Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

On July, 8, 1988, Archbishop Levada of Portland , Oregon, wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about the case of the Rev. Thomas Laughlin.
 
Laughlin, Levada explains, was ordained in 1948 at the age of 23. Levada continues, “he began homosexual contacts with boys shortly after his [...]

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The Irish Times examined the failure of the Vatican to handle the news about the meeting with the Irish bishops. 
It also gives an explanation, all too probable, for the failure of the Vatican to cooperate with the Irish government or to admit any responsibility for clerical abuse: 
Which brings us to one of the bottom lines [...]

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What could the Pope do, as one person asked? 
Many, many things: 
He should immediately remove from the clergy all bishops who are known to be corrupt and abusers. There are about twenty, starting with Mr. Sanchez of Santa Fe (he of girlfriends A, B, C, D, E…). 
He should immediately remove from the cardinalate, and probably from [...]

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Pope Benedict will write a letter to the faithful of Ireland.

Ecclesiastical bureaucrats and professors (and Pope Benedict was both) live in a world of words, and think that saying the correct thing is equivalent to, even better than, doing the correct thing. Having said the correct words, they cannot understand why people want them to [...]

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Pope Benedict and the Irish bishops have issued a communiqué. 

For his part, the Holy Father observed that the sexual abuse of children and young people is not only a heinous crime, but also a grave sin which offends God and wounds the dignity of the human person created in his image. 
 The Holy Father also pointed [...]

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Commonweal has a discussion of the Vatican’s decision to place Pius XII and John Paul II on the path to canonization.
 
I share the concerns. Canonization is supposed to provide a role model for Catholics to follow, but how can you imitate even a good pope? For centuries almost all saints have been priests and religious, [...]

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Archbishop and Mrs. Milingo
Archbishop Milingo, after years of increasingly outrageous conduct, has been defrocked, according to Catholic Word News. 
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo—the renegade African prelate who has launched a worldwide crusade for married priests, under the influence of the Korean sect figure Sun Myung Moon—has been defrocked, the Vatican announced on December 17.
Because of Milingo’s [...]

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The question of lying is a vexed one in moral theology. 
Lying is wrong. But in every situation? 
The classic modern example: the Nazis come to you and ask if you know where the hidden Jews are. You do, but you lie and save a life. 
But it is never right to do evil that good may come [...]

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The Pope’s decision to allow the setting up of an ordinariate for Anglicans who wish to become Catholic is a generous experiment. It would not be a separate “church” like the Eastern Churches, which are self-governing churches of apostolic origin in communion with Rome. As far as I kow, no pope has ever claimed the [...]

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Bishop R. Nickless of Sioux City has written a letter to his diocese: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda.
 
In it he denounces the false method of interpreting the Second Vatican Council: 

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the [...]

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I have a section in my book (Sacrilege, pp. 71-80) on the abuse of boys at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland. The boys had complained to the police for years, but the police and the newspapers covered up for the Church. Shane Earle finally was able to go public and there was a public [...]

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Statement by the President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop V. James Weisgerber

01 October 2009

“I have learned from media reports of the charges brought against Most Reverend Raymond Lahey, former Bishop of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  While shocked and saddened by the accusations, as President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, [...]

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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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If I may quote from my 1998 book Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church:

Both literary critics for whom transgressive is a word of praise and whose hero is the Marquis de Sade, and psychologists who desire an ever-expanding field of sexual; liberation put forward the idea that sex with boys is the next area [...]

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The future Dr. Svensson of Sweden

One possible source of the Vatican’s lax attitude to sexual abusers in the clergy is that the Vatican is staffed by Europeans who consider America’s harsh punishments of crime barbaric.

Sweden, the New York Times reports, has a convicted neo-Nazi murderer in medical school.

Mr. Svensson…was convicted in the 1999 hate [...]

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