Monday, August 30, 2010

In Case You'd Been Thinking About Forgiving the Catholic Church...

Consider:
[O]n Easter Sunday this year when Cardinal Sodano dismissed criticism of the child sex abuse scandal in the Church as ‘idle gossip’. Or on Palm Sunday in New York when Archbishop Timothy Dolan compared the pope to Jesus, saying he was ‘now suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the pillar’, and ‘being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo’. Or on Good Friday in the Vatican when Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, told those at St Peter’s Basilica, including the pope himself, that he was thinking about the Jews in this season of Passover and Easter because ‘they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognise the recurring symptoms.’ He was referring to the ‘collective violence’ of those who have been critical of the Church. He went on to quote from a letter written by an unnamed Jewish friend: ‘I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world.

--Colm Tóibín, "Among the Flutterers,"
London Review of Books  19 August 2010

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