Drudge also linked to an ABCNews piece citing Christopher Hitchens's call to arrest the pope.
Sigh. It's hard to Hitchens seriously any more. Especially when mentioned in the same sentence as Sinead O'Connor (puke!).
Anyway, the piece (by Susan Donaldson James) was a painfully irresponsible piece of journalism. Poke me in the eye kind of stuff. Perhaps, the most offending example is in the following two paragraphs:
Protesters rallied outside the Vatican, angry that an office under his command had stopped the prosecution in 1996 of Wisconsin priest Lawrence Murphy, who admitted molesting 200 boys at a school for the deaf where he worked for 20 years.
The secret church trial was halted after Murphy made a personal appeal to the future pope asking for mercy.
Let's pause for a second, shall we? The first paragraph says that the Vatican "stopped the prosecution." This is quite vague. It doesn't say what prosecution was stopped. Indeed, the phrase comes just after indicated that the aforementioned silly people "said the pope should face a criminal investigation." Now, maybe I'm stretching things a bit, but if the last thing you write before "prosecution" is "criminal investigation" your reader might assume you are talking about a criminal prosecution. What other kinds of prosecutions are there?
Oh, that's right, there are prosecutions with Church courts...outside of civil authority. Ms James gets to this point in subsequent paragraph when she mentions "secret church trial."
Let's consider, then, what's a stake.
The Vatican did not stop the criminal prosecution of the child molester (and accounts are indicating that civil charges were in fact dropped by authorities before the Vatican got wind of the case):
In the early 1970s, multiple allegations of sexual abuse against the priest were made to civil authorities, who investigated but never brought charges. (Catholic News Service)
Thus, the Church stopped its internal prosecution...of, as ABC indicates, a secret trial.
Even if the Church had pursued the secret trial, how would anyone have ever known about it? This, I think, is the most confusing bit of logic being advanced. There seems to be an insinuation that the Church was engaged in some kind of cover-up...but why would the Church bother to cover up the crime if it was already brought to civil authorities and if the trial was going to be in secret?
If anything, it would seem the Church dropped the trial because it would have been a waste of time. The victims would most likely never get the satisfaction of knowing the results of a secret trial. The Church would have had no authority to punish the priest in a secular legal sense. And the guy could well have died before the secret trial was finished. The only reason to have committed resources towards such a trial would be to avoid the media completing misunderstanding the situation fourteen years in the future.
The article then makes a spectacular leap in logic.
And the conservative group Legionaries of Christ issued a statement today apologizing for the behavior of the group's founder, Marcial Maciel, who was determined by a church investigation to have molested seminarians and fathered a child by a woman with whom he had a long affair.
Those would be devastating scenarios for most world leaders, but not for the pope.
Experts in canon law say only a heavenly bolt of lightning can take the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from power as the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
Not only does the Ms James use an utterly flippant (if not blatantly biased tone in the article), she's pretty much engaging in non sequitur.
Why would the treachery and deceit of a vile founder of a religious group translate into a "devastating scenario" for the pope? For that matter, how would it translate into a "devastating scenario" for most world leaders? For starters, there are plenty of tyrants out there who are actually putting rapists and murderers in positions of power without losing any power. For that matter, do we impeach presidents every time we find out that someone in Congress secretly and deceptively engaged in a criminal act? It just doesn't make sense. Then the story (predictably) dwells on the resignation issue for a bit.
Oh, and someone remind me to look up Richard Sipe's claim in the article that: "There have been a pope or two who have resigned, several hundred have been murdered, but it's a very stable organization from the top down."
First of all, I really need to check the numbers there. Several hundred have been murdered? There have only been 266 popes according to New Advent. Were four-fifths of the popes really bumped off (Wikipedia lists 8 definite murders, and 11 alleged murders...oddly enough, they don't include Peter's execution)? And murdered by whom (see, this is why you should never use passive voice)?
Comments