Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

John Paul Receiving Members of the Community of the Beatitudes
Jesus said, “By your fruits you shall know them,” but sometimes very bad men can bear seemingly good fruit.
Many Catholics dislike the Legion of Christ, and do not see it as a good fruit of the psychopathic con artist incestuous abuser Maciel. But I have always wondered how such a [...]

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As I mentioned in a previous post, the historian Derek Hastings has investigated the religious roots of Nazism, not in a broad civilizational sense, but specifically the Catholic groups in Munich from which the early Nazis came. Hastings is the only historian to have done this. I have just read his Catholicism and the Roots [...]

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 Supi, celibacy is going to disappear,and you can marry me - or?
 
German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.
 
Now [...]

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Apparently someone in trying to block access to this letter which El Milenio posted on the internet. I copy it here for the record. It should certainly be taken into account in the process of Pope John Paul II.
 
Soy el sacerdote defensor de los ex miembros de la institución llamada “Legión de Cristo”, que en [...]

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Pope John Paul failed to investigate the charges against Maciel. He let Cardinal Sodano block Cardinal Ratzimger’s attempt to investigate.
 
In November 2002 a letter was sent to John Paul by the Rev. Antonio Roqueñí, the lawyer of Maciel’s victims, via (now  Cardinal ) Stanislaw Dziwisz.
 
El Milenio reports.
 
In the letter the victims state that they know [...]

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In my book Sacrilege, I said that they way tl abusehat American bishops mishandled allegations of abuse was so uniform that it looked like it was the result of a more or less explicit policy set by the Vatican. 
Here is what an Irish documentary is reporting:
In a January 1997 letter to each Irish bishop, marked [...]

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 Pope John Paul and Maciel

Pope Benedict has waived the 5 year period that is normally required for beatification so that John Paul II can be beatified in May.
 
But John Paul’s role on enabling sexual abuse has not been fully explored.
 
Bishop Edward Burns of Juneau has said some very good and very true things:

It has hurt [...]

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In all the talk about Benedict’s comments on the use of condoms to avoid transmitting AIDS, the words use have been “ban.” “allow,” “permit,” etc, all referring to acts of the will. 
But the Pope was not making an act of the will, he is not making a law, but expressing a judgment. Moral discourse is [...]

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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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 On Saturday, April 24 at 1:00 PM, Dario Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, the former President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclésia Dei, will celebrate Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the High Altar of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. The stated occasion is the fifth anniversary of the election [...]

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The current contretemps over Benedict is a symptom that the role of the pope has grown too large. 
One can accept all the dogmatic formulations about the papacy and still think that its role has become hypertrophied in the modern church. 
The popes sought protections from their real enemies (Freemasonic, Nazi, Communist) by making the pope a [...]

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Now that he has made a public statement, I feel I can now reveal what Cardinal Schönborn told me two years ago.
 I know him a little, and I sent him my book Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. We met in San Diego, and I asked him what he thought of the book, especially [...]

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The NYT has the story of how everyone: bishops, priests, Pope, police, failed the deaf children who were molested by Father Murphy. Some critics have asked why victims sometimes take so long to come forward. As the experience of the deaf children showed, even going directly to the police, even leafleting in front of the [...]

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John Paul II and Paul VI did not listen to the cries of violated children. Why?

I have a few sources with Vatican connections and have received fairly reliable second-hand information, and my guess at the scenario is this. 
John Paul, for reasons he refused to explain even to a cardinal who questioned him, would not act against [...]

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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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