Pope Bendict Round Up

So, things have gotten weirder in recent days. First, there was this remarkably temperate comment in an Australian newspaper:

No-one has yet suggested bombing the Vatican and pursuing the Pope through the sewers of Europe till he is caught and riddled with bullets in order to stop priests buggering choirboys in Boston, Chicago, Dublin and Sydney. But a precise mirror image of this is how we behaved in Afghanistan. If we bomb it flat, we were told, and pursue Bin Laden through the caves of Tora Bora and the mud huts of Waziristan until he is caught and riddled with bullets, al-Qaeda won't hijack planes and blow up trains any more. And the world will live at peace. We were told this eight years ago. And we believed it... The Pope's followers desolated, perhaps, 100,000 lives (or this is my guess) by sexual depravity in the past 80 years and killed, perhaps, (this too is my guess, I ask for yours) no more than 5,000 smashed and embittered Catholic boys and girls they drove to suicide or drunken oblivion and early death in those years. The crimes are comparable pretty much and well-attested and well known from enquiries here and in Germany, the US and Ireland. Why then do we not bomb the Vatican and obliterate Italy for harbouring this criminal mastermind, this known protector of evil predators? Why do we not pursue him through the sewers of Europe and riddle his corpse with bullets?... Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?

A professor declares the Vatican's authority ended and basically cries "AmChurch...rises! AmChurch...rises!" in a piece titled "Don’t look to Rome for the true Catholic voices":

Simply put, what Rome says no longer matters. The bishops — those of this country in the vanguard — have already squandered any claim to trust. The pope himself now seems hell-bent on forfeiting what remains of his authority... Yet this moment of painful mortification holds great potential for clarification and renewal. The collapse of Christendom — the concept of a secular order based on Christian precepts — is now fully complete. So too is the triumph of modernity. No encyclical handed down from on high will reverse that verdict. We ourselves must deal with the consequences...

To its proponents, modernity implied liberation. To others, it suggested moral anarchy. Either way, the quickening tempo of change diluted and then dissolved established authority. Truth became first malleable and then seemingly obsolete.

For decades, the Roman Church placed itself at the forefront of those resisting these developments. Resistance proved futile. In a particularly squalid and reprehensible fashion, the Church’s very leadership has now succumbed to what it had long warned against...

Members of a discredited hierarchy are no longer capable of articulating the truth entrusted to the Church. So people of faith must assume responsibility for doing so, interpreting the message of the Gospels for our time and thereby fashioning a much needed critique of the cultural confusion that modernity has wrought...

And then there's this lovely website:

It has been documented that Members of the Catholic Church have committed Crimes Against Humanity - specifically the sexual, physical and psychological abuse of minors.

This has been taking place not in isolated areas, but on a global scale. The Vatican has knowingly made efforts to hide this truth from state authorities - as well as its own people.

Protected by the principals of Religious Freedom - not to mention tax exemption - the Catholic Church has been free to continue these heinous acts with impunity.

The Vatican has been recognized as a sovereign city-state since 1929. Considering its standing in the Global Community, and its despicable behavior, it is time for a UN Resolution to place the Vatican under House Arrest and bring these people to trial.

They sell T-shirts/hats/mugs/etc. and give the proceeds to SNAP, the sex abuse victims advocacy organization. And now Hans Kung stands forth to call for the Church to repudiate the legacy of JPII and Benedict in favor of his version of Vatican II and Church reform in an open letter titled

Church in worst credibility crisis since Reformation, theologian tells bishops: Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops.

Oh, and to say this:

There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).

George Weigel has written an open letter in response:

...your...snarling put-down of Karol Wojtyla’s alleged intellectual inferiority in one volume of your memoirs ranked, until recently, as the low-point of a polemical career in which you have become most evident as a man who can concede little intelligence, decency, or good will in his opponents. I say “until recently,” however, because your April 16 open letter to the world’s bishops, which I first read in the Irish Times, set new standards for that distinctive form of hatred known as odium theologicum and for mean-spirited condemnation of an old friend who had, on his rise to the papacy, been generous to you while encouraging aspects of your current work... What can be expected, though, is that you comport yourself with a minimum of integrity and elementary decency in the controversies in which you engage. I understand odium theologicum as well as anyone, but I must, in all candor, tell you that you crossed a line that should not have been crossed in your recent article, when you wrote the following [quote from above]. That, sir, is not true. I refuse to believe that you knew this to be false and wrote it anyway, for that would mean you had willfully condemned yourself as a liar. But on the assumption that you did not know this sentence to be a tissue of falsehoods, then you are so manifestly ignorant of how competencies over abuse cases were assigned in the Roman Curia prior to Ratzinger’s seizing control of the process and bringing it under CDF’s competence in 2001, then you have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously on this, or indeed any other matter involving the Roman Curia and the central governance of the Catholic Church. As you perhaps do not know, I have been a vigorous, and I hope responsible, critic of the way abuse cases were (mis)handled by individual bishops and by the authorities in the Curia prior to the late 1990s, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger began to fight for a major change in the handling of these cases... I say that your description of Ratzinger’s role as quoted above is not only ludicrous to anyone familiar with the relevant history, but is belied by the experience of American bishops who consistently found Ratzinger thoughtful, helpful, deeply concerned about the corruption of the priesthood by a small minority of abusers, and distressed by the incompetence or malfeasance of bishops who took the promises of psychotherapy far more seriously than they ought, or lacked the moral courage to confront what had to be confronted.

In the meantime, a continued string of new lawsuits have begun to be filed against the Pope and/or the Vatican. I suspect lawyers now view the Church as a target of opportunity and actually have begun to hope (in the wake of the Geoffrey Robertson/New Atheist story) that a court somewhere, somehow, will give a ruling against the Pope/the Vatican in such a fashion that they think it would stick. I suspect that absent a decisive international consensus to the contrary or some definitive ruling from God only knows where, these cases will not stop or go away until someone succeeds, and then the dam is breached, and the order which has held since Constantine shall pass away.