Word: benedict
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...March 24, four days after the Vatican released a papal letter concerning the problem of sexual abuse in the Irish Church, Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee. The 73-year-old clergyman, who became head of the diocese of Cloyne in 1987 and previously served as personal secretary to three Popes in the 1970s and '80s, had been under pressure for some time to step down because of his mishandling of abuse complaints that date back to the 1990s...
Like most Catholics, I appreciate Benedict's efforts to confront the abuse scourge. But Rome's moral fallibility (reminder: it didn't definitively disavow slavery until 1888) is particularly apparent when it tries to downplay the scandal by insisting that clergy in the 1960s and 70s were susceptible to the era's liberal mores, or that the rate of pedophilia among its ranks is no larger than that of society in general. Those arguments - We're no worse than the rest of you! - effectively surrender claims to moral superiority, let alone divine direction. As a Catholic, I believe...
...clerical sex abuse scandal in 2002. A new deluge of priest-pedophile stories, mostly in Europe, has cast another Good Friday pall over the resurrection celebration. This time some of the hierarchical cover-up may have even involved, if only indirectly, the man who would become the current Pope, Benedict XVI. And the Catholic Church's defensive response (as persecuted as the Jews?) has once again made it look like a dark fraternity in a Dan Brown novel instead of a luminous shepherd of souls, a self-interested corporation instead of the selfless ministry that Christ entrusted to St. Peter...
...interest of his Church and his papacy that Benedict take responsibility for what happened under his watch in Munich. One can only imagine the power of the Holy Father asking forgiveness for his own sins, however small compared with those of the main perpetrators, in what has largely been a decades-long failure of leadership. At that point, Benedict might just make his mark on Church history as the eternal guide for personal accountability. And when other cases come up - and they will - we in the media can start to talk about what has improved in combating sex abuse, what...
...will Benedict do it? A few weeks after the white smoke had signaled the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to be Pope Benedict XVI, I got a rather urgent call from my colleague Jordan. He was trying to get a better handle on his new spiritual leader and wanted to know what Benedict's stance had been on John Paul II's pleas back in 2000 for forgiveness of the Church's sins over the past millennia toward women, minorities and heretics. My sources, I told him, always said that Ratzinger had been skeptical about such public declarations, feeling they...