If anyone can take the current incoming fire, it’s got to be Father Corapi. He is the perfect one for this mission.
It is probably now time to scrutinize the “process” by which the activities of the guilty are, thankfully, immediately suspended, while the same process just as forcefully, and just as immediately, gravely injures the innocent who are deprived of due process.
The wickedness here and there of those priests found guilty was allowed to go on in so many cases for so many years that it gave cause for incidents to mount atrociously! In the Church’s effort to slam on the brakes to that awful process, the innocent are caught up and removed with no shred of evidence beyond the accusation alone.
The problem seems to be that the superiors of the accused priests decree “administrative leave” without voicing a shred of evidence, but for the accusation itself. Is that enough?
Father Corapi himself has voiced concern for the innocent priests injured by accusations. So, what is the answer when the process that thwarts the wicked in their tracks, so injures the innocent in his?
In the era before the Second Vatican Council, the psychology of priests regarding censure was quite different.
Blameless men of great sanctity like Padre Pio and St. John of the Cross accepted clearly unjust censures with silent gratitude rather than questioning authority or publicly defending themselves.
The example of the Euteneuer individual is deeply disedifying on this point. I hope Corapi does not follow his embarrassing example.
Well, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops messed up again.
During the worst days of abuse, bishops were complicit in covering up, in moving sex offenders from one parish to another without warning, and in sending them for psychological counseling instead of simply removing them from the priesthood. In their favor, those were revolutionary days throughout the whole culture, and they were told that psychological counseling was the right way to go. They were misled.
Move forward to the emergency conference to fix this mess, and that’s where the current injustices arose. Instead of admitting that they shared the blame, the bishops decided on their zero tolerance policy. Many of us at the time said that that was wrong, because it amounted to saying that anyone falsely accused would be considered guilty until proven innocent. The bishop’s conference refused to listen.
Since then, the bishops have continued to improve, as the old dissidents gradually retire and are replaced. But the Bishop’s Conference is still loaded down with the same dissident lay staffers who have helped cause so much grief over the years.
Nothing new here. Change to the worse happened with a rush, but change back to true orthodoxy will be exceedingly slow, and resisted at every step by the aging hippies who caused the problems in the first place.