“If I were to remain silent,
I’d be guilty of complicity.”
Albert Einstein
(image courtesy the web)
If you haven’t noticed, we have a crisis in our Chruch.
And I’m using the capital C because when one denomination within the
Christian body ails we, the collective body ails.
The Catholic Church has found herself in a near death knell over the heinous revelations of
child predation.
A decades-old crime and yet the cover-ups, lies, the sweeping under of carpets, ad infinitum,
are so deep… it’s a wonder if we will ever uncover the real facts let alone the
actual truth.
A gross sin perpetrated by those whose very vocation has been to teach and preach against
the very sins they were committing.
The scope is inconceivable.
The pain and betrayal are unbearable.
And the sad fact is that we are slowly discovering the same sins within
other denominations…
This growing scandal of sin has only fueled the mistrust and disdain held by many believers
and nonbelievers alike for and of the Catholic Church.
Yet we must remember that before we pick up and prepare to throw our stones that
no denomination, no Christian, no Christian body is without sin and no church body
is exempt from sin, scandal or betrayal.
Being raised in the Episcopal /Anglican church fold, I hold a very close affinity for
the Catholic Church and my love of history draws me to a deep appreciation for our original
Christian roots found in that very Latin West Chruch.
The myriad of Christian denominations has only but one place to look for the original
congregant body—
back to the throne of Peter.
And so I was pleased to see that Pope Emeritus Benedict has broken his silence during his reclusion
in order to address this latest burden of the Chruch.
The breaking of the dam began at the beginning of his election as pope.
There has been a cataclysmic revelation ever since.
The article is linked here:
https://start.att.net/news/read/article/cnn-expope_benedict_xvi_breaks_silence_on_churchs_sex-cnn2/category/news+
So in case your holy indignation for all things Catholic remains at the high end of the Richter scale…
be reminded Catholic, in our religion means globally or the wide body of who we are…
‘Catholic derived via Late Latin Catholics, from the Greek adjective καθολικός (katholikos), meaning “universal’
Our dear friend and ever brave rogue former Anglican bishop addressed this very issue
with a post back in August of 2018—
in which I wrote a post based on the good Bishops teachings…
both links are found below.
Gay predators, telling the truth and spring-cleaning the Church.
https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/sin-and-confession/
My post began with the very notion of sin and our Church’s response:
Sin.
It’s a word that we take for granted yet it is a word whose actions are destroying us.
For we are its actions and we seem not to even care.
Our culture has opted to expunge the word from our vocabulary while blindly
embracing its very nuances.
And what of the Chruch?
She is either impotently silent or either she busies herself by embracing those
very nuances in order to appear more viable, more likable, more cultural.
Benedict who, as a cardinal, served as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
the powerful Vatican department responsible for enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy,
and the successor to the Inquisition…was known as God’s rottweiler.
“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes,
“was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”
Benedict says that this mentality also affected bishops and Catholic seminaries and caused,
“the extensive collapse of the next generation of priests.”
“There were — not only in the United States of America —
individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to
bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicity,” he writes.
“In various seminaries, homosexual cliques were established,”
he writes, “which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the
climate in the seminaries.”
Benedict cites one bishop who showed seminarians pornographic films,
“allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior
contrary to the faith.”
Benedict also reveals that the Vatican’s two investigations into US seminaries,
called Apostolic Visitations, were thwarted by cover-up.
Benedict also reveals a tug-of-war between the Vatican and
US bishops over zero-tolerance.
The Pope Emeritus says that Church lawyers in Rome
“had difficulty” with the US proposal for zero-tolerance and preferred that priests guilty
of sexual abuse of minors receive only a temporary suspension.
“This could not be accepted by the American bishops,” he writes,
“because the priests thus remained in the service of the bishop and thereby
could be taken to be still directly associated with him.”
As a result, the former Pope writes, a new code of Church criminal law was created
and cases of child sexual abuse were judged by the Vatican office of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which then-
Cardinal Ratzinger was the head.
But Benedict admits that the prospect of full criminal trials for sex abuse
was “overwhelming” for the Vatican.
“Because all of this actually went beyond the capacities of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith and because delays arose which had to be prevented
owing to the nature of the matter,
Pope Francis has undertaken further reforms,” he writes.
And yet in the end…the bottom line, in a nutshell…
“Why did pedophilia reach such proportions?” he asks.
“Ultimately the reason is the absence of God.”
“God is dead” so proclaimed Nietzsche—and according to an article in the Big Think,
by Scotty Hendricks God is dead’: What Nietzsche really meant’—
Nietzche was an atheist for his adult life and didn’t mean that there was a God who had
actually died, rather that our idea of one had.”
So perhaps it would behoove those of us who continue to cling to the faith that
Satan delights in the sin of man as we do his dirty work free of charge…
May we remain silent no more!
Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.
Ecclesiastes 7:20
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