Thin mints and the Catholic Bishops

First they reprimanded the largest group of U.S. nuns, who by the way, tend to be way more popular than either priests or nuns among American Catholics. 

Now, it's the Girls Scouts who have come under the inquisition investigation by the U.S. Bishops.

The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts' "possible problematic relationships with other organizations" and various "problematic" program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops.

The bishops' conference provided a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, but otherwise declined comment.

Girl Scout leaders hope the bishops' apprehensions will be eased once they gather information. But there's frustration within the iconic youth organization — known for its inclusiveness and cookie sales — that it has become such an ideological target, with the girls sometimes caught in the political crossfire.

"I know we're a big part of the culture wars," said the Girl Scouts' spokeswoman, Michelle Tompkins. "People use our good name to advance their own agenda."

"For us, there's an overarching sadness to it," Tompkins added. "We're just trying to further girls' leadership."

With the bishops now getting involved, the stakes are high. The Girl Scouts estimate that one-fourth of their 2.3 million youth members are Catholic, and any significant exodus would be a blow given that membership already is down from a peak of more than 3 million several decades ago.

The inquiry coincides with a broader effort by the bishops to analyze church ties with outside groups. Rhoades' committee plans to consult with Girl Scouts leaders and with the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, which has been liaising with the Scouts for two years about various complaints.

 It's amazing that one of the world's great criminal enterprises could comprise such idiots.

But, of course, dear Readers, you'd be expecting this:

 

Three days of peace, music and pedophilia

Under the annals of "Who could have ever predicted..." comes the results of the Catholic Church's investigation into the cause of their recent history of child fucking.

Woodstock.

Glad we cleared that up. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Hey, they're already a part of RICO conspiracy, ain't they?

Connecticut Catholic bishops ask their parishioners to help them out.

Now the bill the bishops oppose would rescind the statute of limitations that is already 30 years past the accuser's 18th birthday in Connecticut, and I believe a similar law in Cali was ruled unconstitutional. But still, if I were the bishops I'd be laying kinda low these days. That's not how they roll, I guess.

Papal pogrom?

On the day celebrating what for centuries the Catholic Church said marked the murder of Christ by the Jews, the Pope's pastor likens criticism of Ratzo's handling of pedophilia accusations to antisemitism.

Speaking in St. Peter’s Basilica, the priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews.

“They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence, and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household. Then he quoted from what he said was a letter from a Jewish friend he did not identify.

“I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

Good Friday has traditionally been a fraught day in Catholic-Jewish relations. Until the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic liturgy included a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, and Catholic teaching held Jews responsible for the Crucifixion.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, stressed that Father Cantalamessa’s sermon represented his own thoughts and was not an official Vatican statement.

Infallible

I can't say I'm not amused by watching Ratzo's past come back to haunt him, nor am I surprised by his (and his adherents') response to the fact that he hid child rapists from the law -- that he is the persecuted one (like Jesus, you know). The New Yorker's Jane Kramer provides some perspective.

What Ratzinger managed, under cover of the ur-populist, airplane-hopping John Paul II, was to further, and in some sense complete, the isolation of the Church of Rome from the concerns of the world beyond the papal state. He conflated the dogma of infallibility, a baby doctrine in church terms—it dates from 1870 and has only been invoked once, to confirm the assumption of the Virgin—with the papal “teachings” that went through his office, and left a billion Catholics to accept them or to risk their souls dissenting. As Pope, he has regarded his own pronouncements as law; a case in point was his recent reaffirmation of a 1968 encyclical against birth control, issued despite the advice of the Vatican’s own commission on contraception, which found nothing in scripture to justify a ban that, in fact, was always as much concerned with producing Catholic babies as with theology. He has reinstated a small group of ultra-conservative priests, among them a Holocaust denier, who had been excommunicated, along with their renegade archbishop, in the late eighties. And he has continued to marginalize progressive theologians—including the Jesuits of the Pontifical Gregorian University, who have had their interfaith theology seminars put in question. Put simply, he has given Catholics a choice between his heaven and a hell he insists is of their own making.

Kennedy's Catholicism

At the risk of sounding disrespectful (what, in a blog?), as moved as I was watching Ted Kennedy's funeral service, I was also struck at how effective it was as a two hour infomercial for the Catholic Church. The old rituals and words were oddly comforting, and the basilica in Boston was beautiful and majestic.

Later that evening at the burial in Arlington, the letter Kennedy had written to the Pope in recent months was read aloud.

As the single eternal flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave burned just steps away up a grassy slope, and the Capitol dome and the monuments of Washington were illuminated against the night sky, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick stood next to Kennedy’s casket and recited excerpts from the letter, as well as a reply from an unnamed aide to the pope. It was a stunning and powerful moment that closed an extraordinary day of farewell observances.

“I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings,’’ Kennedy’s letter stated. “I continue to pray for God’s blessings on you and our Church and would be most thankful for your prayers for me.’’

The Vatican reply came two weeks later: “His Holiness prays that in the days ahead you may be sustained in faith and hope, and granted the precious grace of joyful surrender to the will of God our merciful Father.’’

The letters lent a deeply personal tone to what was otherwise a full military burial, taking place on a gentle rise in the heights overlooking Washington, under the shelter of two maple trees. The journey from Hyannis Port to Boston to this Virginia hillside ended as a bugler played taps, and Kennedy’s wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, clasped the flag that had draped her husband’s casket. Bells rang, chiming the hour of 8 p.m. At the command of “Ready, Fire!’’ a corps of seven riflemen from the US Army’s Third Infantry, standing nearby, fired three volleys.

McCarrick attributed the idea for reading from the letters to the senator’s widow.

“I was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago, and although I continue treatment the disease is taking its toll on me. I am 77 years old, and preparing for the next passage of life,’’ Kennedy said in his letter to the pope, which was delivered by Obama on July 10.

Kennedy listed the ways in which his politics comported with Catholic social teaching, saying: “I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant, fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war.’’

Kennedy’s letter only obliquely referred to his support for abortion rights, a position that put him sharply at odds with church teaching; nor did the excerpt from the Vatican reply touch on the issue.

The Vatican response was strikingly pastoral in tone, expressing the pope’s “concern and his spiritual closeness’’ to Kennedy, and bestowing on the senator an apostolic blessing from the pope. That the Vatican responded at all is news - conservative bloggers have for days been claiming that the alleged lack of a response was evidence of the Vatican’s antipathy to Kennedy.