Sunday, April 18, 2010

Is everything O.K.? RC Church

There is a very good op-ed article in the New York Times full of the upbeat aspects of a separate arm of the RC church, separate from the Corrupt Hierarchy making hay for their own careers even in the middle of a communications meltdown over the handling of Child Abuse by Clergy in a worldwide organization.

That separate arm of the church are those working in the field to alleviate pain, suffering and poverty in the third world.

In contrast, regarding the boys in the front office:
The Catholic Church still seems stuck today in that patriarchal rut. The same faith that was so pioneering that it had Junia as a female apostle way back in the first century can’t even have a woman as the lowliest parish priest. Female deacons, permitted for centuries, are banned today.

That old boys’ club in the Vatican became as self-absorbed as other old boys’ clubs, like Lehman Brothers, with similar results. And that is the reason the Vatican is floundering today.
It is an uplifting piece of writing in the midst of the pig swill official press releases coming out of the Vatican and its failed administration.

I find it quite distressing to keep coming back to the Jaded players on the Vatican ball team. Cardinal Hoyos after being instrumental in returning the schismatic Pius X cult back into the church chose to do so by tricking Cardinal Re to sign off on it. Cardinal Hoyos is now trashing the dead John Paul II by saying that he cleared the letter he wrote praising a French Bishop for protecting a French Priest from civil prosecution for his crimes against children.

John Paul toward the end had little focus on any letters I would think. The full responsibility of that letter falls on Hoyos. Though past the age of eighty and unable to vote in any future papal enclave, he is trying to rewrite the history of his mismanagement of whatever they put him in charge of at the Vatican.

And then you have Secretary of State Bertone who wants to deflect fault away from Vatican policy and cover-ups by having a brilliant bureaucratic idea. He throws out how pedophilia has nothing to do with celibacy and everything to do with homosexuality. How gay of him.

Bertone’s pronouncement is so much like the old fashioned Public Relations/Press Release that the church has used for decades in its one way, only way, of talking to you and not talking with you. For decades, the MSM, Main Stream Media, has accepted these handouts as news to be repeated without comment in newspapers and now on the Net.

This is what got Bishop Martino in trouble in Scranton. You don’t have people skills and you hand out press release after press release after press release. The trouble with that is that issues that deserved to be addressed in dialogue with the laity got merely addressed as a parent speaking to a child. The church and its hierarchy have lost touch with reality. Martino gave up, claiming insomnia as a debilitating factor. I have to wonder, if in the final analysis, whether it was a guilty conscience of following Vatican instructions on every matter in the Diocese that helped to empty pews, empty pews, empty pews.

The MSM has not pushed back until of late. The tidal wave of unsolved problems of the Vatican and a bureaucracy that no longer has any effect in the rule of the church is an easy invite for journalism to come in and perform an autopsy so to speak. The people in the pews want accountability and humanity. The pope seeing a few sex abuse victims only because he has to and not because he wants to comes through loud and clear to the man and woman on the street.

To continue from the Op/Ed piece by Nicolas Kristof.

A Church Mary Can Love
So when you read about the scandals, remember that the Vatican is not the same as the Catholic Church. Ordinary lepers, prostitutes and slum-dwellers may never see a cardinal, but they daily encounter a truly noble Catholic Church in the form of priests, nuns and lay workers toiling to make a difference.

It’s high time for the Vatican to take inspiration from that sublime — even divine — side of the Catholic Church, from those church workers whose magnificence lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness. They’re enough to make the Virgin Mary smile.
I invite you read the entire article by Mr. Kristof.

No comments: