Benedict’s powerful message —
and the bid to suppress it
By Phil Lawler
April 11, 2019
After six years of public silence, broken only by a few mild personal comments, Pope-emeritus Benedict has spoken out dramatically, with a 6,000-word essay on sexual abuse that has been described as a sort of post-papal encyclical. Clearly the retired Pontiff felt compelled to write: to say things that were not being said. Benedict thought the subject was too important to allow for his continued silence.
Vatican communications officials thought differently, it seems. Benedict’s essay became public on Wednesday night, but on Thursday morning there was no mention of the extraordinary statement in the Vatican’s news outlets. (Later in the day the Vatican News service issued a report summarizing Benedict’s essay; it appeared “below the fold” on the Vatican News web page, below a headline story on relief efforts for cyclone victims in Mozambique.)
For that matter it is noteworthy that
the former Pope’s statement was not published by a Vatican outlet in the first place; it first appeared in the German
Klerusblatt and the Italian secular newspaper
Corriere della Sera, along with English translations by the Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register.
Benedict reports that he consulted with Pope Francis before publishing the essay. He does not say that the current Pope encouraged his writing, and it is difficult to imagine that Pope Francis was enthusiastic about his predecessor’s work on this issue.
The two Popes, past and present, are miles apart in their analysis of the sex-abuse scandal. Nowhere does Benedict mention the “clericalism” that Pope Francis has cited as the root cause of the problem, and rarely has Pope Francis mentioned the moral breakdown that Benedict blames for the scandal.
The silence of the official Vatican media is a clear indication that Benedict’s essay has not found a warm welcome at the St. Martha residence. Even more revealing is the frantic reaction of the Pope’s most ardent supporters, who have flooded the internet with their embarrassed protests, their complaints that Benedict is sadly mistaken when he suggests that the social and ecclesiastical uproar of the 1960s gave rise to the epidemic of abuse.
Those protests against Benedict —
the mock-sorrowful sighs that we all know sexual abuse is not a function of rampant sexual immorality — should be seen as signals to the secular media. And secular outlets, sympathetic to the causes of the sexual revolution, will duly carry the message that Benedict is out of touch, that his thesis has already been disproven.
But facts, as John Adams observed, are stubborn things. And
the facts testify unambiguously in Benedict’s favor. Something happened in the 1960s and thereafter to precipitate a rash of clerical abuse. Yes, the problem had arisen in the past. But every responsible survey has shown a stunning spike in clerical abuse, occurring just after the tumult that Benedict describes in his essay.
Granted, the former Pontiff has not proven, with apodictic certainty, that the collapse of Catholic moral teaching led to clerical abuse. But to dismiss his thesis airily, as if it had been tested and rejected, is downright dishonest.
Facts are facts, no matter who proclaims them. The abuse crisis did arise in the muddled aftermath of Vatican II. Benedict puts forward a theory to explain why that happened. His theory is not congenial to the ideas of liberal Catholic intellectuals, but that fact does not excuse their attempt to suppress a discussion, to deny basic realities. (Come to think of it, this is not the first time that the public defenders of Pope Francis have encouraged the public to ignore facts, to entertain the possibility that 2+2=5.)
That message — the message of Pope-emeritus Benedict — is a striking departure from the messages that have been issued by so many Church leaders. The former Pope does not write about “policies and procedures;” he does not suggest a technical or legalistic solution to a moral problem. On the contrary he insists that we focus our attention entirely on that moral problem and then move on to a solution which must also, necessarily, be found in the moral realm.
As background for his message, Benedict recalls the 1960s, when “an egregious event occurred, on a scale unprecedented in history.” He writes about the breakdown in public morality, which was unfortunately accompanied by the “dissolution of the moral teaching authority of the Church.” This combination of events left the Church largely defenseless, he says.
In an unsparing analysis, Benedict writes of the problems in priestly formation, as “homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in seminaries.” He acknowledges that a visitation of American seminaries produced no major improvements. He charges that some bishops “rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole.”
He sees the turmoil as a fundamental challenge to the essence of the faith, observing that if there are no absolute truths — no eternal verities for which one might willingly give one’s life — then the concept of Christian martyrdom seems absurd. He writes: “The fact that martyrdom is no longer morally necessary in the theory advocated [by liberal Catholic theologians] shows that the very essence of Christianity is at stake here.”
“A world without God can only be a world without meaning,” Benedict warns. “Power is then the only principle.” In such a world, how can society guard against those who use their powers over others for self-gratification? “Why did pedophilia reach such proportions?” Benedict asks. He answers: “Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God.”
It is by restoring the presence of God, then, that Benedict suggests the Church must respond to this unprecedented crisis. He connects the breakdown in morality with a lack of reverence in worship, “a way of dealing with Him that destroys the greatness of the Mystery.” Mourning the grotesque ways in which predatory priests have blasphemed the Blessed Sacrament, he writes that “we must do all we can to protect the gift of the Holy Eucharist from abuse.”
In short
Pope-emeritus Benedict draws the connection between the lack of reverence for God and the lack of appreciation for human dignity—between the abuse of liturgy and the abuse of children. Faithful Catholics should recognize the logic and force of that message. And indeed Benedict voices his confidence that the most loyal sons and daughters of the Church will work are already working — toward the renewal he awaits:
If we look around and listen with an attentive heart, we can find witnesses everywhere today, especially among ordinary people, but also in the high ranks of the Church, who stand up for God with their life and suffering.
Still the renewal will not come easily; it will entail suffering. For Benedict, that suffering will include the waves of hostility that his essay has provoked, the dismissive attitude of much lesser theologians, the campaign to write him off as an elderly crank.
No doubt the former Pope anticipated the opposition that his essay would encounter. He chose to “send out a strong message” anyway, because suffering for the truth is a powerful form of Christian witness.
Benedict’s analysis:
What impressed me most
by Jeff Mirus
April 11, 2019
There are several things which I found particularly intriguing about Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s analysis of the roots of the contemporary Church’s problem with clerical sexual abuse. And there is one thing that I found most impressive going forward.
First, it was both intriguing and gratifying to me that
Benedict locates the particular cultural roots of the abuse problem in the massive cultural shift of the 1960s. That’s gratifying because I have long argued that the crisis in the Church that exploded in the second half of the twentieth century was primarily the result of
the collision of a Church in intense need of interior renewal prior to that period with an enormous historical-cultural circumstance —namely, that the long slow secularization of Western culture finally reached the point, in the period following World War II, when that culture no longer recognized the reasons for the public moral restraint which had mostly characterized the West in the past.
The result was that in the matter of a few years — the 1960s — the sexual taboos were swept away, not in terms of private avoidance, which had long since generally disappeared, but in terms of a vanishing public “respectability”. This was a game-changer for a Church that was thoroughly entwined among the respectable institutions of the West and far too dependent on the surrounding dominant culture for its public posture of righteousness.
The result was that
when this massive public cultural shift occurred, bishops and priests very often simply continued to follow the dominant culture from which they tended to take their cues. It is precisely this analysis, for example, which explains why Modernism was frequently underground in Catholic universities in the first half of the twentieth century, only to burst into brazen dominance almost overnight.
Second, I found it very intriguing to see
how much Pope Benedict knew about the problems in the Church. Sometimes faithful priests and laity wondered whether Rome really knew how bad things were, say, in the 1970s and 1980s, considering how little public acknowledgement and public discipline there was.
The tip-off for me was the Pope Emeritus’s admission that the first American seminary visitation was pretty much a failure because so much had been hidden (even though things did get better over time partly as a result).
He also remembered key details, such as that “one bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith”. This was Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan — who was, almost inconceivably, appointed over the well-justified opposition of faithful laity.
The third thing that intrigued me was a matter about which I was almost completely ignorant.
Pope Emeritus Benedict discusses the inadequacy of the 1983 Code of Canon Law when it came to the ability to investigate, judge and impose significant ecclesiastical sanctions on wayward priests. It was partly this that led to Pope John Paul II’s decision to put the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in charge of the investigation of clerical abuse, for apparently only violations under the authority of the CDF could, as a matter of normal course, result in expulsion from the priesthood.
Various revisions to the Code have been made since that time, but it is pretty obvious that the Church’s codified judicial processes can still be difficult to use effectively in at least some situations. The portions of Benedict’s analysis which touch on Canon Law are very interesting indeed.
What impressed me most, however, is what has always impressed me most about Pope Benedict and, indeed, Cardinal Ratzinger as was — namely, his wonderful spiritual depth. Pope Emeritus Benedict knows that the root crisis, not only for clerical abuse but for the entire problem of Catholic secularization, is the profound absence of God in the minds and hearts of far too may Catholics. He explores this problem in theology, in liturgy, even in the spiritual life, and he has much to say about it. But put generally, the main point is this:
A paramount task, which must result from the moral upheavals of our time, is that we ourselves once again begin to live by God and unto Him. Above all, we ourselves must learn again to recognize God as the foundation of our life instead of leaving Him aside as a somehow ineffective phrase.
The entire text of
The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse is fairly brief, only about five times the length of one of my own typical commentaries, or about seven to eight times as long as this brief introduction. Everyone should read it, not for anger and recrimination, but for greater understanding and spiritual growth.
Other than the 'headline' that canon212.com not surprisingly made of it, I am happy to note I seem to be the only one who has cavilled at the final sentence in Benedict XVI's essay, other than a 'headline' in canon212.com. Mine is out of an excess of concern that, as I daily pray, Joseph Ratzinger may be spared further unnecessary controversy subjecting him to more than the opprobrium he already gets from outspoken orthodox Catholics who blame him for Bergoglio.
It seems one can classify the reactions to his essay broadly into four groups:
1) those who approve of the entire essay unconditionally such as the two commentators above of catholicculture.org [and those who might be called Ratzingerian among Italian Vaticanistas today - Antonio Socci, Marco Tosatti, Aldo Maria Valli and Riccardo Cascioli, whose eactions I have yet to translate]
2) those who approve partly, but fault Benedict for being 'incomplete' in many ways (e.g., Carl Olson of Catholic World Report) chiefly by failing to address specific issues such as homosexuality in the clergy and how to deal with bishops who condone and/or cover up clerical sex abuse. Yet B16 himself describes his essay as 'notes' he made in the wake of the February 2019 Vatican summit, which was supposed to deal with those specific issues but did not. B16's notes, though far more organized and coherent than even his successor's formal documents, are far from constituting a post-papal 'encyclical' - which would necessarily be far more encompassing - as some admirers have described it. More importantly, he studiously avoids giving the impression that he still has anything to do with the governance of the Church as he would if he made any 'practical' recommendations on specific issues.
3) those who claim it says nothing new nor adds anything to the discussion (e.g., Steve Skojec of 1Peter5), namely, those who have also dismissed Benedict XVI as totally worthless and irredeemable, because 'it is unforgivable' that any pope should resign [Would they say that if Jorge Bergoglio ever resigned???] consigning him to a circle of Dante's Hell for having resigned and made it possible for Bergoglio to be pope, and
4) the Bergoglio courtiers who would never find anything good to say anyway about any pope but Bergoglio (and his forerunner, Paul VI).
P.S. And then there's someone like Michael Matt, editor of The Remnant - one of those 'traditionalists' who consider Benedict's resignation as 'disastrous' and will forever hold that against him - but who does find 'some merit' in the former Pope's April 11 'notes' and does not seem to share the anti-Benedict progressivist view - which is really preposterous - that the Emeritus Pope has no business writing anything like this at all because he is being divisive and setting himself against the reigning pope.
So, you see, Benedict's to-me-very-problematic last sentence in the article was something they decided to ignore either because they recognize it as irony, or saw it as mere window dressing to hide the criticisms of his successor implied by much of the truths of the faith Benedict reiterates here, as he has always done throughout his life in the Church.
Moreover, just because he resigned as Pope does not deprive him of his Canon 212, Section 3 right and duty to speak out when the faith is threatened, something he manages to do in this article without having to go ad hominem, literally, if only because he does not have to, since everyone, friend or foe, knows exactly what applies to those positions fervently held in this pontificate.
Benedict XVI speaks
(Despite the wolves)
by Michael J. Matt
Editor
April 12, 2019
Benedict XVI’s April letter on the crisis in the Church is not easily critiqued or, indeed, categorized. First of all, he’s not the pope, and so it's natural for one to wonder what the point of the exercise actually was.
[The point of the 'exercise' is to reiterate to the faithful that the Church as a whole, in its visible components from the pope down, needs to return to God and put him once more in the center of our lives, not as a mere token one refers to once in a while to lend a semblance of righteousness to what we say and do. One does not need to be pope to do that, but it helps if it comes from an ex-pope who knows and lives whereof he speaks.]
On the other hand, as Francis continues to severely undermine what’s left of the Catholic Church, should Benedict be faulted for trying to do something meaningful in the face a crisis no one in Rome seems ready to even adequately address, much less seriously confront?
If Benedict’s intervention is to be evaluated on the basis of the gush of vitriol it received from his liberal critics, it certainly can't be all bad.
“Embarrassingly wrong”, screams the USA Today headline. “Benedict blasted for blaming homosexuality, sexual revolution for church abuse crisis”, claims columnist John Bacon.
Here’s the problem for the Cupich types:
Benedict did the very thing the Vatican went to great lengths not to do during the recent sham summit on clerical sexual abuse — he brought up the “H” word:
"In various seminaries, homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.”
[Of course, Skojec and the entire holier-than-Benedict brigade mock him for having used the word only once in the 6,000-word essay. But homosexuality in the clergy and the resultant sex abuses it fueled is only one of the severe manifestations of the virtual absence of God from Christian life today. The analysis was not meant to tackle the specific issues that the February summit avoided - imagine the extent and the decibel level of the protests against him if he had done that: "Shut up, you're no longer pope, and how dare you set yourself up as a one-man council against the work that was done by the pope and 350 bishops from around the world" - but to underscore how, in being fixated on specific issues, even the most well-meaning of Catholics misses the broad picture and forgets to put God in it at all.]
It’s no wonder the Lefties — in the Church and out — are seeing red. The former Pope Benedict XVI was supposed to shut up and say his prayers after the
bizarre 2013 abdication. But now he's out there claiming that homosexuality in the priesthood fueled the crisis.
Way to go, Your Emeritusness! That's a finger in the eyes of a lot of powerful people, including the three amigos (Blase, Jimmy and Jorge).
But that's not all. The former Pope dared to suggest that the Church of Vatican II was “ill-equipped to combat the crisis,” and that a “crisis of supernatural faith” was at work in the Church in the late 1960s which had come about from the “absence of God”.
The “absence of God”… in the immediate aftermath of the bestest, greatestest and most awesomest Council in the history of the Church? Impossible!
Benedict’s intervention was “neither accurate nor helpful”, scolds former CNS reporter, John Thavis:
"When a retired pope issues statements on these kinds of issues, it undercuts the efforts of the current pope." [But just what was wrong with the statements - other than Mr Thavis's objections to a retired pope speaking his mind while not neglecting to 'genuflect' before the reigning pope with a cringeworthy hosannah if that was what it took to be 'permitted' to publish his notes? Undercuts the current pope's efforts in what way? By restating certain truths of the faith? Bergoglio should be thankful Benedict is doing it while he, the reigning pope, prioritizes UN development goals and the virtual delivering of Europe to Islam.]
You’ve got us there, Mr. Thavis. In fact, if the former pope is truly “undercutting the efforts of the current pope,” perhaps we should all get down on our knees and pray he picks up his pen more often.
This will only “divide the Church,” whines Andrew Chesnut, chair of the Catholic Studies program at Virginia Commonwealth University, “at a time when Francis has been calling for unity.” Indeed! But, then again, who is he to judge?
And Fordham’s David Gibson called Benedict’s letter
"deeply problematic and damaging at a crucial time", adding that “he is not the Pope. Just acting like one.” [Gibson, who capitalized on Benedict XVI's election as pope in 2005 to put out a most unflattering biography of the then-new pope, without ever talking to Joseph Ratzinger, on the basis of having worked at Vatican Radio for a number of years - never agreed with anything Benedict XVI said or did when he was pope. He has even more reason to be 'disapproving' now.]
Well, somebody has to!
Nothing new here. The Left will always pitch a hissy fit whenever someone in clerical attire says something even remotely Catholic. These are the same folks, by the way, who lost their collective mind when the “archconservative”, staunch “traditionalist”, one-time
peritus at Vatican II ascended the throne of Peter in the first place.
Ratzinger believed in God and the Church's moral authority, which for some of these folks made "God's Rottweiler" nothing less than an insufferable "rad trad".
So, what are we to make of it all? Well,
it’s Benedict, which means it’s a little of this and a little of that. [I think this is the first time I have ever read anyone characterize Benedict's thinking or writing as 'a little of this and little of that', as if the man recognized by many authoritative Catholic and secular intellectuals as the greatest living mind in the Church of the late 20th century and the start of the 21st century we no better than a dilettante or amateur dabbler!]
Some of it reads like the words of a kindly and sincere old man attempting to convince himself of something of which he's no longer quite so sure. His is a genuine attempt to address the root cause of the crisis in the Church, obviously, which puts him leagues ahead of his hapless successor, but he's still unwilling (or unable) to see the bare nakedness of the Council.
In some passages, Benedict shines light on the fundamental problem; while in others, the thinking of a man nearly as conflicted as
the new Church he helped build comes to the fore.
[The problem with all the holier-than-Benedict trads who see nothing but evil in Vatican-II is that they fail to see that as popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI had no choice but to uphold Vatican-II as they saw and interpreted it - which, as Benedict XVI rightly described it, could only be through a hermeneutic of continuity with what went before. It was a valid ecumenical council whose teachings and decisions a pope cannot change by himself because the Magisterium of an ecumenical council is superior to a pope's.
The final documents of Vatican II - the letter of the law, not the false 'spirit' the progressivists claimed and continue to claim - were such that even Mons. Marcel Lefebvre, who was a council Father, signed them, starting to protest only when the liturgy became the first victim of the progressivists. What did Michael Matt and his fellow 'rad trads' expect John Paul II and Benedict XVI to do? Unilaterally - and 'illegally' - abrogate or amend any Vatican II document they found deficient in any way? Or call a new council to 'clean up the mess'?
Benedict XVI was able to promulgate Summorum Pontificum only because the Vatican II Constitution on the Liturgy did not, in fact, abrogate the traditional Mass at all. Bear in mind this was the first Vatican document approved, at the very first session of the four-year Council. If it had provided for the abrogation of the traditional Mass, it would never have passed at all, and we would have heard from Marcel Lefebvre back in December 1962, not in 1975, when Paul VI suppressed the FSSPX that Lefebvre founded in 1970, forbidding Lefebvre from ordaining any priests, a prohibition Lefebvre ignored. But it would be 1988 before Lefebvre would defy another pope, this time John Paul II who forbade him from consecrating bishops not named by the Vatican.]
The one-time revolutionary appears to be looking back over his once-cherished Revolution with a more critical (or at least realistic) eye. He seems to be longing to rediscover the promise that Revolution once held for him, but can't quite get past the nightmare of a Church fighting for its life in a world in which God is dead.
[Joseph Ratzinger was always realistic about Vatican II and how it had been hijacked during the Council by the progressivists who used the media to foist 'the Council of the media' on public opinion. To accuse him now of seeming to realize all this too late is to ignore THE RATZINGER REPORT, the book-length interview with Vittorio Messori in 1984, all of 35 years ago, that was his wide-ranging critique of how Vatican-II was mis-implemented and mis-interpreted by too many in the Church. A book that firmed up media depiction of him as 'God's rottweiler' and inflamed all those in the Church who felt alluded to.
Published just before the Extraordinary Synod John Paul II called to mark the 20th anniversary of the Conclusion of Vatican II, and discuss its reception by the Church thus far, it got so much publicity that Cardinal Godried Danneels, who was the relator of the synod, complained to the media at its start, "This not a synod about a book; it is a synod about a Council".
Unfortunately for all of us, although that synod produced the contemporary Catechism of the Catholic Church, necessarily incorporating the teachings of Vatican II in a way no one questioned until this pontificate, the reigning pope himself unilaterally changed the Catechism to declare the death penalty 'unacceptable' under any condition whatsoever, and the man who chaired the editorial board of the Catechism, Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna, has become a major advocate of homosexual unions, in direct opposition to what the Catechism says about homosexual acts being sinful.]
He suffers from the same kind of dilution [delusion?] that plagues many of the more conservative bishops and cardinals of that era — brought on now by years of wishful thinking, I suppose, and decades of habitually denying the obvious, and where an imaginary Second Vatican Council had to eclipse the one clearly tearing the Church apart. [See comment above! I guess Mr Matt really never heard of THE RATZINGER REPORT, much less read it.]
And so for the few men who at least will admit there's a problem, it’s always the bishops’ fault or the ‘Council of the Media' or the ‘Virtual Council'. But the Council itself is beyond reproach. Our beloved Cardinal Burke, it would seem, suffers from a similar affliction.
[Mr Matt's sarcasm is misplaced here, and like the other rad-trads of his ilk who see Vatican II as nothing but sheer unmitigated evil, they ignore that Mons. Lefebvre - whose opposition to Vatican II was the most concrete and best documented of all - took all of 23 years to consolidate his four objections to Vatican II. Four!
The first and most familiar was not an objection to the Vatican II document that provided the basis for a Novus Ordo, but the form this new Mass took, which went far beyond the guidelines of Sacrosanctum Concilium - a Novus Ordo that Lefebvre and the FSSPX defied from the beginning.
The other three issues are: 1) 'false' or 'aberrant' ecumenism to the detriment of Catholic mission; 2) the principle of religious liberty espoused by the Vatican-II document Dignitatis Humanae (which Leebvre voted against in the Council, but to which he signed his agreement afterwards, though he claimed that what he signed was simply an attendance sheet); and 3) the promotion of collegiality in place of strict papal supremacy.
He didn't appear to take issue with Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on 'The Church in the Modern world', a favorite of John Paul II but a document that Joseph Ratzinger has always criticized for failing to offer an adequate definition of the "essential features that constitute the modern era". Nor with Nostra aetate, the brief document that acknowledges that other major religions like Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism do contain something good in each of them that the Church an ought to be partners in doing things for the common temporal good. Lefebvre's successors have been far more outspoken in denouncing Nostra aetate as undermining the Church's missionary task.]
They look to the Sexual Revolution, bad bishops, wayward priests —anything other than the cold, hard fact that the fundamental problem in the Church today is the Revolution of Vatican II itself — a disastrous affair that gave rise to the most devastating crisis in the Church since the Protestant Revolt.
[Mr Matt is mixing up causes and effects, and altogether missing Benedict XVI's point that the entire climate of the 1960s was already so marked by the absence of God in modern man's reckoning that it inevitably produced the laissez-faire of an amoral me-myself-and-I-centered society bent only on the satisfaction of its desires and pleasures. That this amorality infected even men of the Church who were the ultimate implementers of Vatican II and implemented it according to the Zeitgeist of '68. A Zeitgeist that was foreshadowed in the deliberate ambiguities of some Vatican-II documents that sought a compromise between traditional conservative thinking and the progressivist worldview.]
The Council and its evil Spirit, along with its New Mass, decimated the Catholic Church, turned the priesthood into a gay profession, emptied seminaries and pews alike, and has done more to discredit the Catholic Church in the eyes of the world than all of the Protestant revolutionaries combined.
Perhaps, a Benedict well advanced in years is beginning to abandon hope of rescuing his precious Council. I don’t know...we'll likely never know. But do read his letter. See if you can make out what's between the lines, and then you make the call.
We’ve made several pull quotes out of those passages which, if nothing else, are like nothing any of us will ever hear from the lips of Pope Francis -- passages, by the way, which make Benedict’s final paragraph so astonishingly perplexing as to leave one wondering if the man's being blackmailed.
Whatever you think of it, pray for Benedict XVI. Even his mixed-bag intervention makes it clear to the careful reader that they got rid of this man for a reason. He needs our prayers, more than our criticism and derision — our prayers and our forgiveness for having indeed fled for fear of the wolves.
Only God and Joseph Ratzinger know what demons conspired against the 265th successor of St. Peter to induce him to do the disastrous thing he did.
[WHAT CONDESCENSION! I imagine Bergogliacs must have the same extreme reaction to critiques of the reigning pope by those of us in what I should call, in all fairness, the holier-than-Bergoglio brigade, as I have to the relentless broadsides by the holier-than-Benedict platoons.]
His unedited letter follows, with pull quotes to draw the reader's attention to the type of observations which were so conspicuous by their absence at Francis' Summit on clerical sexual abuse last February--a Summit which I attended and so can testify to how assiduously Francis & Co tried to avoid the very conclusions Benedict's letter, despite its obvious flaws, has now brought to the fore.
There can be little doubt that Francis had no knowledge of this letter's existence before it was released...else, surely, it would never have seen the light of day. {So, Mr Matt not only ignores or feigns not to remember THE RATZINGER REPORT, but also what Benedict XVI states in his introduction to the essay- that he cleared the project with Cardinal Parolin and through him, with the pope. Of course, we don't know if the Vatican asked to see the manuscript first before it was published so it could give an informal nihil obstat, or whether the Emeritus Pope, out of punctilious courtesy, provided the manuscript before he sent it out to be published. In any case, given the egregious presence of that last sentence in the letter, I would like to think Parolin and/or the pope read the 'notes' and found it unexceptionable because its chosen frame of reference is all in the past, even if it was written as a reaction to a recent event.
I am omitting Matt's reprint of the essay. I do not know why he keeps referring to it as a letter - it is not an encyclical nor was it meant to be nor could it be.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/04/2019 09:53]