Posts Tagged ‘Pope Benedict XVI’

…to a fair story on the pope that they will likely ever produce:

This isn’t an isolated case. In the 1990s, it was Ratzinger who pushed for a full investigation of Hans Hermann Groer, the Vienna cardinal accused of pedophilia, only to have his efforts blocked in the Vatican. It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office. It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.

So the high-flying John Paul let scandals spread beneath his feet, and the uncharismatic Ratzinger was left to clean them up. This pattern extends to other fraught issues that the last pope tended to avoid — the debasement of the Catholic liturgy, or the rise of Islam in once-Christian Europe. And it extends to the caliber of the church’s bishops, where Benedict’s appointments are widely viewed as an improvement over the choices John Paul made. It isn’t a coincidence that some of the most forthright ecclesiastical responses to the abuse scandal have come from friends and protégés of the current pope.

I haven’t seen Morning Joe use any of the links I suggested, however this comes from the preferred source, the New York Times. Let’s see if it gets any play.

…they had a shot.

Then they went after the pope and lost me at once. This pope already stepped up to the plate on this and anyone who has followed the scandals for years would know this. I suspect they still haven’t read the links I provided yet.

The MSM has to remember they are not the only source of information anymore and anyone who is you know actually informed isn’t going to fall for this crap.

Update: Of course they aren’t questioning the NYT because unlike bloggers they have layers of fact checkers.

Update 2: The gullibility of the NYT makes Hot air’s headlines. Will it make the MSM’s anytime soon?

Update 3: And here are some interesting numbers care of POWIP

Funny you should ask via Fr. Z links to an article at the LOGIA that describes themselves as a quarterly journal of Lutheran theology in it John Stephenson looks at the attacks on the Pope and has this to say:

The secular press has had it in for Joseph Ratzinger for going on three decades. Before his election as Pope in the spring of 2005, he was routinely derided in his homeland as the Panzerkardinal (“tank cardinal”) and caricatured in North America as the “Enforcer” or even the “Rottweiler.” The roots of this negative reputation stretch back at least as far as the book-length interview he granted to the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori that catapulted him to global fame when published as The Ratzinger Report in 1985. Prior to that juncture, as a heavyweight German academic who had leapfrogged over a major episcopal see (Munich-Freising) to become a leading official in the Roman curia (as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) under the still new John Paul II, Ratzinger’s was hardly a household name.

But shrewd observers must wonder about the startling disproportion between the enormous hue and cry artificially whipped up by the media and the softly spoken real life figure who seems always to have avoided hyperbole like the plague.

Let me reiterate that this is from a Lutheran journal. A denomination that refers to the Roman Catholic Church as, in the words of one Lutheran priest: “that institution that is rightly labeled as Antichrist in our Lutheran Confessions”. How bad must things be if the media has these guys defending the Pope? They have their own issues, big ones, yet they have at least eyes enough to see this for what it is. Here is the big finish:

As Easter of 2010 approaches, though, if for no other reason than that we remember Martin Niemöller’s post-war regret at not having spoken up for the Jews in due season, we might fitly major in sympathy, understanding, and prayer for the courteous and learned aged prelate who is right now a walking target for innumerable hellish darts launched by theological Modernists and by the unbelieving world that have between them zero tolerance for any crisp, clear, and confident confession of Christ Jesus our Incarnate God.

If any protestant church proclaiming Christ thinks that the media is their friend their errors are more than simply theological.

Exit question for professed Christians: Do you think it is an accident that the Roman Catholic Church is primary target of the secular media? And if it is not what does that say about the Church as opposed to other denominations that do not seem so worthy of their scorn?

Although I have and will continue to hit back at those maliciously attacking the Church in General and the Pope in particular, none of this changes our obligation to pray for these people and to keep them in our prayers.

If we fail to do so, we fail as Christians in general and Catholics in particular