Contra the NYTimes [NCRep]

[didymus]

Nat’l Catholic Reporter:

Contra the NYTimes

This morning’s New York Times “expose ” regarding then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s role in the Vatican’s response to the clergy sex abuse crisis exposes more than it intended. It exposes the fact that the authors, Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger, and their editors, do not understand what they are talking about and, at times, put forward such an unrelentingly tendentious report, it is difficult to attribute it to anything less than animus.

The Times writes: “More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.” First, by the 1990s, much of the abuse had already occurred, as the article later notes. The Porter case in Fall River, Massachusetts, the Gauthe case in Layafette, Louisiana, the Geoghan case in Boston, all involved sex abuse that had already taken place. It was the fallout from those cases that remained to be dealt with. The “metastasizing” had already happened, and the reasons for that are complicated and various. They are not solely attributable to the culture of the Vatican curia.

More importantly, as the Times articles notes, it was Pope John Paul II who was dismissive of such charges, having seen the communist authorities in Poland use similar accusations to besmirch the reputation of the Church. Pope John Paul II was wrong not to take the charges more seriously. . .
Indeed, according to the Times, at the “secret” meeting at the Vatican to discuss the issue Ratzinger did forcefully argue for swifter procedures and penalties. Which is it? Was he dragging his feet or was he advocating for a more forceful response?

It is clear that the Times reporters do not understand the first thing, or at least the second thing, about the Church’s understanding of ordination. They write: “Dismissing a priest is not like disbarring a lawyer or stripping a doctor of his medical license. In Catholic theology, ordaining a priest creates an indelible mark; to return him to the lay state required the approval of the pope.” . . .
There is no way to dispense someone from ordination. Why? Because the actor in a sacrament such as ordination is not the bishop or the Pope, it is God, and you can’t just un-do that. We had this debate with the Donatists in the 4th century but I am not sure the editors of the Times would know a Donatist from a doughnut.

But, the sentence that most betrays the bias of the Times has nothing to do with the sex abuse of minors. In making the case that Cardinal Ratzinger found time to pursue other matters of lesser importance, they write: “As Father Gauthé 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.” This reads as “Bad Cardinal Ratzinger, persecuting those justice-loving liberation theologians.” The operative word in that sentence is “for.” Cardinal Ratzinger did not, in fact, punish liberation theologians “for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed.” He took steps against Liberation Theology because it was built on a faulty anthropology, entailed a materialist analysis of the human person, and reduced the idea of the “Kingdom of God” to a more just earthly regime.

Yikes!
The NCR defending the Holy Father against the NY Times?