Most of the time, you can count on me to take my time and reflect on a story that ticks me off before writing about it. That didn't happen yesterday as the pressures of a schedule didn't permit me sufficient cooling off period. I'm talking about the WMD Blast and the post about Pope Benny's Easter message.I received an email from a fellow blogger whom I respect which indicated that he thought I was engaging in anti-Catholic bigotry with these two posts. I vehemently reject that charge and want to take a moment to explain what's going on my head...
I believe that the leadership of the Catholic Church has been negligent in their handling of the priest sex abuse scandal. When Church officials were "in the know", they swept these allegations under the rug and exerted pressure to victims to keep quiet or else. Those Church leaders, and I include lay leaders in this group, who did not know beforehand have failed to apply pressure on the official Church leadership to take appropriate action. And let me stipulate what I think appropriate action is: the full and complete cooperation with police and prosecutors.
Slipping these priests out of their assignments and shipping them elsewhere is not full and complete cooperation with authorities. Sending them to parishes where the priest must also oversee an elementary school is just negligent.
That's what happened to me...
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati decided to assign a pedophile priest to my parish. To my knowledge, nothing ever happened; but that is not the point. The risk is there. As we all know, pedophilia has a high rate of recidivism. The bishop failed to inform anyone at my church as to what this priest had done. We all found out when the local newspaper ran the story...well after this priest had been moved along.
I treat this as a sin of omission on the part of the Catholic Church. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, a sin of omission is one where you know that not taking action would be a sin. I'm angry with the Church for having put me and my friends at risk.
When Pope Benny was selected to lead the Church, I was hopeful that the Church would finally get around to addressing this issue with the appropriate level of attention, but I haven't seen any movement on this front at all. Instead, what I am seeing from Pope Benny is the continued policy of sweeping this issue under the rug. To say that I am disappointed would be an understatement... This is a serious issue which requires serious leadership and so far, the Vatican has been absent.
All of which brings us to yesterday's posts...
The Associated Press article really hit my buttons pretty good. Here we have a Pope who witnessed the Holocaust and fails to see what our Islamofascist enemy has in store not just for the Jews, but for all of us who believe in religious tolerance. This pope sees "nothing positive" going on in Iraq...a statement so absurd it simply triggered an emotional response from me that is just not sufficient words to describe.
Could I have expressed my disagreement with the Pope better? Probably so. I regret that anyone mistook my frustration with the Church and its leadership as bigotry, but I do not apologize for the intent of those posts: the Catholic Church and its leadership needs to open its eyes to what is going on it the world. I am one angry Catholic...and I will continue to be angry until the Church gets its collective heads out of the sand and start addressing their own issues before issuing judgements on world events better left to the Almighty. If that offends you, that is your problem; I regret to lose a single reader, but I will not change my position on this issue.
