FOLLOW UP ON “VATICAN: Sexual Molestation just as bad as Ordaining Women”.
I was appalled when I read that the Vatican, in releasing a new policy statement on the handling of clergy sex abuse, equated the ordination of women by priests with priestly pedophilia; both being “grave offenses”.
In this Sunday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote “ROME FIDDLES, WE BURN”, a brilliant column taking the Vatican to task for again, avoiding what it needs to do to protect children from abusing priests which is a zero-tolerance policy which the Vatican just cannot seem to get itself to embrace.
Maureen Dowd, educated at Catholic University, grew up Catholic like many of us and like many of us is embarrassed by and mad at, the Vatican for ignoring and mistreating its own Church members. She writes, “The Church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all evidence to the contrary”.
She writes about “tactical contrition” which means that “Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution”.
She also cites a recent investigative study that concludes that the now Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, was also part of the “culture of non-responsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and out right obstruction. He could have stopped these crimes against children and he chose not to and this fact now “threatens to consume his own papacy”.
She talked about Gary Wills of The New Republic and his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church. Jesus said ‘Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me’ which to Wills means that priests were raping Jesus.
To Dowd, the Vatican cares more about the predatory priests than it does about the victims and in so doing, disqualifies itself as a follower of Jesus.
It is here that I think she makes her greatest point because to me, when the holy fathers make decisions based solely on the need to protect their jobs and the institution that gives them those jobs; they are no longer holy or fathers, but greedy, selfish, stupid old men now stripped naked, exposing their diseased bodies for all to see.
I was appalled when I read that the Vatican, in releasing a new policy statement on the handling of clergy sex abuse, equated the ordination of women by priests with priestly pedophilia; both being “grave offenses”.
In this Sunday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote “ROME FIDDLES, WE BURN”, a brilliant column taking the Vatican to task for again, avoiding what it needs to do to protect children from abusing priests which is a zero-tolerance policy which the Vatican just cannot seem to get itself to embrace.
Maureen Dowd, educated at Catholic University, grew up Catholic like many of us and like many of us is embarrassed by and mad at, the Vatican for ignoring and mistreating its own Church members. She writes, “The Church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all evidence to the contrary”.
She writes about “tactical contrition” which means that “Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution”.
She also cites a recent investigative study that concludes that the now Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, was also part of the “culture of non-responsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and out right obstruction. He could have stopped these crimes against children and he chose not to and this fact now “threatens to consume his own papacy”.
She talked about Gary Wills of The New Republic and his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church. Jesus said ‘Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me’ which to Wills means that priests were raping Jesus.
To Dowd, the Vatican cares more about the predatory priests than it does about the victims and in so doing, disqualifies itself as a follower of Jesus.
It is here that I think she makes her greatest point because to me, when the holy fathers make decisions based solely on the need to protect their jobs and the institution that gives them those jobs; they are no longer holy or fathers, but greedy, selfish, stupid old men now stripped naked, exposing their diseased bodies for all to see.
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