"A Broad, Deep, Clerical Conspiracy" and "Bishop Accountability Has Proved a Contradiction in Terms": More Commentary

And there's more: here's another diptych from recent commentary that I want to offer for your consideration — about a totally different topic than the one discussed in the diptych I just provided in my previous posting:

"A Living Symbol of the Catholic Church's Tolerance for the Sexual Abuse of Children": Cardinal Law's Legacy Remembered (2)

Cardinal Law was an evil person.

The fact he’s getting a full dignified funeral while the Catholic Church would certainly deny me one for being in a relationship with another man is really all you need to know about how deplorable it has become. https://t.co/8EFjp3kSg6

— Kayle Clark 🏳️‍🌈 (@kaclk) December 20, 2017

"A Living Symbol of the Catholic Church's Tolerance for the Sexual Abuse of Children": Cardinal Law's Legacy Remembered

I don't want to see a single reference to Cardinal Bernard Law's death that doesn't reference his central role in exposing children to pedophile priests. His actions were as damaging as those priests, and he should have died in jail.

— Robert Merriman (@RobertHMerriman) December 20, 2017

For the New Civil Rights Movement website, David Badash gathers a thought-provoking compendum of responses to news of the death of Cardinal Bernard Law, whose legacy will be summed up by his protection of priests abusing minors, by the lies he told to accomplish that end, by his hunger for ecclesiastical power and power in the secular realm and how he used that power to harm others. As one thinks about this life and that legacy, it's hard not to hear gospel verses ringing in one's ears — about how we'll be judged at the end of our lives according to how we dealt with the least among us; about how what we whisper in the dark will be shouted from the rooftops; about how the crops we reap will be from the seeds we have sown.

"Spotlight": My Five-Point Commentary

Steve and I went yesterday to see "Spotlight." Most of you will already know quite a bit about this film, but in case anyone reading this blog doesn't have information about it, it's a depiction of the dramatic story of the gradual awakening of the Boston Globe's investigative "Spotlight" team to the massive ramifications of the abuse story in the Catholic church. It's the story of how, after having been alerted to this by abuse survivors like Phil Saviano of SNAP, the Globe ignored the situation until reports about a single monstrously abusive priest in the Boston archdiocese, John Geoghan, alerted Globe journalists to the fact that there were more abusive priests in the diocese — as many as 90 — hiding in plain sight, whose histories of abuse were known to all kinds of powerful people but above all to the diocese's chief shepherd Cardinal Law, but about whom no one with power to combat the abuse had done anything at all. 

Gerald T. Slevin: After Elections, Who Will Prosecute More Predatory Priests? Constitutional Lawyer Obama Or The Three R's---Romney, Ryan & Ratzinger? And Why Does It Matter?

Another hard-hitting and exhaustively researched essay by the Harvard-trained former Wall Street lawyer Jerry Slevin today.  Jerry looks at the two U.S. presidential candidates in light of their records in dealing with issues of child abuse and of church and state, and challenges Catholics to inform our consciences as we select a candidate by thinking carefully about why the Vatican and U.S. bishops appear to be playing very overt partisan politics in this election cycle--to assure that the candidate (Romney) more likely to be lenient to Catholic officials prosecuted for criminal activity with child abuse cases is elected.  What follows is Jerry's essay:

Former Irish President Mary McAleese on Attack by Cardinal Law and Mary Ann Glendon

Just think for a moment about what this report means: a former president of a sovereign nation reveals that when she is on an official political visit to another nation, a prince of the Roman Catholic church feels perfectly free to upbraid her for theological views she has every right to hold, and then to usher her and her visiting political team into a room "where a well-known American conservative Catholic, Mary Ann Glendon, is waiting to lecture the President on her views on women priests."