Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Tom Roberts at the National Catholic Reporter reflects on the failure of the hierarchy:
Danneels was generally seen as one of the last of the Vatican II generation who knew that council intimately and supported its reforms. He would be, for lack of a better term, a liberal by many of today’s ecclesiastical measures. But it [...]

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Although words are not everything, they are a beginning, especially if they reveal the heart. Perhaps we can take some hope from these words of Pope Benedict: 

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the [...]

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Julián Carrón, the president of Communion and Liberation, in a letter to La Republica, has written the most profound reflection on sexual abuse in the Church I have seen so far.

None of us has ever been as dismayed as we are in front of the heart-wrenching story of child abuse. Our dismay arises from [...]

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 We are witnessing a cruel irony of history: Joseph Ratzinger, one of the few ecclesiastics to evidence genuine horror at the sexual abuse of children by priests and the one pope since perhaps Pius V to act against corruption in the Church, is receiving a massive international attack for his failures in handling abuse cases. 
It [...]

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Benedict’s letter on sexual abuse, addressed to the Church in Ireland, has disappointed almost everyone.
Confession that is a requirement of repentance involves confessing the whole truth and a desire to make reparation.
Benedict makes some dubious assertions, half-truths at best. He claims that a misunderstanding of Vatican II led to a neglect of the penal [...]

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Ratzinger’s action or inaction led to a child being molested.
 
Sometimes before 1980 the Rev. Peter Hullermann plied a boy with alcohol and then molested him. The parents went to the diocese, who told them not to go to the police, that the case would be handled inside the Church, and that Hullermann would never work [...]

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As the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger  let a pedophile work in his diocese. The London Times reports 
 

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal for the first time tonight as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The priest went on [...]

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When sinners repent, we are informed by the highest authority, the angels in heaven rejoice.
 
Michael Anthony Rodriguez paid a hit man to kill his wife because he was infatuated with a young woman. He was imprisoned in Texas, and with the Texas Seven escaped on Christmas Eve 2000. They killed a young police officer who [...]

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When I researching the book on clerical murders that I have underway, I noticed that even secular newspapers from 1900 -1920 used the words expiation in regard to punishment, especially capital punishment. Now the word expiation appears only in crossword puzzles.
 
The word and the concept appear to be suffering a similar fate in Catholic theology: 

According [...]

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My discussion of the Schmidt case has obvious relevance to clerical sexual abuse. The abusers may have been, in some sense of the word, “sick”; they certainly had distorted personalities. But whatever the source of their desire to have sex with minors, they were guilty when they acted on that desire. 
As Joe said, a good [...]

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The Naples Daily  News reports

A Brevard County woman claiming to be God’s messenger has been charged with attempted murder after reportedly shooting at a family on their back porch.
The sheriff’s office reports that 47-year-old Kathleen Aceto showed up with a gun and began shooting Friday morning. A man in the house grabbed a gun and [...]

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Nightmares are a hazard of those who investigate child abuse, and one of the most potent sources of the nightmares is the explicit sacrilege that is sometimes, perhaps often, involved in the abuse. Some abusive priests have dressed boys as Jesus and then assaulted them.
 
Bishop Lahey not only had child porn on his computer (bad [...]

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Patrick Welsh, who teaches in the Washington D.C, school system, has diagnosed the problem of poor academic achievement among black students: Making the Grade Isn’t about Race. It’s About Parents.

“Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?”
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class [...]

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Michael Deacon unearthed Polanski comments about the crime he committed: 
Polanski told Martin Amis: 

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

When [...]

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The merde has hit the fan in the Canadian Church: 

An arrest warrant has been issued for a former Roman Catholic bishop from Nova Scotia charged with possession and importation of child pornography. The Chronicle Hearld reports:
The Ottawa Police Service Internet child exploitation unit charged Raymond Lahey, 69, on Sept. 25, 10 days after he was [...]

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