Quote of the Day: Archbishop Dolan
"The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves; we do not expect any special treatment…so bring it on."That's Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, in his blog, talking about all the molestation hubub. "All we ask is that it be fair and accurate," he continues. "The reporting on Pope Benedict XVI has not been so."
Archbishop Dolan's best defense seems to be that this is old news (the Milwaukee priest abused kids from the 50s through the 70s), and that the New York Times seems to have a vendetta against the Pope.
posted by The Masticator at 3/31/2010 11:50:00 AM
2 Comments:
Here's the complete defense. The NY Times is trying to sell papers with a salacious pile of innuendo driven by tort lawyers who stand to make big bucks. The NY Times couldn't care less about facts. Read this: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/03/scoundrel-times
One of the defenses I keep hearing, one some Catholics have been using to defend the Vatican, is that abuse happens everywhere -- not just the church. Of course it does. No one thinks this is only a Catholic problem, and there's no need to spend any time time reminding the world that Catholics didn't invent child sexual abuse.
This is the first defense that George Weigel invokes in his piece in First Things, which is a non-denominational religious journal that was founded by a Catholic.
This is a global story because the Vatican mishandled it when it found out about it decades ago, and because it seems as adept at handling the story (and the problem itself) today as Toyota was at dealing with its sudden acceleration nightmare.
No, of course the Church isn't at the core of a "global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors" -- that's absurd, and I don't think any reasonable person believes that.
What I think reasonable people believe is that the Church didn't want to face the fact that its priesthood was home to a few pedophiles over the years who inflicted an incredible amount of damage to good Catholics. The Church seems to have chosen to protect its image before protecting its faithful.
The heart of Weigel's argument starts many paragraphs in, with the accusations that the Times relied on biased sources in its reporting. (Why he waits so long to make this point, I don't know; he almost lost me crying about how public schools abuse kids too.)
So perhaps, as far as the Church (which may or may not being working its ass off to purge itself of abusers) is concerned, the bigger problem is one of public relations. Why do so many groups seem to hate this pope?
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