Response to The New York Times
corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDkxYmUzMTQ1YWUyMzRkMzg4Y2RiN2UyOWIzN DVkNDM=
— Source: Father Raymond J. de Souza is a chaplain at Queen’s University in Ontario.
Quote:
The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.
The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.
Before addressing the false substance of the story, the following circumstances are worthy of note:…Read full story on above link
Scoundrel Time(s)
firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/03/scoundrel-times
Mar 29, 2010
George Weigel
Source: - George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center
Quote:
But it was the New York Times’ front page of March 25 that demonstrated just how low those determined to bring the Church down were prepared to go.
Rembert Weakland is the emeritus archbishop of Milwaukee, notorious for having paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to satisfy the demands of his former male lover. Jeff Anderson is a Minnesota-based attorney who has made a substantial amount of money out of sex abuse “settlements,” and who is party to ongoing litigation intended to bring the resources of the Vatican within the reach of contingency-fee lawyers in the United States. Yet these two utterly implausible—and, in any serious journalistic sense, disqualified—sources were those the Timescited in a story claiming that, as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF], Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, had prevented sanctions against Father Lawrence Murphy, a diabolical Milwaukee priest who, decades before, had abused some 200 deaf children in his pastoral care. This was simply not true, as the legal papers from the Murphy case theTimes provided on its Web site demonstrated (see here for a demolition of the Times’ case based on the documentary evidence it made available). The facts, alas, seem to be of little interest to those whose primary concern is to nail down the narrative of global Catholic criminality, centered in the Vatican…
Read full story on above link
Well expressed comments extracted and rearranged a bit:
Why would anyone, anywhere, at anytime, believe anything written in the New York Times? You are supposedly Catholics and at the first shot fired by a lying newspaper rag, whose sources are a tort lawyer ready to line his pockets and a discredited bishop Weakland, you are ready to convict your Pope and the leaders of the church. Shame on you.
The “new” revelations aimed at Pope Benedict on the Wisconsin and Bavarian priests dredge up two ancient cases where there had been no coverup. Both cases were reviewed by the competent civil authorities in a timely fashion.
In WI, the DA chose not to proceed with a prosecution presumably because of Statute of Limitations considerations. Yet, the Church continued to pursue its own internal case for abuse of the confessional against Fr. Murphy. As the judge on the case (Fr. T. Brundage) has recently written, that case continued right up until the death of Fr. Murphy. As to the Bavarian case, Cardinal Ratzinger’s alleged “misconduct” was his 1980 approval of a transfer of the accused priest to the Munich Archdiocese so the priest could be given psychiatric treatment. As though psychiatric treatment were wrong? We may have learned that it has not proven effective for the treatment of pedophilia, but that was an empirical lesson still to be learned 30 years ago. Hindsight may be 20-20, but we live our lives and make our decisions in the quiddity of the present.
There are really two points that shouldn’t be forgotten:
First, the New York Times lied. They took two sources who are clearly biased and made up a story. Now, “lied” implies they knew what they were telling is a falsehood, so perhaps it’s not a nice thing to say. However, easily accessible facts refute their story, so I’m sticking with “lied” for now.
Second point, I’m pretty happy about the course of things. Our house is getting a thorough and needed cleaning and we will be the better for it. Sadly, the protestant and Orthodox churches, the schools (public and private) and various other social institutions will simply go along, in happy denial that they have this cancer eating at their craw. The real sadness about the NYT, however, is that they have lied about the one man who, as cardinal and pope, has actually done more than anyone else to address the sex abuse problem.
Granted, media types would like a bit more drama: firings, public excoriation, maybe a flogging or two. But Kodak moments don’t make for justice and healing. They just make for good TV. Nor would they satisfy the hard core anti-catholics, for whom it will always be “too little, too late”, for whom the pope is the ultimate scapegoat. The fact is we have gotten rid of a lot of bad priests, not to mention a few bad bishops. We have too many clergy too comfortable and secure.
