Finally, finally, the press is asking
questions about why a Milwaukee priest who abused as many as 200 deaf boys
between 1950 and 1974 was never prosecuted by the police. And the answers they
are getting sound as lame as those offered by former Archbishop Rembert
Weakland.
In yesterday’s New York Times, journalist Laurie
Goodstein has defended her widely-quoted attack on Vatican obstructionism on
sex abuse cases. It is based on an
extensive paper trail of documents which resulted in a Milwaukee paedophile
priest, Lawrence C. Murphy, dying as a priest instead of defrocked and in
disgrace.
Professional criminologists seem somewhat
bemused by the furore over sex abuse in the Catholic Church. A German journal
of political commentary, Cicero, interviewed Germany’s most prominent criminal
psychologist, Hans-Ludwig Kroeber
yesterday. He is the director of the Institute for Forensic Psychiatry
of the Free University of Berlin and serves on an independent panel of experts
advising the Catholic Church about child abuse. He is not a Catholic.
Here is another piece of evidence that Benedict, while he was head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Holy Office), was not
inclined to cover-ups. He wanted a former cardinal fully investigated.
The New York Times, in its coverage of the Milwaukee sex
abuse allegations, may quote Fr. Thomas Brundage but the priest says
they never spoke to him. This is important because of the role Fr.
Brundage plays in the tragedy of Fr. Lawrence Murphy. Fr. Brundage
establishes his bona fides on the issue pretty quickly.
Isn’t
it odd that the most perceptive article on the media storm over clerical sex
abuse comes from a British magazine staffed by ex-Trotskyite pro-abortion
libertarians? Writing in
Spiked, editor Brendan O’Neill says that the hysteria “is a reaction informed more
by prejudice and illiberalism than by anything resembling a principled
secularism, and one which also threatens to harm individuals, families, society
and liberty”.
Defenders of the Pope
in the middle of the media assault over clergy sex abuse are fighting on two
fronts. The first is media distortion. Key newspapers have grotesquely
distorted accounts of how some cases were handled by the Vatican and by the
Pope himself when he was Archbishop of Munich. The second is the widespread
impression that paedophilia is widespread amongst Catholic priests. Both of
these are best dealt with by referring to facts in the public domain.
March has been payback time for some of the
media’s favourite Catholic theologians. Long before Joseph Ratzinger became
Benedict XVI, he was christened “God’s Rotweiler” and the “Panzer Cardinal” for
supporting orthodox Catholic teaching. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, his theological
foes are treating the current controversy as a chance to press for their own
vision of the Church.
Articles defending the Catholic Church in
the middle of the paedophilia scandal attract hundreds of comments. Many of
them contain statements of dumbfounding ignorance such as most priests are
paedophiles. How can statements like this be refuted?
Few of the recent stories have done more to raise a cloud of suspicion over Benedict than the claim by New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein that he declined to defrock a Catholic priest in Milwaukee who had abused more than 200 boys in an institution for the deaf.
Just B16 is MercatorNet’s contribution to
clearing the air about the sex abuse scandal enveloping Pope Benedict XVI and
the Catholic Church. Last year, in our “Our
public intellectual A-list” we described Benedict as “the world's leading
voice for human dignity founded upon the divine creation of man” – which he
undoubtedly is. Human dignity
sounds like a motherhood statement, but it is viewed with suspicion and even
disdain in many academic circles. The idea that human beings are rational and
that we can know what is right and wrong is at risk today. Indeed, the modish
thing is to describe morality as nothing more than social conventions or evolved
responses to ancient threats.
A thought experiment about marriage
24 May 2012
A world in which sexual intimacy could not produce children would never have come up with the idea of marriage.
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