By Joe Fitzgerald
Boston Herald
April 21, 2008
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1088501&srvc=home&position=recent
Three years ago, while multitudes chanted "We have a new pope!" upon seeing white smoke at St. Peter's Basilica, critics of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger were already predicting gloom and doom.
Ratzinger, they charged, was the last thing the Catholic Church needed, especially here in America, figuring his reputed inflexibility would put him very much at odds with a culture wanting to believe anything goes and everything's negotiable.
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"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled as fundamentalism," he'd declared two days earlier at a Mass dedicated to the papal election process. "Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards."
One headline writer called him 'God's rottweiler.'
From the moment he became Pope Benedict XVI, he was on a collision course with local malcontents whose resistance to the teachings of the church added immeasurable ugliness to the scandal that left it reeling.
In their exploitation, they shamelessly created a witch hunt in which basic American tenets, such as the presumption of innocence, were tossed to the wind in reckless pursuit of ideological agendas.
Back when Bernard Law was made a cardinal here in 1984, Pio Laghi, the pope's ambassador, quipped, "After Boston, only heaven," meaning Boston was a dream assignment for anyone wearing a Roman collar.
By the time Law left in the throes of the scandal, however, that collar had become a scarlet A, thanks to a lynch-mob mentality implying every priest was guilty by association, a slur made unconscionable by the fact it was intentional.
Yes, it was heartwarming to read of the pope's unprecedented private meeting with local victims of priestly abuse; even his most wild-eyed critics were momentarily mollified.
But, lest it be overlooked, he also had the grace to allude to forgotten victims, too, urging love for those faithful priests who, while remaining true to their vows and callings, were made to pay a price for crimes they did not commit.
A young parochial vicar in a bustling Boston parish shared those frustrations here at that time.
"There's a retired priest I'm friendly with, a very traditional guy who was rarely seen not wearing his clerics," he said. "But I noticed he stopped wearing them as often, and when I asked why, he said, 'I feel ashamed.'
"I know exactly what he meant. When I go into a CVS or supermarket now, people do one of two things: Either they look right through me as if I don't exist, or I get this contemptuous stare.
"When that happens, I feel like telling them, 'Look, I didn't do it, and I'm not God, so if you're mad at Him, tell Him!' It's as if they want to take it out on you personally.
"It wouldn't surprise me if these are the same people who say, 'Now let's not profile all Middle Eastern men because a few blew up the World Trade Center.' Yet they look at every one of us and wonder what we're all about."
He was absolutely right, which is why no list of victims is complete if it doesn't include the ones who unfairly bore the brunt of suspicion and loathing, much of it triggered by dissidents hoping to hobble a vulnerable Catholic Church by any means necessary.
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Decades later, idyllic Catholic childhood tainted So this one's for them, the ones who received neither sympathy nor settlements, though they were just as innocent.
May they now begin to experience some much-needed healing, too.
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