Friday, March 26, 2010

Vatican says media engaged in "ignoble attempt" to smear the Pope...


"Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in Heaven." (Matthew 5: 11-12).

"Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty...of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2477).



Throughout the history of the Church, there have been many saints who were wrongly accused. For example, Blessed Miguel Pro was executed in 1927 by Mexican authorities after being charged with attempting to assasinate government officials. There was no evidence against him. But that didn't concern those who had their own agenda to discredit the Church and her ministers.

Likewise, Pope St. Paschal I was falsely accused of instigating the murder of two of his own papal officials who opposed one of his decisions.

We can expect such attacks to escalate. There are forces determined to undermine the Church's authority in order to advance an unholy agenda. We must now rally behind the Holy Father. We must come to the defense of Christ's Vicar on earth. We must pray for Peter's successor. Just as those who hated the Church assasinated Blessed Pro, so now there is an effort to assasinate the character of our beloved Holy Father.


Related reading here.

4 comments:

Ellen Wironken said...

Catholic League responds:

"Pope Was Told Pedophile Priest Would Get Transfer." That's the headline in today's New York Times piece on the pope. Yet the Times offers absolutely no evidence to support this charge. All it says is that his office "was copied on a memo" about the transfer of Peter Hullermann. According to Church officials, the story says the memo was routine and was "unlikely to have landed on the archbishop's desk."

Let's say Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, did in fact learn of the transfer. So what? Wasn't that what he expected to happen? After all, we know from a March 16 Times story that when Ratzinger's subordinates recommended therapy for Hullermann, he approved it. That was the drill of the day: after being treated, the patient (I prefer the term offender) returns to work. It's still the drill of the day in many secular quarters today, particularly in the public schools. A more hard-line approach, obviously, makes more sense, but the therapeutic industry is very powerful.

In other words, there is no real news in today's news story. So why print it? To keep the flame alive. Look for the Times to run another story saying they have proof Ratzinger knew of the transfer. Did they think that after he approved the therapy that Hullermann would be sent to the Gulag?

Yesterday's Times story on the half-century old case concerning Father Lawrence Murphy will be the subject of an op-ed page ad in Tuesday's New York Times. Meanwhile, I am taking advantage of every TV opportunity to set the record straight. The pope is a great man, and the Catholic League is proud to stand by him.

Anonymous said...

Is it possible there are still people in the Church who deserve being called out for their pedophilia? The media does have a responsibility to report such news, but if you are suggesting there is a slant involved perhaps you could cite some examples.

Paul Anthony Melanson said...

Most of the abuse which has taken place within the Church has been homosexual in nature and has not constituted pedophilia.

I'm not suggesting there is a slant in the media coverage. I'm sayng it - outright. And so is George Weigel: "The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument."

Elizabeth said...

Anonymous, read this from a well-respected priest:

http://gkupsidedown.blogspot.com/2010/03/pedophile-priests.html

Please refrain from perpetuating the "pedophile priest" myth. While there have been pedophilia cases in the Church, most abuse cases - as Mr. Melanson has noted - have been homosexual abuse.

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