Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Some Americans praise the more sophisticated European attitude to sexuality. The fuss about the Palin pregnancy, or about Clinton’s affairs, would be unimaginable in Europe.

The Catholic Church hierarchy in the United States is heavily influenced by Europe: rising stars among the priesthood were educated at the North American College or at other European seminaries to pick up the attitudes of Romanita. They may also have picked up other European attitudes, which may explain why they let sexually abusive priests continue to abuse children for decades.

The Spanish newspaper ABC has a story about Marcelino Fernández Arnaiz. Three days after getting out of prison, he was suspected of immediately abusing a six year old girl. It was not his first time in prison: he had previoudly been jailed for sexual abuse in 1980, 1983, 1986, 1990, 1999, 2000, 2002  and 2003. Every time he got out, he reoffended. Spain has become, like the Catholic Church, a forgiving community for pederasts where everyone gets a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth…chance.

The Pope said the right words in Australia: 

“Dear friends, may this celebration, in the presence of the Successor of Peter, be a moment of rededication and renewal for the whole Church in Australia!

“Here I would like to pause to acknowledge the shame which we have all felt as a result of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy and religious in this country. Indeed, I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that as their pastor I too share in their suffering.

“These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation. They have caused great pain and have damaged the Church’s witness. I ask all of you to support and assist your bishops, and to work together with them in combating this evil. Victims should receive compassion and care, and those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice. It is an urgent priority to promote a safer and more wholesome environment, especially for young people.

“In these days marked by the celebration of World Youth Day, we are reminded of how precious a treasure has been entrusted to us in our young people, and how great a part of the Church’s mission in this country has been dedicated to their education and care.

“As the Church in Australia continues, in the spirit of the Gospel, to address effectively this serious pastoral challenge, I join you in praying that this time of purification will bring about healing, reconciliation and ever greater fidelity to the moral demands of the Gospel.”

I would feel better about this is these words had not been added at the last minute. According to John Allen, “The pope’s direct apology was a last-minute addition to his prepared text.”

There is still no indication that bishops will suffer any consequences if they choose to tolerate abuse and to make hard-hearted remarks about victims (see below).

Bishop Fisher, the youthful bishop who is the organizer of World Youth Day, has demonstrated by his remarks what bishops really think. We learn from this article and this article  in The Age:

The bishop organising World Youth Day, Anthony Fisher, made the remarks in response to questions about two Melbourne women who were repeatedly raped by priest Kevin O’Donnell when they were pupils at Sacred Heart Primary School in Oakleigh from 1988 to 1993.

Abuse by priests has traumatic and sometimes fatal consequences:

Emma Foster committed suicide this year, aged 26, after a long battle with drug addiction, while Katherine drank heavily before being left disabled when hit by a drunk driver in 1999.

But such trivialities do not deter the relentlessly upbeat Bishop Fisher:

The case was detailed on ABC’s Lateline on Tuesday, but Bishop Fisher told the World Youth Day daily media briefing that he had not seen the program. “Happily, I think most of Australia was enjoying, delighting in, the beauty and goodness of these young people … rather than dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, on old wounds,” he said.

I had hoped that perhaps that Pope Benedict has a human heart. But perhaps not:

The head of the Vatican’s press office has moved to pour cold water on expectations the Pope will offer an apology for clergy sex abuse while in Australia.

Reverend Federico Lombardi said he believed Pope Benedict XVI had not given a commitment to apologise to victims of abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, or to their families.

Any reference to the abuse issue by the Pope may also come in the form of a “statement” only, Rev Lombardi said.

“There is a problem understanding the meaning of apology,” he told reporters, through an interpreter, in Sydney.

“I do not recall that he (the pontiff) declared that he would make an apology, but I do not know, perhaps I did not understand properly.

“So, I would suggest that you keep following what the Holy Father says. If the apology happens, all the better. But I would not anticipate that the Holy Father would give an apology.”

Such are our shepherds.

As a young man in Australia Anthony Jones was forcibly molested by the Rev Terence Goodall. Jones made a formal complaint to the church, which ordered an investigation. Australian Lateline reports

Rod Dreher has a post apologizing for his delight in the prompt death of the wicked.

I have been watching a DVD of the interrogation of Rev. Ryan Erickson, who murdered two men in cold blood to cover up his sexual abuse. The detectives cornered him in lies, and he knew the game was up. Shortly after that, at the end of 2004 he committed suicide rather than face humiliation, jail, and what happens to young homosexuals in jail.

I felt some pity for the SOB. Our response when we see a person or even an animal cornered and about to be killed is often pity, even if we know the death is necessary.

This basically good human response creates problems at murder trials. The jury and the public see the accused badgered and hunted; they tend to forget the absent murder victim.

Earthly justice is necessary and even desired by God – who has given the civil power the sword for a reason. But somehow we hope, after all the demands of justice are satisfied, that the last word will be spoken by mercy.

Kreuz.net reports that the Jesuits (who else) want to host a homosexual group at the World Youth Day in Australia; the organizers of WYD are not enthusiastic.

I doubt that this will go anywhere, but it should provide some entertainment for a while.

The Miami Herald reports:

A church modeled in part after one in Miami but with a ”revolutionary” spirit that praises Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is now at the center of a religious and social controversy in Venezuela.

Although it has adopted many of the symbols and rites of Roman Catholicism, the new Reform Catholic Venezuelan Church departs from traditional belief in some key ways.

For example, reformists consider that ”homosexuality and bisexuality are not sins in and of themselves.” Divorce is allowed and priests do not take vows of chastity. 

The new church uses the language of liberation theology: 

According to its leaders, the reformist church seeks to establish an institution that is “inclusive, participatory and with a strong Bolivarian spirit that recognizes Jesus Christ as the Lord of History. He is present in the revolutionary process that is occurring in Venezuela.” 

This is not the first time politicians in Venezuela have tried this trick: 

Attempts to establish churches with political motivations are nothing new to Venezuela. In the mid 1940s several government leaders who had declared themselves anti-clerical decided to establish a Catholic Apostolic Church of Venezuela, by forging the ordainment of a bishop. 

I wonder how Catholics who agree with the new Church’s agenda will react?

 The new book by Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk that claims Walesa worked for the Communist secret police until 1976.

Der Spiegel interviewed Cenckiewicz: 

 

SPIEGEL: This Monday your book “The Security Service and Lech Walesa” comes out. It has already sparked an intense debate. In it, you and your co-author Piotr Gontarczyk claim that the hero of the Polish reform movement collaborated with the secret police in the 1970s. Do you have proof?

Cenckiewicz: We provide clear evidence in our book including registration cards, notations, notes from the secret police and reports from the so-called informant “Bolek.” There’s positive proof that Lech Walesa was registered with the secret police under that code name between 1970 and 1976.

SPIEGEL: Walesa has emphatically denied that, and says the Bolek file is a forgery. How can you be sure the secret police didn’t fabricate the documents to paint the union leader in a bad light?

Cenckiewicz: We know the secret police’s methods, and the way the archive and registry were run — that’s how we know. We’ve also found evidence from the Bolek file cited in other files.

SPIEGEL: Those could also have been forged.

Cenckiewicz: These files still had their original seals and it could be proven that they hadn’t been opened since the 1970s. Manipulation is out of the question.

SPIEGEL: Assuming for a moment that Walesa was in fact Bolek as you allege, how much damage did he do?

Cenckiewicz: We describe the fate of people who Bolek informed on. We’ve come across seven such stories. The rest were destroyed or stolen from the files. But it’s clear that Bolek informed on more than 20 people who were later harrassed or oppressed.

 

 

As president Walesa sought to sanitize his file:

SPIEGEL: The other major claim in your book is that Walesa tried to clean out his file when he was president of Poland in the early 1990s.

Cenckiewicz: For me that’s the saddest chapter. He was the first freely elected head of state since World War II, but he used his office to remove incriminating secret police files.

SPIEGEL: Walesa has also strongly denied this accusation. What proof do you have that he did this, or at least ordered it done?

Cenckiewicz: Some of the documents have his signature, a date and the note “I have borrowed this file.” Others have the signature of some of his closest co-workers, for example former Interior Minister Andrzej Milczanowski, requesting the documents on his behalf. Walesa endorsed the request. Later it turned out some of the files were returned incomplete. The new, post-Communist secret service took note of that.

According to Der Spiegel’s “In the Hell of the Files,” a book in Poland, The Secret Police and Lech Walesa, claims that Walesa, after his first arrest in 1970, agreed, under the code name of Bolek, to inform on his follow workers in Gdansk, and received 13,000 zlotys, about two months pay, for his work.

Walesa, founder of Solidarity and Nobel Prize winner, denies it and says the secret police files are false.

The national conservative paper Rzeczpospolita, which has also reported on the sexual misconduct of Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, has printed a preview of the book by Slawomir Cenckiewicz und Piotr Gontarczyk of the Institute of National Memeory (IPN).

In 1992 the conservative government presented a list of 66 prominent Poles who had cooperated with the Communists, and Walesa was on that list.

But the Polish secret police had destroyed many of their files as Communism was falling, and it was impossible to determine what these men had done. Such accusations were used as a weapon to destroy political foes. The lustration or cleansing of Polish society from Communism became a farce.

The files were sealed, and liberals such as Adam Michnik want them to be sealed forever.

The Institute of National Memory has custody of the remaining files of the secret police, and the new book is based on those files.

Cardinal Paskai of Hungary betrayed his priests to the Communists; and Paetz is suspected of being a Communist informer in the Vatican.

Until the generation of Europeans who might have collaborated with the Communists dies off, the suspicions and accusations will be an open wound on the new democratic societies.

The National Post reports on this exhibition on eugenics at the Canadian War Museum. The exhibition “reveals how it was not thoughtless right-wing thugs as much as writers and scientists, the intellectual elite, who led the movement.”

But

It also fails to stress just how much the socialist left initiated and supported the eugenics campaign, not only in Germany but in Britain, the U. S. and the rest of Europe. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, English social democrat leader Sydney Webb and, in Canada, Tommy Douglas were just three influential socialists who called, for example, for the mass sterilization of the handicapped. In his Master’s thesis The Problems of the Subnormal Family, the now revered Douglas argued that the mentally and even physically disabled should be sterilized and sent to camps so as not to “infect” the rest of the population.

It is deeply significant that few if any of Douglas’s left-wing comrades in this country or internationally were surprised or offended by his proposals. Indeed the early fascism of 1920s Italy, while unsavoury and dictatorial, had little connection with social engineering and eugenics. The latter German version of fascism was influenced not by ultra conservatism in southern Europe but, as is made clear in the writings of the Nazi ideologues, by the Marxist left.

In England H. G. Wells proposed forced abortion and the elimination of inferior races.

South of the Canadian border the left also led the eugenics movement:

In the United States socialist writer Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the mother of the abortion movement, called for a radical eugenics approach as early as the first years of the 20th century. She wrote of the need for “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization.”

The Globe and Mail reports

As Canada’s population ages, more and more patients are suffering from a host of chronic diseases, but there are too few general practitioners and specialists across the country to provide timely and quality care, a survey of doctors concludes.

When our son John, who has juvenile diabetes, was in Montreal, he had a bad experience with the endocrinologist who was supposedly monitoring him. She failed to call in his insulin prescription, and eventually in a three way telephone conversation in French among my wife, the pharmaciost, and the doctor’s secretary, the secertary told the pharmacist to give my son whatever he asked for.

Not exactly the higehst standards of health care - but it appears the doctors are overwhelmed.

Not only developed countries like Germany are facing depopulation. Cuba’s demographic decline has already begin according to El Pais’s article “La población Cubana decrece por tercer año consecutive” (”The Cuban Population Decreases for the Third Year in a Row”). The decline is accelerating (un ritmo acelerado). In 2025 there will be 74,000 Cubans fewer than in 2024.    

Cuba has good public health statistics – an average life span of 77 (as opposed to 71 in Latin America) and a low infant death rate 5 per thousand live births (as opposed to 23 per 1000 in Latin America) but it also has a low birth rate,  1.43 (as opposed to 2.4 for the region). The replacement rate is 2.1.

Even more seriously, the population is aging. At present 16.6 % of the population is over 60 years old; by 2025 the percentage of the population over 60 will be 26%. By 2025 Cuba will have 772,000 fewer citizens of school age than it has now.

In other words,  “el país estará pronto entre los más ‘viejos’ del planeta ,” the country will soon be among the oldest on the planet, with all that means for care of the elderly.

The government has promised to take unspecified steps to stop the population decline.

No new churches are being built in Europe, and many are being secularized, as Deutsche Welle points out. The Elias Church, in Berlin

is now a children’s museum.

But Moslems go to mosque, and they are claiming their place in the cityscape. Here is the new mosque for Cologne: The exterior is by a German architect and will be modern

but the interior, the clients insist, will be by a Turkish firm that specializes in Islamic kitsch.

The Germans are not happy about it, but they are neither having children nor going to church, so all they can do is complain.

Le Figaro reports: 

La France est un pays qui vieillit. Près d’un habitant sur trois devrait avoir plus de 60 ans en 2050, contre un sur cinq en 2005. Soit 22,3 millions de personnes séxagénaires et plus, contre 12,6 millions. A cette date, l’âge moyen des Français sera de 42,6 ans, contre 39 ans en 2006.

 

France is an ageing country. Almost one of of three inhabitants will be more than 60 years old in 2050, as opposed to one in five in 2005. There will be 22.3 million sexagenarians and older, as opposed to 12.6 million. At that date, the average age in France will be 42.6 years, as opposed to 39 years in 2006. 

The only comfort is that Italy and Spain, with lower birth rates, are ageing faste and will face the retirement financing problem sooner.

The movie Prince Caspian has some major differences from the book, and I think the movie is better for it.

As most reviewers have noted, the movie is darker than the book, and darker than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie.

The movie is about growing up, especially about male growing up, and the violence and aggressiveness of the male adolescent. It is a war movie, because violence and aggressiveness have their necessary role in a world in which evil must be fought, as Lewis well knew. The book and the movie are set in the Blitz of London.

But anger and aggressiveness must be moderated and not develop into mindless hate and revenge. There are virtues beyond fortitude: prudence, justice, and beyond those, faith and charity.

The move is also about the losses that growing up brings. As in the book, Peter and Susan will never again return to Narnia.

The imagination of the twenty-first century has taken on a dark tone. Although the twentieth century was filled with wars and the threat of nuclear destruction, but Lewis’s and Tolkien’s books are lighter in tone than their film incarnations, even though both authors saw the trenches and mass slaughter of World War I.

I noticed this in Battlestar Galactica, which was far more serious and far darker than the original series.

If the filmmakers get to The Last Battle, the tone may be unendurable.