Lemme guess. The press will say this is not enough.
[Independent.co.uk]Pope Benedict XVI is planning to make the first general apology for the abuse of children and minors by Roman Catholic priests when he meets thousands of clergymen from around the world in June at the climax of the International Year for Priests, Vatican sources say.
…
Vatican officials hope such an unprecedented act of penance by Benedict, together with thousands of clergymen in St Peter’s Square, 9-11 June, will do much to lay to rest the scandal and defuse protests that might disrupt his trip to Britain in September. The encounter will form the climax of the special year of events designed in part to encourage vocations to the cloth but which instead has been marred by the mushrooming paedophile scandal.
April 25, 2010 at 7:58 pm
"Lemme guess. The press will say this is not enough."
The comments below the article already say it's not enough. So much hate, so much self-righteousness, so much ignorance. Sad, really…
April 25, 2010 at 8:12 pm
The critics of the Church will see it as a foot in the door, allowing them to hope for greater changes (women priests, acceptance of gay lifestyles, etc.) The reaction when those changes aren't forthcoming will be much more acrimonious and vitrolic than what we've seen so far.
Get some popcorn and settle in folks, it'll be quite a show.
April 25, 2010 at 8:14 pm
The press will say:
The pope has finally broken silence, but doesn't promise grave changes. CTA will cry: The bad. bad pope hasn't done what we've wanted him to do. There's still celibacy and he is against the women's right to be ordained …
STFU
April 25, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Alipius said…
"The comments below the article already say it's not enough. So much hate, so much self-righteousness, so much ignorance. Sad, really…"
Really, what does hatret, self-righteousness and ignorance have to do with it? We are talking about willfull abuse by our clergy of innocent minors. Get that?
April 25, 2010 at 10:40 pm
The "scandal" is only "mushrooming" because the media are piling on the "crap". We all know the cases in questions are decades old and in many times already have been settled. No matter how hard anyone has tried (Der Spiegel, I'm looking in your hideous direction) there has been no evidence our beloved Pope Benedict was involved in ANY malfeasance or cover-up. So, the real scandal is there is no scandal there dispite what's been reported.
April 25, 2010 at 10:58 pm
Didn't venerable JPII include these grave crimes in his apology during the Jubilee year?
April 26, 2010 at 2:28 am
It is doubtful the apology will appease enemies of the Faith–they want a public hanging, and the Church to dissolve. Nothing will satisfy them.
Mrs. S
April 26, 2010 at 2:58 am
Anon @ 3:14,
Ignorance and hatred usually have everything to do w the comments under any story at all, but especially on the Church, in any British online paper.
We all get it – the crime is horrible, and somebody must pay. The NYT and J Anderson say "somebody" is Pope Benedict. The documwntary evidence so far says he is personally guilty of a failure of close supervision in Munich 30 years ago, and since then, has had an epiphany or conversion ca 2001, and is the one bishop who has fought hardest against both the scourge of perverts in the priesthood, and bishops who don't see the full horror of the problem.
He's reformed the processes for getting rid of these guys. He's clarified the bishops' responsibilities to cooperate with legitimate civil authority. He's not a criminal.
The Church is not a criminal enterprise – JP Ii may have been in denial, and certain cardinals may gave been clueless, bought or bedazzled by Maciel – but there Vatican's probably never had the close command and control a military or commercial organization has. The Vatican wasn't micromanaging bishops- it was trusting them to use their authority wisely. in this, they didn't.
Apparently, neither did Orthodox bishops – and they don't have a Vatican, so the meme of a centralized conspiracy is clearly not the only possible explanation for the Catholic bishops' failures. Families, public schools, other churches and other faiths have all instinctively tried to deal with pedophilia by denying it, or quietly sending the perp to a shrink instead of jail. The Church's business is the forgiveness of sin and rehabiitation of the sinner. Here, the bishops neglected justice for the victim, and worse, the obligation to prevent the perp from
reoffending. The error was both tragic and culpable – but it was also a natural result of human folly and misdirected mercy.
The Pope has been beaten up in the press for his/CDF's concern for due process, when
presented with a case 30 years old, that local
law enforcement couldn't take care of, and the local bishop had failed to do so in a timely manner. He's been accused of "knowing what they were up to" – Andrew Sullivan's insistence that Ratzinger was guilty of deliberately letting
Maciel continue to sin, after Jason Berry
and ABC News mentioned that Ratzinger was one of the few – or the only – target of the Legion's bribes who refused to take the cash. (Any cop knows there's sometimes a difference
between knowing what's going on and being able to make a case for an indictment, let alone a conviction; but AS *really* wants Benedict to be the bad guy (he still thinks 'the next pope' is gonna bless gay unions) The British 'reading' public wants to 'kick the Pope,' as the song says- and they don't give a rodent's buttocks that he's been working to reform the Church, and taking on his own shoulders a lot of the
burden of apologizing that his 'brother bishops'
have sluffed off.
So yeah, it's self- righteous, ignorant, and hateful to shout down any defense of an
innocent party on the grounds that "Somebody's gotta pay, and we're to damn lazy
to find out who's really guilty, so let's just grab this guy here and beat the shit out if him – and
anybody who says 'no, he's not the guy' is
disrespecting the victims."
April 26, 2010 at 3:11 am
You can't recover from a scandal like this. Even for our times, this is truly despicable.
April 26, 2010 at 4:10 am
Anon @ 10:11 I don't understand your comment "you can't recover." Who is "you" in that sentence? And what is the definition of "recover"? Way too subjective there to have any substance.
April 26, 2010 at 4:36 am
Well, for willfully covering up child abuse, I don't think jail is entirely unreasonable. I think accepting an apology, after which the pope gets to go back to his comfortable home, would be unreasonable.
April 26, 2010 at 8:34 am
@ anonymous (4:32 PM): Oh, golly! There's been willful abuse by our clergy of innocent minors? Thanks for letting me know!
We are talking about a public that is largely made up of puppets which for the greater part of history were always happy to be directed towards the immediate object of hatred, endowed with the proper code to morally elevate themselves above said objects and on the way ignore any evidence that might allow them to cut certain individuals some slack.
You want to tar and feather the abusing priests and spineless bishops who tried to cover it up? Tell me where and when. You want to candystripe the hate-speech people are hurling towards the Pope precisely because there is "so much hate, so much self-righteousness, so much ignorance"? Don't count on me.
April 27, 2010 at 1:53 am
Oh, I am sure SNAP already has its vicious press release written up, ready to e-mail to the papers, saying that the apology is "not enough." In fact, the reporters probably have their slanted reporting planned also. (I work in a news room. It's a common trick to write stories up beforehand and fill in the details.)