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To: Torie
This piece strikes me as a committee written exercise in opaque burearcratese.

I call it "Vaticanese". You have to know how to interpret it. For example, the following:

a) the Pastors of the Church need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care;

translated into American English, comes out roughly like this:

Bishops need to stop being wishy-washy about sexual sin. In particular, priests & religious ["religious"=laypeople under vows, like nuns & monks] who are teaching that homosexual acts can sometimes be something other than grave sin need to be slapped down, hard, and by local bishops, not just by Rome. Also, bishops, if you have any "gay" organizations in your dioceses, or "parents and friends of gays" organizations, which are not four-square behind Catholic teaching that all sexual activity outside of marital intercourse open to life is mortal sin, you need to make it clear that they aren't speaking for the Church, and you don't support them.

51 posted on 04/25/2002 4:00:17 PM PDT by Campion
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To: Campion
My interpretation from the statement by the Americans is that they, poor boobies, continue to understand the crisis and its solution as procedural.

The mortal danger is that once the idea is established that sexual abuse is a problem to be "managed", it becomes a regrettable but unavoidable cost of doing business -- like paying for fire insurance or pest control. This is the way -- not that the cardinals want it that way, but because they don't understand the dynamic at work -- that pederasty becomes normalised. The fatal mistake is to treat the symptom only, without addressing the disease. Deviant priests do not appear out of thin air. They come from corrupt seminaries, and ultimately from an ignorant, uncatechised laity that's been on its own, wandering in the desert for 40 years. The problem of sexual deviancy and blackmail are just one aspect of this systemic problem. The cardinals seem to think they're fighting a trash fire, completely clueless that behind their back the entire forest is ablaze.

I thought the American statement was, to use the English slang, "wet." Very wet.

85 posted on 04/25/2002 10:06:00 PM PDT by Romulus
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