Just as the latest round of homosexual network and sex abuse allegations in the Church are reaching a fever pitch, Pope Francis – who has been eerily quiet of late – dropped a nuclear theological bomb into our midst.
From Crux:
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the death penalty now is no longer admissible under any circumstances.so how does the Pope handle the wrath of pious catholics?
by changing the subject.
update: related essay: Fiddling while Rome Burns.
Author mentions the up coming meeting on Families in Ireland, which has Catholic christians up in arms... and he will give a speech at an alternative meeting that is in effect protesting the "official" meeting.
ewtn News report on that alternative meeting.
but shouldn't the Vatican welcome all? Or is there an agenda that a lot of people worry about?
because guess who is in charge of the official meeting?
“Our Holy Father Pope Francis is encouraging families from all across the world to come to Ireland in 2018 to celebrate family life. And to reflect on the importance of family in our lives,” Cardinal Kevin Farrell says in the video. Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, as well as a Dublin native, Cardinal Farrell is one of the persons responsible for organizing the event.
heh. What could go wrong with an esteemed Cardinal in charge?
more here from an Italian site.
Much has already been written about the McCarrick case in recent days. But not much yet on the extent to which it may involve not only the protagonist of the affair, but also the churchmen most closely connected to him, they too the beneficiaries, thanks to him, of careers verging on the miraculous. One of these in particular prompts serious questions. It is Kevin J. Farrell, 71, made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016 and the prefect of the new dicastery for laity, family and life.no problem here, folks, just move along.
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Well, I am against the death penalty, and indeed we don't have it here in the Philippines.
Yet the Pope forgets the Catholic church is... catholic, i.e. all over the place and has been around for 2000 years.
the affluent world who can remove criminals into jails for prolonged periods to keep ordinary people safe. But in the past and future this might not be true.
You see, the reason for the death penalty was because historically jail was not an option.
Ironically, there were alternatives (exile, paying weregeld, etc) or even release into the community, especially if the perpetrator's family could guarantee he would no longer be a danger to the community, but outsiders and criminals and gangs who terrorized people needed to be stopped somehow.
The alternative? think Robin Hood or Seven Samurai or Death Wish.
Vigilante justice is the result if the state doesn't use controlled violence to keep people safe. But the result is often a cycle of violence and payback. (Njal's saga relates how feuds destroyed many innocent people in medieval Iceland).
establishing rule of law is sometimes harmful to the poor, or maybe I should say easy for the rich to manipulate, but better than the alternative.
Even those cases where moderns point fingers have a reason.
Killing "witches"? well, some time it was because they committed crimes. This is true whether you are discussing the Sun King's Paris or rural Africa today.
Killing "gays"? no one probably cared about quiet relationships, but when the local boys were powerless against rich and powerful predators, some folks got mad: so justice maybe? even Dante put one of his beloved teachers in hell because he was a serial predator against young men sent to him as students.
hmm... maybe Cardinal M should study Dante.
Of course, Dante also put two popes in Hell for meddling into politics, but never mind: those were the good old days of immoral Popes who schtupped their mistresses, but remained Catholics (as opposed to today, where we have a moral Pope who wants to reform the church by making any type of schtupping okay).
they aren't just in the church, of course.
author and ex policeman Joseph Waumbaugh said
As a cop, I dealt with every kind of bum and criminal. They all have more integrity than some Hollywood people.
A lot of the rage is against false mercy: and seeing the abuse as a psychiatric problem, not as a sin or a crime. This allowed people to game the system with fake repentance and who are given another chance to harm again by the naive.
yeah. And I remember Adamec writing in the diocesan newspaper (in the 1990s) that no abuse had been reported on his watch, yet I had a patient tell me that her husband was told to pressure a family not to report their son's molestation since it would destroy that nice priest.
When any allegations were made, priests were sent for a psychiatric evaluation and Bishop Adamec followed the recommendation of professionals in suspending or removing priests, the filing explained.
"It is unfortunate that the grand jury was apparently not provided a full and balanced set of facts based on all the materials and information that was available to it, including exculpatory information related to Bishop Adamec from the diocesan records that were obtained in August 2015," the filing concluded. "Those records contain clear information demonstrating that, contrary to the language of the report, Bishop Adamec's handling of sexual abuse allegations was anything by abysmal and that he most certainly placed a high priority on protecting the welfare of children."
and the sin has a ripple effect: I am convinced that the Penn State/Sandusky scandal happened because of the Altoona Diocese was gay friendly and pushed a non judgemental attitude in this matter: so when Sandusky was reported, the attitude was that they were just playing around, no harm done, just move along folks...
ironically, the bishops and the psychologists who were involved in the whitewash of these crimes are still free, but the DA who rooted out the corruption ended up going to jail: supposedly for releasing grand jury testimony against a corrupt politician in Philadelphia.
Which says a lot about the judicial system in Pennsylvania.
and don't forget the good priests who will suffer from this: often punished for not approving of sin by their superiors ("too rigid") and distrusted by laypeople who assume all are guilty, not just the few criminals in the church.
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Here in the Philippines, our bishops are scoring browny points with the international elite for opposing the war on drugs. What they are NOT doing is fighting the drug cartels and the politicians who get rich off of bribes to look the other way. Why do I say this? Because if they did, they'd be dead like the 2 dozen or so Mexican priests and pastors killed in recent years for opposing these criminals.
openly naming crooked politicians/businessmen is the most common reason for killing reporters here in the Philippines.
In contrast,, although we have had a few priests here killed for opposing rich businesses who would grab land or destroy the environment or who defended the rights of the poor against local politicians, and priests killed by Moro terrorist gangs, but so far, none dead because they pointed fingers at corruption of the big shots involved in the drug cartels. Hmm...
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true conversion is the answer, not liberation theology.
GetReligionBlog has an article on the evangelical/Pentecostal churches in Central America who are fighting the gangs by converting them.
and the local protestant churches in our town are helping the mayor with drug rehabilitation, which is the unsung part of the drug war here. Traditionally the Catholic church is helping too...
When I worked in Oklahoma, we heard only one or two sermons mentioning drug/ alcohol use, but at least our church allowed AA to meet in their hall. However, addicts who wanted a church to help them in repentance and how to live an ethical life were better off going to the local Assembly of God, who had outreaches for addicts and other sinners. (I should note: On more traditional reservations, there were also tribal outreaches to encourage traditional healing ceremonies to help addicts turn their life around...which worked when the healer was truly a traditional healer).
here is an article on local rehab in the Philippines, which of course ignores the religion aspect of the problem.
the point is that unless you do both (threaten those who use/buy/sell drugs so they figure that changing their life is preferable to being dead, and then you have to offer them an alternative, which includes repentance and reintegration into the community) it won't work. And religion is part of rebuilding one's life.
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speaking of rehabilitation:
President Trump just met with inner city pastors to discuss ways to reintegrate people from jail back into the community by giving them jobs, and encouraged the pastors to work with the returning prisoners to integrate them back into the community.
Hmm... how does that saying go? Only Nixon can go to China?
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