Word: pope
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...weeks prior to Easter Sunday—the holiest day in the Catholic liturgical calendar—Pope Benedict XVI was preparing for an apology instead of a celebration. On Sunday, March 21, congregations throughout Ireland were read a letter authored by the Pope, which expressed his “shame and remorse” for the acts of child sexual abuse committed by priests in the nation. The Pope was responding to two reports released by Irish officials last year, which discovered frequent abuses in parochial schools and widespread efforts by ecclesiastical authorities to cover up these crimes. Ultimately...
...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...
...alone divine direction. As a Catholic, I believe in the workings of divine grace, that in the end light defeats darkness; but as a reasoning human being, I know that no mortal institution has direct access to it. If the Holy Spirit guides cardinals when they choose a Pope, where is it when bishops are moving ordained rapists from parish to parish...
...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...
...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...