In fairness, it is true that some of the attacks on the Church are motivated by malice -- and that's true of modern anti-Semitism. Critics are merely looking for excuses to attack. But that doesn't mean all the criticism is wrong -- and the Vatican is strikingly flat footed in media terms. And holocaust survivors are rightly infuriated by the trivialization of their suffering -- indeed, who was the victim at Mount Cashel? It was not the Church.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ydkovzs
VATICAN CITY -- Attacks on Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church over a sexual abuse scandal are comparable to the most shameful anti-Semitism, said a letter read by a preacher at a Vatican Good Friday service attended by the pontiff.
Father Raniero Cantalamessa, a Franciscan whose title is "Preacher of the Pontifical Household," drew the parallel during a "Passion of the Lord" service in St Peter's Basilica on the day Christians commemorate Jesus' death by crucifixion.
James Morton
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7 comments:
> Critics are merely looking for excuses to attack.
Really? What is your evidence for this?
Displaying malice in the course of fighting religion (any and ALL religions) is inevitable and appropriate.
Attacks on the church motivated by malice? Are you kidding?
It's motivated by the church's "failings" to deal with problems and peoples concerns about children.
The Catholic church has lost it's moral authority to tell people how to live, how to believe.
Disgusting.
And those that try to protect the church are also guilty.
Want to clean up the Catholic church - the congregation needs to force them. Money talks.
I'm sure at least some of it is motivated by malice or just because it's in the news right now. But that doesn't explain why anyone would think it would be a good idea to compare criticism of the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews.
In fairness, how many critics of the Roman Catholic Church are truly motivated by malice, in contrast to the malignant malevolence or willful ignorance behind verbal and physical attacks on Jewish individuals and communities?
Last week on Radio-Canada, I heard a few speakers repeat vile, decades-old, cultural stereotypes about Jewish Quebeckers.
But I've never heard or read criticism against the Vatican that, though informed by anger, frustration and outrage, was malicious.
I have used the expression Vatican Taliban on occasion in my blogposts, whenever I've written about the arrogance and intransigeance of dogmatic rulings with regard to women. To me that is legitimate criticism and not malice.
Much criticism of the Catholic Church would be silenced if its leaders acknowledged the decades, if not centuries of harm that were done to girls and boys by allowing pedophile priests to continue to have access to children.
If the perpetrators were to beg forgiveness from their victims, that might be a start.
The Roman Catholic Church has a lot to answer for. This pedophile thing has been going on for centuries and first revealved in 1970's in St. John's, Newfoundland. These men are not infalable and certainly not the Pope. They are mortal and they need to stop hiding behind their capes and address the truth...they are men who have found a place to hide away and fiddle and diddle while practicing their illness knowing they would be sheltured. What is so disgusting is now, they are trying to compare their plight to the Holocost..makes my stomach crawl.
Malice? There is some in some of the attacks -- there are people who delight it dragging the Church down. Lapsed Catholics and some anti-Catholics. My father told me of anti-Catholic riots in Britain in the 1930's. That said, much of the bad stuff was brought on the Church by itself. And the current approach to the sex scandal is not helping. Entire nations have turned aways from the Church because of the conduct -- look at Ireland (heavens look at Quebec). The current Pope is a subtle thinker -- and yes I know his role as heresy chief -- his encyclicals are as good as anything I read in any philosophy book. But I doubt that's what he needs now.
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