The Catholic Church’s Martyrdom Problem
Pity the cardinals of the Catholic Church in America. They are being whipped from pillar to post by the media for looking like imperious, obfuscating enablers in the pedophilia crisis. Poor Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York is decrying the New York Times for refusing to publish his exegesis on pedophilia. See http://blog.archny.org/?p=42.
If the archbishop’s only response to the pedophilia scandal is to say ‘Well, others do it, too,’ he should thank the New York Times for saving him from making a fool of himself.
I don’t enjoy reading this repulsive stories, but I need to read them and the church needs to listen to them to regain any hope of credibility with the flock. It is repentance that is needed, not finger pointing, and hauling out the Statistical Abstract to demonstrate how vile other professions are puts Catholic priests on the same moral altar as bus drivers. They are not. They are not supposed to have any sexual contact, at all, let alone with little boys. The latest in this charade is a comment made by a letter-writer in today’s Republican-American (http://www.rep-am.com/letters/) that “The Catholic Church… has a homosexual problem,” although whether this is better, or worse is unclear. Evidently, there is a school of thought that believes that the errant priests were merely sex-deprived gays, deserving of our pity rather than our contempt.
When that kind of addle-brained bigotry is used as a defense, all hope for understanding is lost.
Whether there was one predatory priest or 2,000 or is immaterial. Priests are supposed to be models of virtue for us not models of villainy.