Vatican officials normally assume a diplomatic look of strained politeness when fielding questions from a hostile press. This time is different. Cardinal Ratzinger’s American successor as head of a leading Vatican department has peeled off his gloves and hit back at the New York Times.

Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, accuses it of being “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness that Americans have every right and expectation to find in their major media reporting.”

In an extraordinary statement posted on the Vatican website, Levada angrily observes that New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein overlooks the failure of local diocesan authorities and the police to do anything about abuse by a priest, Lawrence C. Murphy, from 1950 to 1974. “The point of Goodstein’s article, however, is to attribute the failure to accomplish this dismissal to Pope Benedict, instead of to diocesan decisions at the time.” Levada goes on to say:

It seems to me, on the other hand, that we owe Pope Benedict a great debt of gratitude for introducing the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors. These efforts began when the Pope served as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and continued after he was elected Pope. That the Times has published a series of articles in which the important contribution he has made – especially in the development and implementation of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, the Motu proprio issued by Pope John Paul II in 2001 – is ignored, seems to me to warrant the charge of lack of fairness which should be the hallmark of any reputable newspaper.

To get the full story, including Levada’s dig at “Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting”, visit the website.