I would really like to see what “experts” are saying the Catholic Church is in turmoil. It is not for nothing that the story has a big correction at its head.
I submit that cafeteria Catholics and the media are seeing and trying to make turmoil where it doesn’t exist. As Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio… said
called upon the priests and people of the Diocese of Brooklyn to stand up with him and “besiege The New York Times. Send a message loud and clear that the Pope, our Church, and bishops and our priests will no longer be the personal punching bag of The New York Times.”
Bishop DiMarzio’s spirited defense of the Holy Father was based on the decision of The New York Times editors to, “Omit significant facts,” and ignore the reality that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Ratzinger headed up, did not have competency over Canonical Trials in 1996. Moreover, Bishop DiMarzio continued “…the priest in question, Father Murphy was in the midst of a Canonical Trial. He died before a verdict was rendered.”
via Brutally Honest.
If the media bothered to look they would notice the huge attendance at events like the Catholic men’s conference among Catholics who actually believe and attend mass.
If Catholicism is so weak why was such a fuss made when dissenting nuns supported it? If Catholic opinion doesn’t matter why fund pseudo Catholic groups? In my opinion it is no coincidence that the scandals that struck the church were at their height as the church walked away from traditional practices.
I would suggest going to the Anchoress site and reading the whole thing as opposed to say Morning Joe trumpeting the BS class action case against the pope is a great example of this nonsense propagating the “big lie“:
Which brings us to Crimen sollicitationis. The document was crafted to ensure that if a Catholic were solicited to commit a sexual sin by a priest while going to confession, he or she could denounce that priest without being exposed to public scandal. Sinead O’Connor (and many, many others who have been flogging this particular Big Lie) have it precisely backwards. Crimen sollicitationis was not written to protect sexually abusive priests from punishment; it was written to enable the Church to get to the truth about predatory priests without embarrassing their victims or breaking the seal of confession. In fact, the protections required by Crimen sollicitationis encouraged victims of abuse to come forward. By requiring secrecy of the bishop and priests who handled any complaint about a priest-confessor who was a sexual predator, the Church tried to protect the confidentiality of the confessional and the privacy of the victim, not to prevent the crime from being reported to the police by the victim, who was never under any obligation of secrecy. The appropriate analogy is not to some Mafia-like international criminal conspiracy, but to the secrecy of those newspapers that choose not to print the names of rape victims.
The ignorance of American Catholics concerning their own faith in criminal, ironically foes of the church are using that ignorance to allow the former Bishops in Milwaukee to pass onto the pope their responsibility for turning a blind eye to their own problems.
Any Catholic who uses the New York Times in general and Maureen Dowd in particular as a source for their opinion of their church has real problems. Perhaps if they talked to the actual priest who served as the Judicial Vicar in the Milwaukee case they might learn something, oh sorry the NYT didn’t bother to even ask for an interview.
The fact that I presided over this trial and have never once been contacted by any news organization for comment speaks for itself.
My suggestion to Mika and Barnicle is to read the whole thing until they have done so their comments on the case are simply uninformed gibberish. Perhaps they should try talking to or interviewing Fr. Thomas Brundage themselves before they jump on the Dowd bandwagon.
Update: I of course meant the “Dowd” bandwagon rather than the “Down” in the last sentence. I’ve corrected it.
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