Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Vatican blasts anti-Catholic 'hate'


Pope Benedict XVI addresses the faithful on Easter Sunday.



THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published Wednesday April 7, 2010

Vatican blasts anti-Catholic 'hate'
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VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, saying accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic “hate” campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining “the motive for these attacks” on the pope. The Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.

“The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different” agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.

Herranz didn't identify the lobbies but “defense of life” is Vatican shorthand for anti-abortion efforts.

Also arguing that Benedict's promotion of conservative family models had provoked the so-called attacks was the Vatican's dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano.

“By now, it's a cultural contrast,” Sodano told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. “The pope embodies moral truths that aren't accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church.”

Also rallying to Benedict's side was Italian Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, who heads Vatican City's governing apparatus.

The pope “has done all that he could have” against sex abuse by clergy of minors, Lajolo said on Vatican radio, decrying what he described as a campaign of “hatred against the Catholic church.”

Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based minister in the United Church of Christ who is faith work director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, described the cardinals' comments as “diversionary counterattacks” that are an affront both to the victims of clergy abuse and to gays and lesbians.

“It makes me heartsick,” she said.

Sex abuse allegations, as well as accusations of cover-ups by diocesan bishops and Vatican officials, have swept across Europe in recent weeks. Benedict has been criticized for not halting the actions of abusive priests when he was a Vatican cardinal and earlier while he was the archbishop of Munich in his native Germany.

The European scandals in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland are erupting after decades of abuse cases in the United States, Canada, Australia and other areas.

Benedict has ignored victims' demands that he accept responsibility for what they say is his own personal and institutional responsibility for failing to swiftly kick abusive priests out of the priesthood, or at least keep them away from children.

But he has been protected by a vanguard of senior Vatican prelates who are fending off what they contend is an orchestrated attempt to attack the leader of the world's more than 1 billion Catholics.

The Vatican No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, rebuffed questions about the pontiff's silence on the topic, indicating that Benedict was standing firm.

“He's a strong pope,” he told reporters after arriving Tuesday in Chile. The Italian news agency ANSA quoted him as calling Benedict a “great prophet of the Third Millennium.”

Bertone, now the Holy See's secretary of state but formerly Benedict's deputy when the future pope headed the Vatican's morals office, has himself been swept up in the scandals.

During a May 1998 meeting at the Vatican, Bertone told Wisconsin bishops to halt a church trial against an ailing priest who was accused of sexually abusing 200 deaf children, according to a Vatican transcript. The priest died soon afterward.

“It's not true, it's not true! We have documented the opposite,” ANSA quoted Bertone as saying in Chile. “Let's not talk about this topic now, because otherwise we'll be here all day verifying precisely the action taken by me and by his eminence.”

Vatican Radio depicted the church as a victim.

“There are those who fear the media campaign of anti-Catholic hatred can degenerate,” it said.

The radio noted anti-Catholic graffiti on walls of a church outside Viterbo, a town near Rome, and reminded listeners that a bishop was attacked by a man during Easter Mass in Muenster, Germany. The bishop fought back with an incense bowl.

The radio likened the recent campaign to the persecution suffered by early Christian martyrs.

“The crowds, incited by the slanders of the powerful, would lynch the Christians,” the radio said.

In Munich, meanwhile, an independent lawyer hired by the Catholic Church wrapped up his investigation of abuse allegations at the southern Ettal monastery.

“The investigation clearly shows a system of abuse that lasted for decades,” Thomas Pfister said.

There were some cases of sexual abuse at Ettal, but most victims who came forward were physically abused and most cases took place before 1990, Pfister said in a telephone interview.


Source: http://www.omaha.com/article/20100407/NEWS/704079899

P.S. Two words: Plausible Deniability!
Booh Hooh, poor holy see priests and dignataries. 'Got their sensitivities hurt.
.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The radio likened the recent campaign to the persecution suffered by early Christian martyrs."


OH PLEASE. the Christians killed in the inquisitions and the martyrs died for Truth,They died for Accepting Christ rather than pagan traditions.

Arsenio A. Lembert Jr. said...

Anonynous:

You are positively right!

How can you compare an emperor living in the lap of luxury who should have know of all the child abusers in his ranks; With poor lhelpless martyrs who were kept in midevial dungeons, starved, tortured, then brutally burned at the stake or beheaded, with a man that has probably never seen a day of hard work in his life? Anyway the focus is on him, he can't change the game around on someone else. Ratzinger you're on the hot seat. Talk about your guilt....No one wants to hear that jive about "I'm not the bad guy".

Ratzinger headed the congregation for the doctrine (alias The Inquisition since 1981) when quite a few of the molestations took place; Didn't he know what was happening? He was trying to promote his religion(the latest catechism and Dies Domini both have his imprimatur)by imposing many edits, bulls, and decrees such as "Caritas in Veritate"? And he can claim he didn't know? While he's calling for a New World Order with teeth? While he's calling for a new reserve currency? This same bully in a robe is now calling foul? He doesn't even believe his own lies. How can anyone at the top of a corporation not know what's happening in the rest of the company? Lame excuses coming from a man who is ruthless?

Denial is not a river in Rome? I believe that's the Tiber!

Arsenio A. Lembert Jr. said...

(Continued)

The River Tiber; Or, is that the Timber?

Timber.........!