Comprehension fail, citation also fail YET AGAIN.
Sydney Morning Herald
Pope spreads blame for church's humiliating record on child
abuse by priests
Barney Zwartz
December 22, 2010
AN UNIMAGINABLE number of child sex-abuse reports this year was a
humiliation the church must accept as an exhortation to truth and
renewal, Pope Benedict XVI has said.
The Pope used his annual speech to Rome's cardinals and bishops to
urge the church to reflect on how it let the abuse happen. But he
also blamed the influence of the secular morality of child
pornography and sex tourism, and a form of moral relativism that
influenced Catholic theology in the 1970s.
''We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as
possible the injustice that has occurred,'' he said. ''We must ask
ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of
living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen.''
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The Pope said the church was well aware of the gravity of this sin
committed by priests, and of the church's responsibility. But nor
could he be silent about ''the context of these times''.
''There is a market in child pornography that seems in some
way to be considered more and more normal by society,'' he said on
Monday. ''The psychological destruction of children, in which human
persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying
sign of the times.''
He also said he heard from bishop after bishop in developing
countries how sex tourism threatened an entire generation, while
the problem of drugs was extending ''its octopus tentacles around
the entire world''.
He criticised moral relativism from the 1970s that
discarded absolutes, leaving only a ''better than'' and ''worse
than''. ''Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and
in the process it ceases to exist.''
The Pope was pessimistic about the future, saying: ''For all its
new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled
by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without
which juridical and political structures cannot
function.''
A Catholic ethicist, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, said the Pope's use
of the 12th-century saint Hildegard's vision of the church as a
battered woman, her garments rent and torn by priests' sins, was a
powerful metaphor for the church's suffering caused by paedophile
priests. He said the Pope could not blame secular culture,
because the culture did not stoop so low as to advocate abusing
children, but he was right to criticise situational ethics because
child abuse was always an absolute wrong and never
justifiable.
Victims' advocates were sceptical yesterday. Helen Last, of In Good
Faith, said: ''These statements we continually get are just
crocodile tears until they open their files and processes to
secular authorities.''
Ms Last said it was encouraging if the Pope put the interests of
children first, because that had not been the church's practice for
the past 20 years.
The Melbourne historian Dr Bernard Barrett, who has researched
clerical sexual abuse, said it did not begin in the 1970s but
spanned the church's 2000-year history and remained a deep-seated
problem.
Thats Ass Romanista2001 for you.. again. lol
