Cubbies’ legendary double-play combination has its unfortunate, to say the least, contemporary throwback as described in this analysis of who’s been on first in the upward movement of questionable bishops.
Month: September 2018
Pope Francis meets with U.S. bishops as more leaders face allegations of harassment and cover-ups
What a softening head for this Wash Post piece in today’s Chi Trib, which should have read “Cardinal DiNardo blew it in 2010 in an abuse case and his fitness questioned to lead a probe” or something like it.
Indeed, in the 2nd paragraph we read that DiNardo was “himself accused this week of covering up the actions of an abusive priest in his archdiocese – prompting questions about DiNardo’s fitness to lead the reforms.”
And so goes the rest of the story, most of which that’s not background is about DiNardo.
Chi Trib, reasonably conservative in its (quite readable) editorials, is sometimes unreasonable in a sort of bland timidity in its news presentation, even as its news stories are thorough and often of the go-to variety.
via Chicago Tribune
How many states have launched their own probes of clergy sex abuse?
From Wash Post story in Chi Trib today, this ambiguous line:
States including Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York have now launched their own investigations.
“Including.” There are others who have launched etc.?
What Post trying to say is that these five states have launched etc. There are no others, so why “including”?
These are writers and complicit editors who doing a sentence are like the messy person who throws mud against a wall, trusting some will stick.
Sloppy, sloppy.
Clergy abuse: When silence was golden
Sun-Times editorializes on Chicago archdiocese’s abuse-coverup problem.
Before the Archdiocese of Chicago ushered in an era of heightened transparency, Raymond Goedert, a top church official, followed the indefensible practice for dealing with priests who allegedly molested children.
He talked to church lawyers instead of calling the cops.
Standard practice. Clericalism at work there. Closed-shop mentality. Tamp it down, tamp it down. Do not besmirch the institution. Lawyer up.
The last was to defend the coffers whereby, as I heard a Chicago priest tell his (black) congregation in the ’60s, “It takes money to save souls.” Bald, atypical description of good works sponsored far and wide, we presume, not quite of how souls are saved.
As to where Bishop Goedert lives, well where do bishops live who did likewise over the years? One got kicked upstairs to a Vatican job and was buried last December with a protocol-directed solemn-high funeral mass in St. Peter’s Basilica at which Pope Francis did his duty with a blessing over the casket. The cardinals had come to bury him, not to praise him, a spokesman explained.
As to Bishop Goedert’s being praised by fellow priests, it’s because he has been a much appreciated leader among them, a straight talker, stand-up guy, who did what was standard, what was expected of him — which is the problem, of course, as the Sun-Times says.
I recall another priest who in the 2000’s from another pulpit remarked, almost in passing, that hard times were coming for priests, or words to that effect, referring to expected backlash because of widespread reporting of abuse. Legitimate concern, but beside the point at that time, even parochial.
A decade later from yet another pulpit, an out-of-town Jesuit preached up a storm in a parish mission in which along the way he bewailed the role of the press in besmirching the church with its sex-abuse stories. A good man, missing the point.
Now that’s clericalism.
Cardinal Cupich on why not blame homosexuality for abuse, 8/27/18
In Chicago Tribune as part of an extensive interview:
“If you say that this is about homosexuality, then in the end what you’re really saying is that people who are gay are more prone to abuse children than straight people are, and that’s an injustice,” Cupich said.
“The research does not bear that out. And I’ve said that time and time again. Well, people are saying, ‘Well, you know you had so much of this abuse that was male-on-male.’ That’s true. But it was due not because homosexuals are more prone to injure kids, it was due to opportunity and also situational factors.”
Opportunity, sure. Access is more direct. Same for situational factors. He uses soft, less particular terms much favored by the bureaucrat. Specificity is for prosecutors and poets, who are more likely to give us a feel for things.
But he’s stuck with the report of 81% of priest victims being male. If they’d been female, they would still have been victimized? That’s a hard argument to make. An odd one anyhow.
The Plot to Bring Down Pope Francis
Hold horses on this one, which purports to catch the writer in an ignorant statement about forgiving abortion. It was in fact, one mistake in a long, well informed, if slanted and wrong-headed, article.
But my reference to forgiving abortion ignores her link to her 2015 story to Francis’ expanding to priests “the discretion to forgive penitent Catholic women for having abortions.”
Not that priests have been entirely ruled out, being sometimes deputed by their bishop to give absolution. But granting absolution has been limited to bishops.
The writer might have specified this but did provide the necessary link, and in any case let the record show she is clearly not uninformed.
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It’s all a plot, says Daily Beast writer, a liberal who loved him from the start for his “cool” all-things-OK approach.
Such as:
[making it] OK to forgive abortion [give absolution] to repentant women . . .
Thus speaketh the ill-informed reporter. First time evah repentance is cause for forgiveness!
Pope’s men working to cover his tracks in re: McCarrick
Seeking, we presume, to swear and “prove” that while half the ecclesiastical world knew about the ex-cardinal’s malfeasance, he, Francis knew nothing.
Apparently the Vatican is realizing that the silent gambit was not working, or rather was working against them:
Pope Francis’ top advisers say the Vatican is preparing the “necessary clarifications” about accusations that the pope covered up the sexual misconduct of a now-disgraced American cardinal.
Francis’ nine cardinal advisers expressed their “full solidarity” Monday with the pope over the scandal, which has thrown his papacy into crisis.
If he knew nothing, why not? Which so-called advisors left him in the dark? Which heads are to roll among his men?
via PopeWatch: Necessary Clarifications – The American Catholic
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich: ‘We have bigger agenda than to be distracted by church sex abuse scandal’
Like climate change or plastic in the ocean?
“I’m hurting, I can’t sleep, I’m sick,” the seminarian told Cupich during an Aug. 29 gathering at which the cardinal spoke to about 200 future priests enrolled at the seminary, according to another person who was there and spoke with the Chicago Sun-Times but asked not to be identified.
The seminarian told Cupich he was a young boy during the last scandal, in the early 2000s — amid a renewed wave of child-rape allegations against priests and cover-ups by their bishop bosses — and “thought this was over,” that the bishops had done their jobs.
Cupich thanked the man for speaking up and said he, too, was sick over the situation.
Minutes later, though, the cardinal said something that struck some of the seminarians as “tone-deaf.”
“I feel very much at peace at this moment. I am sleeping OK,” Cupich said, according to the person in attendance, a man studying to be a priest, who recalled that some fellow seminarians shook their heads in “disbelief.”
Not exactly consistent.
The source said Cupich also told the group that, while the church’s “agenda” certainly involves protecting kids from harm, “we have a bigger agenda than to be distracted by all of this,” including helping the homeless and sick.
That account was confirmed by other sources, including another seminarian also present at the gathering.
One of them said he decided to speak with the Sun-Times because so many Catholics “are hurting,” the cardinal’s remarks were so “non-pastoral,” and “the people of God need to know that their seminarians care” and “aren’t going to repeat the mistakes of the past — not only not repeat them but have them cleaned up.”
He’s losing them, it seems.
More about this q&a session at Mundelein (IL) seminary at Chicago Sun-Times.
Tear Down this Papal Wall of Silence
See something, say something, Francis. You’ll feel better if you do.
Many international leaders, including Pope Francis, have frequently commented on walls. In February, 2017, Pope Francis told the general audience in St. Peter’s square, “In the social and civil context as well, I appeal not to create walls but to build bridges,” On March 18, 2017, he tweeted “I invite you not to build walls but bridges, to conquer evil with good, offence with forgiveness, to live in peace with everyone.”
While Pope Francis is absolutely correct, it seems that he should follow his own advice.
Makes sense to me. Why won’t he talk about the Vigano accusations, made not by a pundit going on news reports but by a veteran Vatican hand with nothing to gain who cites detailed incidents in which Francis himself is involved?
Instead, in not only the Vigano case,
he has been a master builder of an invisible wall which separates him from much of the Catholic Church.
Unlike the brick and mortar wall surrounding Vatican City, Francis’s wall consists of ambiguity, inconsistency, passive-aggressiveness, and silence. He can be very clear on some matters, but when it comes to certain topics, he becomes vague, briefly stepping into the light, before slipping back into the shadows.
His answers are typically in the form of cryptic rebukes, often through his press office or one of his close advisors. On certain issues his message is hazy and he becomes aloof and inconsistent when asked for clarification.
He can even become living satire, such as his recent declaration that plastic in our oceans is an “emergency,” as if environmentalists need support from the pope, as he ignores a scandal in the Church which he himself could resolve with immediate and certain results.
It’s so obviously a diversionary tactic as to question if he’s losing his touch with what sells with the hoi polloi.
more more more here: Crisis Magazine
The Hunting of the Viganò II
Church Militant has a fascinating story, the stuff of novels.
Vatican officials are on the hunt for Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò.
According to sources within the Vatican, the Secretariat of State of the Holy See — under the direction of Pietro Cardinal Parolin [see below] — has communicated an instruction to its internal and external security services to use its “intelligence resources” to locate the physical whereabouts of Abp. Viganò.
This request has been communicated not only in order to prevent more unpredictable damage to the image of Pope Francis and the Holy See on the world stage, but also to “prepare the terrain” for the former apostolic nuncio-turned-whistleblower to be prosecuted for alleged multiple crimes against Vatican and Church law.
He who says nothing and calls for silence goes after the offender, or sends his people. The Dictator Pope.
And Pietro Parolin, secretary of state, is the same who in that capacity protected his post and perquisites enjoyed by fellow cardinals by shutting down the financial audit of the curia in 2016.
An old Roman hand, you might say, fully in the tradition of the “Italian princely courts.”
Blithe Spirit 