A “great fan” of the PBS Newshour, Cardinal William Levada, was interviewed by Margaret Warner in a segment that aired last night. Levada is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and “a top Vatican official charged with handling the fallout of the church’s sexual abuse scandal.” From the extended transcript at PBS:
MARGARET WARNER: We’ve had people say to us that this is the worst crisis the church has faced in a couple hundred years. Do you see it that way?
CARDINAL LEVADA: It’s a big crisis. I think no one should try to diminish that. I think the crisis is particularly grave because priests are ordained to be good shepherds. We had Good Shepherd Sunday this last Sunday, and this is anything but being a good shepherd when you abuse children and you violate their innocence and their persons and they are too young to be able to respond on their own. So this is a crisis if you will that I think caught most of us by surprise. One bishop told me “this isn’t the cruise I signed up for,” but that’s in fact what has happened. I think the pope, that was not his training and background, but I think he is the right man to be guiding the church at this time.
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MARGARET WARNER: So you don’t think it’s appropriate that people hold the church to a higher standard? There is more focus on the church?
CARDINAL LEVADA: That’s a fair question. I think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard in the sense that priests are given a long period of training selection. It’s a selective choice, this is not something that one would have expected that a bishop or anybody in the church, parents, none of us would have expected this, but I think the causes we will see go back to changes in society that the church and priests were not prepared for, particularly changes involving how to be a celibate person in a time of the sexual revolution, that’s one of the causes I’d say.
Levada added, “I’ve examined my own conscience, with the help of media and lawyers in Oregon and California.” Earlier he’d said, “I do think that the American media in particular has the question has been driven by information given by the plaintiffs’ attorneys.”
In the April 16, 2010 edition of L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops, the bishops read that abuse was going on as early as 1936, well before the sexual revolution:
“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of members of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”
An editorial from a great secular newspaper in 2010? No: It’s a speech of May 28, 1937, by Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich. This speech, which had a large international echo, was the apex of a campaign launched by the Nazi regime to discredit the Catholic Church by involving it in a scandal of pedophile priests.
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The cases [of pedophile priests], which were few, but real, produced a very strong reaction from the episcopate. On June 2, 1936, the Bishop of Münster – Blessed Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946), who was the soul of Catholic resistance to Nazism, and who was beatified in 2005 by Benedict XVI – had a declaration read at all the Sunday Masses in which he expressed “pain and sadness” for these “abominable crimes” that “cover our Holy Church with ignominy.” On August 20, 1936, after the events at Waldbreitbach, the German episcopate published a joint pastoral letter in which they “several condemned” those responsible and underlined the cooperation of the Church with the tribunals of the state.
By the end of 1936, the severe measures taken by the German bishops in reaction to these very few cases, some of which were doubtful, seemed to have resolved the real problems. Quietly, the bishops also pointed out that among teachers in the state schools and in the very youth organization of the regime, the Hitler Youth, the cases of condemnations for sexual abuses were much more numerous than among the Catholic clergy.
Anglican Mainstream picked up this report, running it under the headline “Nazis Were First to Exploit Pedophile Priests to Attack Entire Catholic Church” implying by that what we see happening today is a second playing of those tactics to attack the church — rather than a legitimate interests of those that the church hierarchy has failed.
The Primatial Adviser of Anglican Mainstream is The Most Rev Drexel Gomez, [retired] Archbishop of the West Indies who led the Anglican Covenant committee. One member of the Steering Committee is Professor Christopher Seitz, of the Anglican Communion Institute, and theology schools at the University of Toronto and the University of St. Andrews.
Anglican Mainstream has a campaign to exploit the media’s scrutiny of the Catholic Church to scapegoat gays.