As reported in the Guardian and the New York Times, the Holy Mother Church thinks that exposing and criticizing the church’s cover up of decades of predatory sexual abuse by priests – involving the rape and abuse of children, men and women – is comparable to the Holocaust. That’s the comparison made in aGood Friday sermon by the pope’s personal preacher. The church later denied that his views were "official", but then published them in the official Vatican newspaper.
The church made that astonishing comparison – that exposing its priests’ crimes and their cover up was comparable to the murder of six million Jews – and nailed it to the cathedral door with the claim that the observation was first made by an anonymous Jew. That would seem to substitute one traditional scapegoat for another in a way that honors neither. The comparison was immediately assailed by representatives of child abuse victims and world Jewry.
The enormity of that comparison seems designed to distract from the church’s longstanding cover-up – and enabling - of the crimes of its priests (and presumably those higher in the hierarchy). Tristero andDigby develop that argument. It is such a whip-and-lash, cross-on-your-back PR defense that the church must expect that worse revelations will quickly follow. They are probably right.
On its first day, an abuse hotline in Germany received 4500 calls. Abuse scandals are widening inAustria, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The US-based predatory sexual abuse scandal, which the Boson Globe covered in award-winning detail several years ago, continues to smolder. There are appeals for an end to enforced celibacy and for this pope to step down, an act of humility and contrition not seen in the Vatican since Gregory XII resigned in 1415. But that was over the politics of who should be pope, not about the abuse of his flock by the shepherd.
Scandal has come close to this pope in several ways. As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was chief enforcer of the faith from 1981-2005, and it would have been his office that dealt with predatory sexual abuse claims against priests from around the world. One of these was the abuse case of Father Murphy in Milwaukee. His brother, Georg Ratzinger, spent three decades as director of a choir school in Germany that is now involved in a physical abuse scandal. And Benedict was archbishop of Munich when apaedophile priest was reinstated in his parish there.
It will take more than a letter to abused Irish Catholics to clean this church’s stables and restore its credibility as a spiritual guide and as an influence for moral good. The work of thousands of its faithful and dedicated professionals and the hopes of its millions of parishioners and the communities they live in hang in the balance. One act of contrition, symbolic of the season, would be for this pope to step down and let his successor clean house.
[via seminal.firedoglake.com]
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