Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Sunday, April 28, 2002 Rotten Fish Head Thanks to JunkYardBlog for his interest and comments and also to Rod Dreher at NRO for this blog: Despite denials from the chancery, the Boston Herald is sticking by its Friday story quoting an unnamed Catholic Church official saying the plan is for the Vatican to get Cardinal Law out of Boston before he has to face the indignity of a deposition in the Shanley civil suit. You know what I think? That the story is true, and that it was leaked by some high-ranking priest who knew he and others would be left to face the peasants with pitchforks who would storm the chancery walls (so to speak) if the Vatican turned the cardinal into a fugitive from justice. You know what else I think? That unless some cooler American heads talk the Pope out of that disastrous course of action, it's going to happen. What convinced me of this was a passage I ran across today from "Man of the Century," Jonathan Kwitny's appreciative 1997 biography of John Paul. On pages 460-463, Kwitny discusses the role of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus in the Vatican Bank scandal, which broke early in JP's papacy. Marcinkus, who worked in the Vatican, was pushed by Paul VI to get the Vatican Bank involved profit-making. Marcinkus engaged in some extremely dark financial doings, which became public under John Paul, and was an international scandal. Kwitny reports that John Paul stonewalled Italian investigators, refusing to hand over Marcinkus for criminal indictment, and signing off on patently false public explanations of what had really taken place in the dirty affair. Behind the scenes, JP forced the Vatican Bank out of the kind of schemes that got it into such trouble -- but, writes Kwitny, "Even more important to him, though, was that the public never find out what wrongs had already occurred. He said he wanted 'the entire truth ... brought to light' and would 'cooperate' with authorities. Yet he publicly endorsed a new statement the Vatican issued that week, merely repeating the lies of the previous statement. A report [Vatican Secretary of State Agostino Cardinal] Casaroli had requested from several prominent Catholic banking experts was hushed up. That so unhypocritical a man as John Paul could utter such blatant deceits proves that for him, the image of the Church took extraordinary precedence." Sort of proves my point about the hierarchy and this pope. Now I understand exactly the feeling of those Hebrew prophets who likened Israel to a beautiful women who kept turning whore. So many (including myself) have seen and continue to see the RCC as a great, beautiful Bride of Christ - such majesty, sublimity, depth, art, and richness in our worship history - and yet, such whoredom and debauchery, such unbearable deceits. Many are starting to talk apologetically as in my newspaper today, calculating what percentage of priests are involved and guessing it to be less than .5%; trying to present the rest of the priesthood as innocent of crime. I don't care if it was only one priest who hurt children and young people. It was the actions of the entire hierarchy that I object to - not one rotten apple, but a host of men who covered up and hid the evil doers and allowed them to continue to harm people. (Also, this present scandal doesn't begin to touch upon a much more frequent crime - embezzlement of funds and financial malfeasance. We have no real idea of how much money is being quietly siphoned from the Sunday collections among other funds. But tales I have heard about my own parish pastors over the last 50 years from people who had knowledge or powerful inklings, and what I have seen myself, shows that another huge scandal is simply waiting to be exposed. I doubt it will be, though. This is where secrecy and unaccountability is truly effective since, the money is most often stolen before it's ever counted and thus never really existed as church property. The funny thing is that the bishops are far more effective at prosecuting thieves and embezzlers when they catch them. The money they care about. Children and young people's innocence don't matter much to them.) posted by Mark Butterworth | 9:30 PM | |
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