Posted on 03/29/2010 11:43:25 AM PDT by marshmallow
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger tried to persuade Pope John Paul II to mount a full investigation into a cardinal who abused boys and young monks, one of the Church’s most senior figures revealed yesterday. But Ratzinger’s opponents in the Vatican managed to block the inquiry. As the future Benedict XVI put it: “The other side won.”
The pervert cardinal was the late Hans Hermann Groer, removed as Archbishop of Vienna in 1995 following sex allegations. The source for the story is Groer’s successor in Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, an intellectual whom some commentators have tipped as a possible future Pope.The source for the story is Groer’s successor in Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, an intellectual whom some commentators have tipped as a possible future Pope.
That’s quite a revelation, in my book – but it doesn’t fit the script that the Benedict-hating media have written, so we’re not hearing too much about it. Also, I suspect that former advisers to John Paul would rather not remind us that the late Pope didn’t do enough to curb sex abuse and cover-ups. Safer to blame Benedict, eh?
Here’s the quote from a report by Philip Pullella of Reuters:
Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, in defence of the pope, told ORF Austrian television on Sunday that Benedict wanted a full probe when former Vienna Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer was removed in 1995 for alleged sexual abuse of a boy.
But other Curia officials persuaded the then Pope John Paul that the media had exaggerated the case and an inquiry would only create more bad publicity.
“[Ratzinger] told me, ‘the other side won’,” Schoenborn said.
The other side. I suspect he was referring to a Vatican old boys’ club that Cardinal Ratzinger never joined, and which didn’t want sex abuse cases to “damage the good name..............
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
And Pope Benedict has been quietly going about reforming seminaries and the psychological testing that is required to get in. This is media retribution for the Catholic Church opposing Obamacare.
There you go, bashing Holy Mother Church again!
This is a tough one. Allow the media to continue to excoriate the current Pope in the press, or put the blame on the previous pope who’s on the fast track for sainthood?
Personally, I believe Ratzinger. He’s a hard-ass purist.
I have read this story before - that the previous Pope, while a very good and holy man, had difficulty believing that this problem was so rampant all around the globe. He thought it a case of isolated cases, and the church needed to try to clean out the leaders & priests who were implicated, and then try to get on with other business.
I think PBXVI is a more pragmatic Pope, and was more realistic about ths problem, the scope of it, and the need to really clean house. That is why Benedict has been working so hard to restructure the seminaries, and to establish screening procedures for priestly candidates. No known homosexuals are to now be admitted to the seminaries.
The rancor against Benedict is rather intriguing, because they rail against him for his anti-homosexual rules for the clergy - and at the same time claim he was protecting homoesexual priests. It makes no sense when looked at with an open mind. Also, the leftists, who never fail to rally for the homosexual agenda, will not admit that the vast majority (80-90%) of accusations against priests are of a homosexual nature - with young, mostly teen-aged boys, and are thus not strictly pedophilic. This of course does not decrease the seriousness of the charge, but is does clarify the nature of the abuse!
We should remember that the full knowledge of the magnitude of this problem only came about in the 1990’s - and by then PJPII was suffering from Parkinson’s and other debilities of old age.
Another hit piece on a former Pope not around to defend himself, Catholic Bashing, dark forces trying to undermine the Catholic church, just the MSM doing payback, What about the school teachers, etc.? Just the “gay” lobby trying to push homosexual marriage, lawyers for the victims stirring the pot.
Anything left out?
Good post.
What a concept.
I wonder why Benedict XVI is exempt from those standard judicial protocols?
Corporate responsibility?
In fact, the Church is not a corporation and the Pope is not a CEO.
He does not have day to day control of what goes on in every diocese on the planet.
That responsibility rests primarily with the bishops.
It is they who must shoulder much of the blame for this mess. In the Murphy case, which was used as the fuel to start the present fire, that would be Rembert Weakland and his predecessors.
The critics in the media need to make up their minds. One minute they're championing the cause of democracy in the Church and cheer-leading for anyone who dissents from Rome and refuses to submit to Church teaching and discipline. The next minute they're claiming that the Pope controls everything in the Church, or ought to and he's responsible for every failure.
It's unclear to me how anyone who has followed the disciplinary upheaval in the Church over the past 40 years with its "we'll do our own thing" motto, can turn around and claim "corporate responsibility" and point a finger at the Pope. The rebels are reaping what they sowed. They caused the mess by flouting Church discipline and law and instead of accepting responsibility, point the finger at the Pope.
You wrote:
“This is a tough one. Allow the media to continue to excoriate the current Pope in the press, or put the blame on the previous pope who’s on the fast track for sainthood?”
About two years before he died John Paul II admitted he was probably too lax on discipline. Anyone who lived through his reign should know that that’s true. John Paul II will still become a saint. No one can seriously question his personal holiness. His administrative failings won’t keep him from sainthood.
Remember, in the 1990's, there were some pretty powerful "progressives" in the episcopacy, one of whom was one Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. After he died, the logjam on various issues was broken. My guess is that there are a lot of machinations that haven't been reported and that at times there was some pretty serious squaring off behind the scenes. We may never know the whole truth, but as much as BXVI is attacked by the revolutionaries, he's bound to be the good guy.
Thanks for this post.
Rather it means the individuals may share in the responsibility for an organization's acts. Example:
The nation of Israel during Jesus’ day had a religious leadership that some percentage of which was corrupt. They loved their titles and elaborate garb, the deference paid them and laid claim to being children of Abraham, shepherding the flock of God.
Yet in 70 A.D. EVERYONE, the whole corpus, that was still in the city of Jerusalem suffered the same fate, whether sincere and hardworking or a corrupt lout, whether priestly class or beggar. They didn't have to be “directly responsible” or have any control at all.
Jesus had said, “Your house is left desolate to you”, and left very specific instructions on how the individual could
avoid sharing in the responsibility for the failings of the whole.
“That responsibility rests primarily with the bishops.”
and who is in charge of the bishops?
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