Sandro Magister, "Genesis of a Crime. The Revolution of the 1960's" (www.chiesa, March 25, 2010): "The scandal of pedophilia has always been there, but it was magnified by the cultural revolution of half a century ago. Benedict XVI makes the claim in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland. Two cardinals and a sociologist comment."
Related: Gerald Warner, "Catholic sex abuse scandal: time to sack trendy bishops and restore the faith" (Telegraph.co.uk, March 22, 2010) -- [Advisory: Warner is on an unrestrained tirade here, but one which the recent scandals in Ireland may help render at least understandable.]
2 comments:
There is something impressive about the way the Praetorian Guard rally around the Pope. Cardinals are ready to put their own heads on the line to save his.
Christopher Hitchens had a buffoonish video attacking the Pope, broadcast to his shame by Andrew Sullivan -- it was full of manifest errors and lies, including a totally false account of the Fr Murphy affair. Ratzinger first heard of this in 1996 and his only error, if error it was, was to show mercy to a dying man whose crimes -- which the law had absolved him of -- were 20 years in the past. Mercy is a Christian virtue that our society tramples on, and lots of cases of Summa ius, summa iniuria, are the result.
Ignatius Insight.com has a good criticism of other mistakes of Hitchens. See also http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0329.htm
German journalist and feminist, Alice Schawarzer, defends the Pope in "Sexueller Missbrauch: Wie es geschehen kann."
Her thesis in the first paragraph is that the sexual misuse of children is not an invention of the Catholic priest. Nor does it have anything to do with celebacy. In Germany alone -- to paraphrase, EJE--Kriminologischen Instituts Hannover estimates that yearly a million children are sexually misused and this happens in nine out of ten cases to girls. And three out of four perpetrators are not complete strangers or teachers, but rather a father, uncle, a neighbor or one who lives nearby. . . . Sexual misuse of children is possible everywhere...
Post a Comment