Hardball Religion’s sequel

Pastor Wade Burleson turned a slimy anonymous email into a touching open letter on balancing faithful forgiveness and resolve.

Oust Cardinal Sodano for entanglement with Maciel

Austen Invereigh argues in America, the Jesuit Catholic weekly, that corruption by Marcial Maciel Degollado requires the resignation of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, “the all-powerful secretary of state under John Paul II and now Dean of the College of Cardinals.”

Analyzing Jason Berry’s two-part [1, 2] investigation of Maciel – the womanizing, drug-abusing pedophile founder of the Legionaries of Christ (LC) – Invereigh concludes that Sodano’s sponsorship and protection were bought by Maciel.

Berry’s investigation certainly supports that conclusion. A key passage from Berry’s longer, darkly fascinating account of Sodano’s entanglement with Maciel:

Back to Rome in 1989, Sodano, in preparing to become secretary of state, took English lessons at a Legion center in Dublin, Ireland. He vacationed at a Legion villa in Southern Italy. An honored guest at Legion dinners and banquets, Sodano became Maciel’s biggest supporter. Glenn Favreau, a Washington, D.C., attorney and former Legionary in Rome, said: “Sodano intervened with Italian officials to get zoning variances to build the university” on a wooded plateau of western Rome. Maciel hired Sodano’s nephew, Andrea Sodano, as a building consultant. Pontificial Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum is the name of the complex.

But Legionaries overseeing the project complained to Maciel that Andrea Sodano’s work was late and poorly done; they were reluctant to pay his invoices. To them, Maciel yelled: “Pay him! You pay him!”

Andrea Sodano was paid.

With the Apostolic Visitation of LC at an end, Invereigh argues, Sodano’s “resignation would be the best way of repudiating the sordid manner in which Maciel was protected in Rome for so many years.”

Cardinal Bertone’s homosexuality/pedophilia myth

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, had it exactly wrong when he asserted Monday that psychologists have shown “that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia.”

Joe Kort, a psychotherapist and gay and lesbian studies adjunct professor at Wayne State University wrote in Psychology Today:

One frequently quoted researchers on the topic of homosexuality and child molestation, Gregory Herek, a research psychologist at the University of California, defines pedophilia as “a psychosexual disorder characterized by a preference for prepubescent children as sexual partners, which may or may not be acted upon.” He defines child sexual abuse as “actual sexual contact between an adult and someone who has not reached the legal age of consent.” Not all pedophiles actually molest children, he points out. A pedophile may be attracted to children, but never actually engage in sexual contact with them. Quite often, pedophiles never develop a sexual orientation toward other adults.

Herek points out that child molestation and child sexual abuse refer to “actions,” without implying any “particular psychological makeup or motive on the part of the perpetrator.” In other words, not all incidents of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by pedophiles. Pedophilia can be viewed as a kind of sexual fetish, wherein the person requires the mental image of a child–not necessarily a flesh-and-blood child–to achieve sexual gratification. Rarely does a pedophile experience sexual desire for adults of either gender. They usually don’t identify as homosexual – the majority identify as heterosexual, even those who abuse children of the same gender.

Herek has addressed the issue directly writing in Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation:

In recent years, antigay activists have routinely asserted that gay people are child molesters. This argument was often made in debates about the Boy Scouts of America’s policy to exclude gay scouts and scoutmasters. More recently, in the wake of Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation from the US House of Representatives in 2006, antigay activists and their supporters seized on the scandal to revive this canard.

It has also been raised in connection with scandals about the Catholic church’s attempts to cover up the abuse of young males by priests. Indeed, the Vatican’s early response to the 2002 revelations of widespread Church cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests was to declare that gay men should not be ordained.

Cardinal Bertone is not only wrong but also fostering an invidious myth which in testament to the wisdom of the average American, has fallen into disfavor in this countryl. As Herek explained:

The number of Americans who believe the myth that gay people are child molesters has declined substantially. In a 1970 national survey, more than 70% of respondents agreed with the assertions that “Homosexuals are dangerous as teachers or youth leaders because they try to get sexually involved with children” or that “Homosexuals try to play sexually with children if they cannot get an adult partner.”

By contrast, in a 1999 national poll, the belief that most gay men are likely to molest or abuse children was endorsed by only 19% of heterosexual men and 10% of heterosexual women. Even fewer – 9% of men and 6% of women – regarded most lesbians as child molesters.

Consistent with these findings, Gallup polls have found that an increasing number of Americans would allow gay people to be elementary school teachers. For example, the proportion was 54% in 2005, compared to 27% in 1977.

The degree to which the church’s problems and the victims’ pain are made worse by celibacy is at worst unclear.

It is clear that by peddling an invidious myth in an attempt to somehow defuse the sexual scandal in which the Roman Catholic Church is awash, Cardinal Bertone has brought additional dishonor on all involved.

Arrest the pope? Not exactly

That Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens arrest-the-pope campaign we referred to earler was, Dawkins suggestes, not altogether as advertised. Dawkins writes:

Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself.

What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horme, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article.

[H/T: Andrew Sullivan]

Statute of limitations on child sex abuse (the pain doesn’t stop)?

Vatican guidelines of clerical sex abuse at last clearly require church-wide obedience to civil law, the New York Times reported today, while Connecticut bishops fight to limit the coverage of that civil law.

In Canada, there is no statute of limitations after which civil or criminal liability expires. As Child Abuse Effects explains:

When it comes to child abuse, there is no statute of limitations in Canada. Whether the child abuse occurred 5 minutes ago, 5 weeks ago, 5 or 50 years ago, an offender can still be charged. Nowhere is the latter more evident than with our Aboriginal people: more than 7,000 lawsuits have been filed against the Canadian Federal Government claiming sexual, physical and cultural abuse suffered at Residential Schools.

Connecticut bishops don’t want their state to emulate Canada, out of concern for the church as a financial entity. As NBC Connecticut reported, “Church officials say it could have devastating financial effects and could result in claims that are more than 50-years old which would be impossible to defend in court. Currently, victims have until their 48th birthday to file lawsuits.”

Impossible to defend? No. The burden of proof cuts both ways. So as Mark Silk observed, we’re left with the money bishops still don’t want to spend healing victims.

Hear one victim

Arthur Budzinski, one of the victims of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, describes the pain of having been abused as a youth at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin:

The majority (wants new) rules

Les Puryear, a pastor who has championed the cause of small churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, has initiated a move to give those churches a louder voice in convention matters.

Puryear, who ran for SBC president two years ago, started a web site called “the SBC Majority Initiative.”

“Prior to the SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL, we will be announcing SBC Majority Initiative candidates for all major offices,” the web site says. “Also, we will be unveiling a motion which will be made in Orlando for a bylaw change which will effect greater representation of the SBC Majority on SBC entities boards.”

Puryear, who has previously questioned the wisdom of of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force emphasis church planting at the expense of existing churches, is pastor of Lewisville Baptist Church in North Carolina. Figures on the web site demonstrate the difficulty his movement faces.

The web site says SBC presidents come from churches with attendance in the top 1.4 percent, while 76 percent of trustees are from churches with attendance in the top 16.6 percent.

Clearly, the SBC rewards large churches. That’s not surprising in an organization that compiles its statistics in an “annual church profile” like last year’s showing a drop in membership. Perhaps, however, with signs pointing to denominational decline Southern Baptists will realize that higher numbers don’t necessarily equal God’s blessing.

If so, Puryear’s efforts might not be wasted.

Fired for acknowledging evolutionary science: Bruce Waltke

Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) Professor Bruce Waltke was forced to resign because he observed that faith and evolutionary science are compatible in a video in which he said, according to a reconstruction of his remarks by USA Today:

If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult … some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness.

His remarks had to be reconstructed because Waltke was apparently driven by the “culture of fear” which pervades the evangelical community to ask the BioLogos Foundation, which had posted the video as part of their advocacy of science’s compatibility with faith, to take it down. And they did, yet Waltke was still compelled to resign.

Neither the video nor its contents should have come as a surprise. It wasn’t Waltke’s first run at the subject [1, 2]

The reaction is a surprise in part because Waltke isn’t otherwise a liberal, as Tony Cartledge explains:

Waltke is by most measures a very conservative scholar. Though he accepts a theistic version of evolution (acknowledging the reality of evolution while trusting that God guided the process), he also believes in an inerrant Bible and a literal Adam and Eve. But even that is too big a stretch for the most ardent inerrantists, leading to RTS’s over-the-top response.

Perhaps Waltke’s use of the word “cult” was the step too far.

If so, the reaction to his comments gives it legs.

[H/T: Tony Cartledge]

‘Cradle catholic’ welcomes arrest-the-pope campaign

Deist and cradle Catholic Libby Purves welcomes the Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens arrest-the-pope campaign. “Not just because of what bad priests did and bad bishops hid,” Purves writes:

What troubles me even more is that in doing this, church authorities repeatedly dragged other people into collusion and thus into what — in more convenient circumstances — they themselves would call sin. Young victims, particularly of sexual crimes, badly need to know that they are absolutely accepted as innocents betrayed: the crime is not their burden and does not define them. One of the ways in which societies achieve this is by openly punishing the perpetrator. Too often, that didn’t happen. In some of the most infamous Irish cases the children who suffered were sworn to secrecy, with all the dusty, incense-smelling, habit-rustling impressiveness of canonical process. They were made to collaborate in the shame, by men round whose necks hung the cross they had been taught to revere.

Read the entire piece here.

[H/T: Ruth Gledhill]

What did the Rev. Kiesle do while Cardinal Ratzinger delayed?

The Rev. Stephen Kiesle remained a priest for years while then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger “bucked pleas from the Oakland, Calif., diocese to defrock him.” The Associated press has obtained a copy of 1985 letter signed by Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), delaying a decision for “the good of the Universal Church.”

The Contra Costa Times reports:

The letter came five years after Kiesle himself requested removal from the priesthood, and the diocese recommended it to the Vatican, following Kiesle’s no-contest plea in 1978 on a misdemeanor charge for tying up and molesting two preteen boys in the rectory of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Union City.

Kiesle, now 63 and recently released from prison, lives in the Rossmoor senior community in Walnut Creek and wears a Global Positioning System anklet. He is on parole for a different sex crime against a child. A self-described “Pied Piper of the neighborhood,” he is perhaps the most notorious among dozens of East Bay clergy accused of sex abuse over decades.

Numerous accusers have claimed he abused them as children at Our Lady of the Rosary, Santa Paula (now Our Lady of Guadalupe) in Fremont and Saint Joseph in Pinole, where he served in the mid-1970s, then returned in 1985 to volunteer as a youth minister.

What comprehensible “good” was there in delay of a decision on this this?

[H/T: Eric Bugyis]