Word: scandale
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Benedict XVI got 9/11, a worldwide issue, and the priest sex abuse scandal, an in-house problem that captured the horrified imagination even of Americans outside the Catholic house. And Benedict's reaction this past week to the abuse issue would have to be scored a public-approval knockout, from his unexpected broaching of the topic on the plane over, to his moving expression of "deep shame" at his Wednesday prayer service with his bishops, to his private meeting with the victims of abuse and his acceptance from Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley of a book containing the names...
...note for subsequent action. At a TIME magazine luncheon for Cardinal William Levada, Benedict's successor as head of the Vatican doctrinal office (the one in charge of the most egregious sex abuse cases), we asked whether the Vatican intended to deal with the one part of the sex scandal that seems outstanding: beyond attending to victims and taking abusers out of commission, would the Vatican sanction any supervisors and bishops who "aided and abetted" the priest-predators...
...that they had acted on bad psychiatric diagnoses at a time when the high recidivism rate of sexual predators was little known. At the same lunch, he hinted to reporters that the Vatican was engaged in possible changes in church law that would enable it to deal with the scandal more nimbly. In fact, his response was not clear enough to project a significant policy initiative, and we'll have to wait and see if the Pope feels the need to fit new actions to brave words. Noted Janice McKay, a parishioner with a 21-year-old son, after Sunday...
Benedict pointedly called it a "scandal" that a majority of us favor even limited legalized abortion. Yet we're not the Da Vinci Code heretics the Vatican suspects. We look instead to the Boccaccio Code, especially in the wake of the abuse crisis. We've learned to conform to the Catholic faith instead of the Catholic hierarchy. And if the Pope's visit and its aftermath indicate anything, it's that we aren't likely to change that stance until the church, with deeper structural and doctrinal reform, changes its own. As the Pope returns to Rome, a common question...
...gratified as any Catholic that Pope Benedict XVI confronted the issue as strongly as he did during his U.S. visit. And yet, as the celestial glow and the cable news giddiness wear off, most U.S. Catholics will still be angry at the church over the scandal; most still won't adhere to church teaching on issues like birth control, homosexuality, divorce, female ordination and the death penalty; and most still won't believe you have to obey those church teachings to be a good Catholic...