The "good" Christopher Hitchens has been drawing attention to Benedict's dodging of the child sex abuse scandals, with the diocese of Boston being the damned spot of this trip -- not on the itinerary, and its former Cardinal Law sitting in quasi-asylum in the Vatican. This statement from Hitch has drawn National Review's Kathryn-Jean Lopez out of her joint Bush-Pope adulatory haze:
The scandal is not the presence of pedophiles in the church, but the institutionalization of child-rape by the knowing protection and even promotion (by non-pedophiles) of those who are guilty of it.
to which K-Lo responds --
People have been punished (and Cardinal Law was in a lot more powerful position when he was in Boston. I don't think he understands where he is today as a promotion) and prayerful renewal with an emphasis on a return to orthodoxy is the solution. Which is where Benedict leads.
Note that K-Lo's logic attributes to the scandals to a supposed departure from orthodoxy, by which she presumably means an osmosis of societal liberalism into the Church. So it's all the fault of the lefties, again.
But in fact the scandals were facilitated by a traditional culture of silence, an unwillingness to challenge the Church power structure from within, and an unwillingness of the state to pursue a crime against its citizens. It was the belated application of modern values that finally brought some redress. Saying prayers and getting back to basics didn't have much to do with it.
UPDATE: Guy La Roche at A Fistful of Euros finds a "blame society" analysis in Benedict's own reflections on the scandal.
Previous papal visit posts here and here
No comments:
Post a Comment