Quick note: I am playing a bit of catch-up since I recently completed the Lenten daily reflections. So while a lot of the stuff I'm posting may have happened a week or more ago, I believe they are worth noting.
Daniel Cardinal DiNardo of Houston-Galveston issued a statement on April 1 in anticipation of the Easter Triduum:
Since 2002, the Church in the United States has had a policy of zero tolerance: Any member of the clergy who has admitted to or has been found guilty of sexually abusing a minor can no longer engage in public ministry.No one has been more forceful in implementing this policy than Pope Benedict XVI.
In 2001, Pope John Paul II assigned the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith full responsibility for cases of priests accused of sexual abuse. (Before 2001, the Congregation only became involved in rare instances when admission of abuse occurred in the context of the confessional.) Pope Benedict, then a cardinal, was head of that Vatican office. He has been the primary force for advocating a tough response to the crisis. He led our Church's efforts to reform how sex abuse cases are handled, making it easier to remove priests who have committed crimes from ministry. As pope, he has
made handling abuse cases a priority.Pope Benedict is the first pontiff to meet with victims of sexual abuse by clergy. He is the first pope to devote an entire document to the sexual abuse crisis in his recent letter to the Church in Ireland. He spoke openly about the crisis several times in his visit to the United States in 2008.
There has been no one more effective and clearer on this issue than Pope Benedict XVI.
Given all that His Holiness has done to push reform forward, recent headlines insinuating inaction or culpability by Pope Benedict XVI regarding the crisis are unfair and inaccurate. Any innuendo that he has not tried to tackle cases of sexual abuse by clergy is misleading and harmful to the Church. (Cardinal William J. Levada, an American bishop who now leads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a statement regarding recent media coverage; a summary of his comments is also available on our Web site.)
Cardinal William Levada, an American bishop who now leads the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (as did Pope Benedict back when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger), also defended the Holy Father back on March 26. He said the New York Times failed to treat Pope Benedict fairly, and came up short of the American journalistic tradition of fairness, accusing the paper of "anachronistic conflation" and "rushing to a guilty verdict."
As a full-time member of the Roman Curia, the governing structure that carries out the Holy See's tasks, I do not have time to deal with the Times's subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd's silly parroting of Goodstein's "disturbing report." But about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his "successor" Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.
There is no way of knowing this, but one would hope that the point of publishing such daily reports on sex abuse in the Church is not merely to make it impossible for Church leaders to respond in a satisfactory way to the scandals, thereby demoralizing the faithful.
