some dreadful truth has been dragged out of the Vatican vaults, demonstrating Pope Benedict XVI’s culpability in child abuse. It is hard to avoid the impression that the nihilists have a sense of empowerment as never before.

There’s something ugly in the air. The two central institutions of the West are the Throne of St. Peter and the Oval Office. That is not an exaggeration, for the Catholic model in Europe and the American model are the two modes of life that the West has developed. When Catholic universal empire failed with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and was buried by Napoleon, the United States emerged as an alternative model; the non-ethnic nation founded on Christian principles albeit without an explicit tie to a particular Christian confession.

For the first time in history the barbarians have breached the citadel; to have Barack Obama in the White House is the cultural equivalent of electing Madonna to the papacy. America, the source of a civil religion that held together the world’s only remaining superpower, is committed to its own self-demolition. Nihilists around the world are in a triumphant mood and believe that it is time to mop up the remnants of their enemies everywhere.

Our only hope is that they will do what Hitler did and what Napoleon did and overreach.

Shocker! Newsweek Story Full of Common Sense and Devoid of Hysteria!

This story is very out of character for Newsweek. Did they lose a block of Catholic subscribers they are trying to win back or what? For once, something fair and balanced from the "lamestream media."

The Catholic sex-abuse stories emerging every day suggest that Catholics have a much bigger problem with child molestation than other denominations and the general population. Many point to peculiarities of the Catholic Church (its celibacy rules for priests, its insular hierarchy, its exclusion of women) to infer that there's something particularly pernicious about Catholic clerics that predisposes them to these horrific acts. It's no wonder that, back in 2002—when the last Catholic sex-abuse scandal was making headlines—a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent of those queried thought Catholic priests "frequently'' abused children.

Yet experts say there's simply no data to support the claim at all. No formal comparative study has ever broken down child sexual abuse by denomination, and only the Catholic Church has released detailed data about its own. But based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. "We don't see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "I can tell you without hesitation that we have seen cases in many religious settings, from traveling evangelists to mainstream ministers to rabbis and others."

Since the mid-1980s, insurance companies have offered sexual misconduct coverage as a rider on liability insurance, and their own studies indicate that Catholic churches are not higher risk than other congregations. Insurance companies that cover all denominations, such as Guide One Center for Risk Management, which has more than 40,000 church clients, does not charge Catholic churches higher premiums. "We don't see vast difference in the incidence rate between one denomination and another," says Sarah Buckley, assistant vice president of corporate communications. "It's pretty even across the denominations." It's been that way for decades. While the company saw an uptick in these claims by all types of churches around the time of the 2002 U.S. Catholic sex-abuse scandal, Eric Spacick, Guide One's senior church-risk manager, says "it's been pretty steady since." On average, the company says 80 percent of the sexual misconduct claims they get from all denominations involve sexual abuse of children. As a result, the more children's programs a church has, the more expensive its insurance, officials at Guide One said.

The only hard data that has been made public by any denomination comes from John Jay College's study of Catholic priests, which was authorized and is being paid for by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops following the public outcry over the 2002 scandals. Limiting their study to plausible accusations made between 1950 and 1992, John Jay researchers reported that about 4 percent of the 110,000 priests active during those years had been accused of sexual misconduct involving children. Specifically, 4,392 complaints (ranging from "sexual talk" to rape) were made against priests by 10,667 victims. (Reports made after 2002, including those of incidents that occurred years earlier, are released as part of the church's annual audits.)

Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population, but Allen says a conservative estimate is one in 10. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it's closer to one in 5. But in either case, the rate of abuse by Catholic priests is not higher than these national estimates. The public also doesn't realize how "profoundly prevalent" child sexual abuse is, adds Smith. Even those numbers may be low; research suggests that only a third of abuse cases are ever reported (making it the most underreported crime). "However you slice it, it's a very common experience," Smith says.

- snip -

Allen suggests a final reason we hear so much more about Catholic abuse than transgressions in other religions: its sheer size. It's the second largest single denomination in the world (behind Islam) and the biggest in the United States. (Fifty-one percent of all American adults are Protestant, but they belong to hundreds of different denominations.) "When you consider the per capita data," says Allen, "I don't think they have a larger incidence than other faiths."

Read the rest here. Well, well. Kudos to Newsweek for a balanced story at a time of hysteria. Now can everybody put the pitchforks down and back away real slow?

Commenting on the Newsweek story, Ross Douthat addresses the tired old "If only they could get married" meme here. He gets it right when he puts it this way:

As I’ve said before, I don’t like it when Catholic leaders fall back on the “child abuse happens everywhere” defense to excuse the church’s egregious failings and cover-ups. I do like it, however, when mainstream media outlets do their job and report that there’s no evidence that the rate of sex abuse is higher among the Catholic clergy than among any other group.

It is interesting to note his conclusion that Roman Catholic priests may be abusing children at as low as one fifth the rate that the American population as a whole. You know, the American population as a whole includes journalists. Just saying.

New York Times Uses Faulty Translation to Accuse the Pope

Further to the scandal of the biased, anti-Catholic reporting from the New York Times, here is a report from the Catholic News Agency on a story in the Italian newspaper Il Foglio in which we find some astonishing insights into the decline of a once-proud American institution, the so-called "newspaper of record."

The influential Italian political newspaper Il Foglio published an article today criticizing the New York Times for relying on a computer-generated translation from Italian to English of important responses from the Vatican to a sex abuse case. The failure to translate led the American newspaper to argue that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was protecting a sexually abusive priest from Milwaukee.

The article, titled “What the New York Times does not translate,” starts by saying, “Last Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd returned to attack the Pope. Commenting on the words of exorcist Gabriele Amorth, who said that behind pedophile priests is the devil, Dowd suggested a way for the Catholic church to solve the problem: hire a ‘sexorcist.’"

Nevertheless, “after re-reading the NYT’s allegations against the current Pope on the case of the pedophile priest Lawrence Murphy, who abused hundreds of deaf children when he worked at a school in Milwaukee, it is the American newspaper which seems to be in need of some consultants,” the paper opines.

“Behind the accusations,” says Il Foglio’s senior writer Paolo Rodari, “there is a gross translation mistake.”

Rodari reviews how NYT’s Laurie Goodstein reconstructed the events on her March 25 article and concentrates on the correspondence between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Archbishop Rembert Weakland, then of Milwaukee, his Auxiliary, Bishop Richard Skilba and the Bishop of Superior, Raphael Fliss.

“This is a meeting of crucial importance, because it reveals what path Bertone, on behalf of Ratzinger, decides to take once they know the facts.”

Il Foglio notes that the NYT story provides links to both the English and Italian version of the 1998 meeting, “but it omits to say one thing: the English version is a grossly distorted translation of the Italian, made with ‘Yahoo translator,’ a translation that the Vicar of the diocese, Thomas Brundage, sent to his authority, Bishop Fliss, to help him understand the Italian,” the Italian political paper explains.

According to Il Foglio, Fr. Brundage warned in his letter that “It is a very rough translation and the computer certainly cannot distinguish some of the peculiarities of canon law.”

The computer-generated English version would support the NYT’s allegations against Bertone and Ratzinger, “but that same conclusion is not possible if a correct review of the sources is done, in other words, if (the story) is based in the official text written by the CDF in Italian,” Rodari explains.

“And it is here, in the Italian version, that many important things are said.” “It is explained that either Fr. Murphy gives ‘clear signs of repentance’ or the canonical process will go to the end, including his dismissal from the clerical state.”
“But in the English version used by the NYT, instead, not only are some passages omitted, but frequently the contrary is said,” Rodari writes.

“It is true, Bertone requests to take into consideration Murphy’s frail physical condition, who indeed soon after dies. But he never says that because of such conditions the process should be stopped. He says, and this is omitted in the automated English version, that in order to help Fr. Murphy’s repentance, ‘a period of retreat may be granted,’ otherwise, the measure will be ‘more rigorous,’” the Italian paper states. [bolding mine]

If the NYT wants to make highly contentious and potentially career-destroying allegations against an innocent and high-profile man, it ought, at the very least, take the trouble to get the translation of key documents right. Unbelievable. Just totally unbelievable.

Any blogger with an ax to grind could do what the NYT is doing. We should expect more of the NYT. It is no wonder this once-great paper is going down the tubes.

UPDATE:

If you want more detail see this story by Jimmy Akin from the National Catholic Register. It is very thorough and it contains a professional translation of the document in question.

Rowan the Lost and His Circular Firing Squad

Here is a hard-hitting article by Peter Hitchens on the lackluster leadership of "Rowan the Lost" as broken Britain stumbles toward the complete rejection of its Christian character and heritage. [My comments in square brackets and in bold]

"Do we have to wait until the hate-filled mobs storm into Canterbury Cathedral and drag him from the pulpit before the Archbishop of Canterbury grasps that Christianity is in danger in this country? [Short answer: apparently yes!] Nice, furry, mild and useless, Dr Rowan Williams chose this Easter week not to protect his Church, but to rebuke several bishops who had rightly warned of the swelling rage against the Church. [It is a bit much to ask him to fight the leftist establishment that rules Britain; after all, he is a life member of it.]

No doubt he is right to point out that Christians elsewhere suffer more. I would like to hear more protests from 'human rights' campaigners against the nasty treatment of Christians in the Muslim world, not least under the rule of the Palestinian Authority which many leftist Christians idiotically admire. [Quite right, but it is doubtful that Williams had those places in mind. He is not entirely against Sharia Law, after all.]

But so what? In those rough neighbourhoods, under the grudging scowl of Muslim so-called 'tolerance', this has been the case for centuries. Here, things are and ought to be different. [And we ought not to forget this fact.] Dr Williams is the head of the Established Church in England. The laws of this country, the shape of its cities and countryside, its language, morals, literature, architecture, family structure and politics are all based upon Christianity.

Take it away and it will be like removing the mortar from a great building, leaving its bricks and stones loose and trembling in the storm to come. [A valid point: if you think it is bad now, it could be worse.] And yet there are many people who want to do this. In this Century of Selfishness, Christianity is an annoying obstacle, with its infuriating insistence on active unselfishness and its unalterable rules which say that there are some things you just cannot do, like for instance murder unborn babies and walk out on your marriage. [This is getting down to hard, cold reality.]

Last week, there was yet another case of someone being in trouble for being a Christian, in an officially Christian country. I collect these incidents: preachers arrested and fined; nurses disciplined for offering to pray for patients; registrars disciplined for declining to officiate at homosexual civil partnerships; adoption societies forced to close because they will not place children with same-sex couples. Just 30 years ago, they would have been unthinkable. Another few decades and Christianity will be against the law. [That is, if you think in terms of the trajectory in which society is heading. For some reason, many people have a curiously static view in which they expect the status quo to go on forever and are surprised when it does not.]

I expect that before long there will be cases of teachers being fired for resisting compulsory sex education in primary schools. Last week's example was that of a nurse, Shirley Chaplin, badgered by superiors for wearing a crucifix on a chain.

Does anyone really believe that she would have been pestered by authority if she had worn a Muslim symbol on a chain round her neck? Does anyone believe that a Muslim preacher would have been put in the cells, and fined £1,000 - as happened to Shawn Holes in Glasgow - for calling homosexuality a sin in a public place? Each of these cases lets others know that they had better be careful, and makes many faithful Christians fear that they may have to choose between their faith and their livelihood. [The chilling effect is real and may even be affecting Williams himself.]

Does Dr Williams even know about the oppressive new codes of practice in the professions and the public sector, which compel employees to adopt the new secular faith of 'Equality and Diversity'? Now the Archbishop has strangely chosen this weekend to attack his fellow Christians in the Roman Catholic church. They must be beginning to wonder how long they have got before they are arrested. [He is upset that the Pope is willing to take in Anglican traditionalists when he thought he had them over a barrel. How is he supposed to impose sodomy and women bishops when the pope gives harassed priests and bishops a choice for heaven's sake?]

Yet nobody seems to ask, in all the justified fury against Roman Catholic priests who have disgraced themselves and wounded others, an interesting question. Here it is. This Easter weekend, a film was released into British cinemas called 'Kick-Ass', which features an 11-year-old girl, Chloe Moretz, who speaks in filthy language and wears outfits obviously designed to sexualise her. [Here is where it gets good.]

I find this repellent, disgusting and immoral. Yet this film, which members of Britain's exciting post-Christian elite helped to make, is receiving generous praise in the liberal media. Why? If this isn't the corruption of the young, then what is? Yet I have no doubt that those who defend this sewage are in the ranks of those howling at the Pope for supposedly condoning priestly child abuse (which he doesn't). [OK, the bluff of the leftist media has been called. Will they condemn child sexual exploitation when it is not done by a priest? Don't hold your breath waiting for the editorials, op ed pieces, headlines and outrage.]

Phooey. What they hate is not the abuse, which happens in liberal state institutions just as it does in the Roman church. What they hate is the Christian church. [The inescapable conclusion.] And at the moment they are winning the argument partly because the Church won't fight back with any spirit. Dr Williams seems actually to be on the side of the anti-God battalions."

___________

HT: Virtue Online

One final comment: it is possible to hate Christianity and to hate child abuse. It is also possible to hate Christianity and to use child abuse as a handy weapon to assail Christianity. Some people fit into the first category and some into the second. One can respect those in the first group. But Hitchens has provided the means for telling the two groups apart. Do they restrict their ardor over to oppose child abuse to cases involving the Church or not?

He is Risen! Let Ciaphas and Pilate Rage and Threaten: He Still Reigns!

I just got back from Church and it was a terrific service of joy, hope and triumph. Jesus is risen! He is risen indeed!

When I went down to breakfast this morning I made the mistake of looking at the morning paper. The Toronto Star chose to celebrate Easter Sunday by splashing stories and headlines about the Catholic child abuse scandal all over the front page and on several pages inside. The Star had called all 225 Catholic parishes in the GTA during the past week asking for copies of the priest's Easter Sunday homilies and then criticized the Church for not devoting the Easter Sunday celebrations to the child abuse story the media has been in a feeding frenzy over during the past week. What is next? Ritual humiliations of priests in the streets? Physical attacks on Churches? Will the violence of the French Revolution come again? The hostility to Christianity was not even disguised; it was so obviously a hate fest that it may have sickened many people, even those not otherwise favorably disposed to the Church.

Imagine if the Star did something similar on Ramadan demanding that every Inman talk about suicide bombing and apologize for 9/11. Imagine front page headlines implicating all of Islam for the actions of Al-Qaeda? Can you picture it happening? No, neither can I. The Star is too cowardly to do that. But it is safe to pick on Christians because it is well known that there is no danger of Christian terrorists putting out a contract on the Editor or setting off bombs at the Toronto Star building. They are essentially bullies who only pick on those who don't fight back.

Anyway, it made Easter have a more authentic feel than ever. The first disciples in Jerusalem that first Easter Sunday were huddled in an upper room with the doors locked. The religious and political authorities were on high alert and believers were in danger. Then Jesus rose from the dead! And the ragtag group of disciples grew into a movement and eventually a Church and eventually a world-wide religion that continues to grow today as people continue to meet the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

We have been blessed to have politicians who did not persecute us for a long while. But now we are entering a new phase of the Church's existence, one characterized by persecution. Jesus warned us that it would be so and He does not call us to anything he himself not only endured - but triumphed over! That is what we remember especially on Easter and indeed on every Resurrection Day week by week.

Background Reading on the Recent Attacks on Pope Benedict XVI

This article, "The Dictatorship of Relativism Strikes Back," by a Lutheran theologian, John Stephenson, is one of the best in-depth discussions of who Benedict XVI is and why the liberal media want to destroy him. It is balanced and clear in situating the pope in the overall context of modern Roman Catholic theology as a moderate. It distinguishes between Catholic - Protestant theological differences, which are real, and the attack on Christianity itself that is occurring today.

This article, "Moral Panic Flares Again," by Italian sociologist, Massimo Introvigne, is an excellent overview of the history and statistics of the Roman Catholic child abuse crisis. He puts the problem in context without denying its reality. He asks why is this issue suddenly becoming such an obsession with the secular media and their liberal Protestant and Catholic allies at this moment? He also shows that over three quarters of the problem involves priests having homosexual sex with post-pubescent boys. He offers a very interesting and rational perspective from a sociological point of view.

You may have read about the latest "scandal" story in the past few days from the Associated Press. This is an especially appalling piece of "yellow journalism" and Father Z shreds it here.

The Catholic Herald, an English Catholic paper has a good article entitled "The Pope and the Abuse Scandal: a Guide for Perplexed Catholics," which gives a good overview of the situation.

UPDATES:
The Catholic League has a summary of social scientific studies comparing the actual rates and kinds of sexual abuse of children and others in the Roman Catholic Church to various other sectors of society including schools and Protestant Churches. It really puts the Catholic situation in perspective and raises the obvious question of why the Roman Catholic Church is being singled out by the media.

George Weigel has short but clear piece here in the Philadelphia Inquirer which addresses the fact that Pope Benedict XVI has taken the lead in ridding the Church of its "filth."

Media Bias is Not the Whole Problem

I just wanted to correct a possible misinterpretation of what I've been writing on the attacks on Pope Benedict XVI by the liberal media. I am NOT saying that if the media just let up on the Church and gave it a pass, then everything would be fine. I don't want the media to give anybody a pass on child abuse, which is a horrible evil.

My point is a bit more nuanced; it is that Pope Benedict is part of the solution, not part of the problem, and attacks on him are misplaced. Go after the culture of cover-up all you want. Go after the abusers all you want. I have no beef with that. But my beef is that a re-affirmation of Christian doctrine and morals is exactly what is needed today, not a loosening of moral standards just to avoid the scorn and persecution of the world. And Benedict is leading the Church in the right direction, both in general and with regard to the abuse scandal in particular.

Rod Dreher, in a post entitled "OK, now the Times is piling on Benedict" makes my point exactly. [BTW, he is talking about the NYT, not the ToL]

"This is why the liberal vs. conservative narrative applied to the drama playing out among Catholics right now is so frustrating. The idea that the problems of Pope Benedict and his institution are largely the fault of a hostile media is risibly wrong; Laurie Goodstein didn't reassign pederast priests. The idea that if only the Catholic Church were rid of supposedly rigid conservatives like Benedict, the Church would usher in the New Jerusalem is pathetically untrue. Liberal Catholicism -- which is the Catholicism prevalent at the parish level in the US -- has proved that it can't maintain what is distinctively Catholic over time. ("How did the Catholic Church get this reputation for being sex-obsessed?" said my friend, a lifelong mass going Catholic. "I've never heard a homily about sex." In my 13 years as a faithful Catholic, I never did either). As an outsider to Catholicism now, one who desperately wants Benedict to succeed, I find the predictable way the scandal is playing out in the hands of partisans of both sides depressing, because beside the point." [my bolding]

Dreher is a former Catholic who believes nonetheless that the Catholic Church is crucial to the survival of Western civilization.

"I spoke over the weekend to some Catholic friends who are deeply involved with the institutional church, and devoted to it. They're troubled over all this, of course, and what it means for the future of their church, and indeed of our culture. I shared with A. my thought that the fate of the West hinges on the fate of the Roman church, and that no one who cares about our civilization can be anything but profoundly concerned about this mess."

I agree. The West is in trouble and the collapse of the Roman Catholic Church at this point in history could lead to the collapse of the West itself. And that would be tragic for so many (though not for God). God would simply raise up another Christendom (as He is almost certainly doing) as a witness to the Gospel, but it would be tragic for us.

And this is precisely why the media has a responsibility to deal with this story without letting its left-wing bias distort it into a familiar anti-conservative narrative, which politicizes it without getting to the heart of the story. When the impression is given that one actually is hoping for Benedict and the Church to fall, journalistic objectivity has gone out the window.

Media Bias: They Have Been Waiting a Long Time to Get This Pope

The current media assault on the Roman Catholic Church over the sex abuse scandal is vicious and unrelenting.

The unfair attacks on Pope Benedict XVI are multiplying as the liberal media and their liberal fellow travelers within the Church, both of which groups are prejudiced against the Pope for theological and ethical reasons, seek to smear the Pope with whatever rumor they can use for their political purposes.

In the interest of fairness and balance, here is a good article by Daily Telegraph blogger, Andrew M. Brown, entitled: "Why Can't the Media Treat the Pope Fairly?"

"I read the coverage of the Pope every day in the newspapers and listen to the BBC news and as a Catholic and a journalist I feel like crying out pathetically: “This is not fair!” And it isn’t fair, or reasonable. Intelligent journalists who are normally capable of mental subtlety and of coping with complexities have abandoned their critical faculties. There is an atmosphere of unreason.

I cannot help feeling that a lot of it is down to sheer, blind hatred. It amounts to the demonisation of a whole institution and its leader. We have come to a stage where nothing good whatever, no good faith can be assumed of anybody involved in the Church – however senior, however greatly respected, loved, admired, including the Pope . . .

Consider also India Knight column today in the same newspaper, headed “Holy Father, I can no longer stay in this Church of Disgust”. This is the work of a sophisticated writer, with a half-page weekly column in the top-selling quality Sunday newspaper. A lot of people will tend to believe what they read here. Among other charges, Knight repeats the general gist of the New York Times story. But she does it in a slightly opaque fashion that seems calculated to do utmost harm to the Pope.

She claims that Murphy, an abusing priest in Milwaukee, “avoided justice after an intervention by Cardinal Ratzinger, now the Pope”. In the next breath, she writes: “Murphy was moved to another parish in 1974 and spent his final two decades working with children. ” She also says Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee “twice wrote to Ratzinger requesting that Murphy be defrocked”.

But surely this juxtaposition of facts could be a bit misleading. Ratzinger could not have done anything about Murphy’s crimes in the 1970s because he didn’t know about them. Knight does not mention when Archbishop Weakland got around to writing to Ratzinger. Murphy’s crimes were first reported in 1974 and Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee didn’t write to Ratzinger until 1996 – 20 years later, when Murphy was on the point of death and beyond harming anybody. That’s relevant, is it not? So why does Knight not mention it?

Wouldn’t it be more pertinent to ask what Archbishop Weakland was doing about child abusers in his diocese in the intervening years before he decided to write to the Vatican? One can’t help thinking it’s all about nailing the Pope and to hell with what really happened.

As for Archbishop Weakland, the media have seized on him as a prime witness against the Pope. On Radio Four’s PM last Thursday, Eddie Mair trumpeted “an extended interview” with the archbishop, who was asked more about what Ratzinger did or didn’t do.

The archbishop sounded humble, eminently reasonable, definitely believable. But is he a reliable witness? Apart from a vague expression by Weakland of personal failing, the average listener to Radio Four would be none the wiser about his checkered history and any of the facts that might make him a biased or less-than-reliable witness. (For more on Rembert Weakland, start with his Wikipedia page.)

The average listener would not know, for instance, how Archbishop Weakland first responded to accusations from parents about child abuse – by muttering about libel. Or that he admitted routinely shredding copies of reports about “problem priests” in his diocese. Or that in 1988 he said the following about sex abuse victims: “Not all adolescent victims are so innocent. Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise. We frequently try such adolescents for crimes as adults at that age.”

Or even that he forked out $450,000 of diocesan funds to buy the silence (and ward off a legal action) of a former graduate student named Paul Marcoux with whom he had carried on an inappropriate relationship.

I am not asking for special treatment of the Pope, by the way. I think he must be held accountable the same as all Church leaders. I think the Press is entitled to ask questions and to subject a secretive institution to scrutiny.

I have read the Irish reports into child abuse and I must say they are eye-openers. They are heart-breaking. The idea that individuals who claimed to be acting in the name of Christ, the embodiment of all gentleness and mercy, could behave with such monstrous corruption and brutality towards innocent children is almost impossible to comprehend . . . I have read Occasions of Sin, Diarmaid Ferriter’s masterly account of the modern Irish Church and the choke-hold that institution had over Irish society.

I am suggesting only that some of the untruths that keep getting repeated should be checked. It’s only what journalists are supposed to do every day of their working lives. Hold the claims up to the light. Speak to people who don’t have an axe to grind. Apply the principle of fairness.

The business about the so-called “pontifical secret” and the letter of 2001, touted as a “smoking gun” which implicates the Pope in cover-up, is an object lesson in the way the media repeats a “fact” and yet barely examines it. Christopher Hitchens held this up as uniquely damning evidence and so has the BBC and now a dozen other journalists have parroted the same thing. This is a misreading, as John Allen explains here and Sean Murphy in detail here. If you want to understand amid all the fury, read these articles. They make sense.

Essentially, Ratzinger’s 2001 directive made it easier to act against sex abusers. The secrecy that’s mentioned is hardly different from the secrecy that obtains in all sorts of sensitive hearings and investigations in the secular world such as those of the Family Court. What happened in 2001, actually, reflects to the Pope’s credit. That year saw Ratzinger’s moment of “conversion” as it has been termed.

He reviewed all the files on every priest who had been plausibly accused of abuse anywhere in the world and he took responsibility for what he called the “filth” that had infected the Church. At last there was someone high up in the Vatican who really got it. As John Allen says, “beforehand, he came off as just another Roman cardinal in denial”, but suddenly he and his staff became “energetic” in pursuing abusers.

The newest accusation concerns the abusive priest from the diocese of Essen named Peter Hullerman. It looks as though then Archbishop Ratzinger of Munich approved for Hullermann to be transferred to a rectory in Munich for therapy in January 1980, in the knowledge that he assaulted children in Essen.

Incidentally, when considering this case keep in mind that the Archdiocese of Munich at that time had 400 secular employees, more than 1,700 priests and more than 6,000 religious – monks and nuns. And that Fr Gerhard Gruber, the Vicar General at the time, has said the Archbishop, who’d spent most of his life in a university, “left many decisions to lower-level officials”. (Not everyone agrees with this. The Dominican Fr Thomas Doyle says: “Pope Benedict is a micro-manager”. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he, since he is a longstanding, and by his own admission inflammatory, critic of the Vatican.)

Anyway, in a catastrophe for the children who became his further victims, Hullermann was returned to pastoral ministry and had more contact with children. He was convicted for sex crimes in a Grafing parish in 1986. Amazingly, he was allowed to return to ministry even though he barely engaged with the treatment and only agreed to it to save his job.

How does this reflect on the Pope? Well it’s one thing to approve Hullermann’s accommodation in a rectory in Munich to undergo therapy, and another to say he can be released freely into a trusting parish with children. Fr Gruber, the Vicar General of the diocese, is the one who authorised Hullermann’s return to parish work with access to children, not, I think, the Pope. He has said this was a “serious mistake”. But he also said the Archbishop did not know and, as above, that he left decisions to lower-level officials. “The cardinal could not deal with everything,” Fr Gruber said . . .

It’s hard to say how the Munich scandal will pan out. What we can expect is more revelations from all over the world. But there’s a crucial distinction to be made, surely. There is such a thing as a mistake made in good faith. This does not deserve punishment. On the other hand you have dishonesty, deliberate negligence and incompetence; bishops should be punished for any of these failings.

About those who harm children, Christ’s teaching is explicit: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

If you are looking for reasoned argument and careful examination of the facts, this article and the links provided will aid you greatly. Read it all. But it you just want to join in the orgy of destroying all institutions and all institutional leaders just because that seems like the cool thing to do, then you probably are not still reading by now. And if you are one of the liberals out to crush Pope Benedict XVI, please repent and stop.

The Roman Catholic Church is to blame for being too lenient with sexual deviants. So how ironic is it that pro-homosexual activists beat the Church over the head with its too lax attitude to male homosexual priest abusing boys? The Church has done more to be be understanding toward homosexuals than almost any other institution in society and many with homosexual inclinations have lived chaste lives and rendered fine service in the priesthood.

But in the general decline in moral standards and general cultural atmosphere of permissiveness after the 1960s, even those whose sexual proclivities focused on younger men or boys felt free to indulge their appetites - after all, wasn't everybody doing it? The answer is not a married priesthood or the acceptance of same sex marriage, abortion and contraception.

No, the answer is a re-commitment to chastity on the part of the Church, better rules to protect children and others from sexual predations and the elimination of those with deep seated homosexual tendencies and who promote the so-called "gay culture" from the priesthood. The amazing thing is that years ago Pope Benedict XVI already took steps to make these thing happen - long before the "scandal" broke. You won't read that in the Times of London but it should affect your perception of what is going on today.