Canadian Bishops Deplore Hitchens Article against Pope, Catholic Culture, March 23, 2010

BishopAccountability.org

	Canadian Bishops Deplore Hitchens Article against Pope Catholic Culture March 23, 2010 http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=5805 CANADA -- The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement on March 18 criticizing two articles on the abuse scandal. "We strongly deplore the tone of these articles which are offensive to Canadian Catholics and imply that the Church has not responded to the problem of sexual abuse," the bishops' statement notes. "This is false, and the accusations are evidently influenced by prejudice." "The attacks against Pope Benedict XVI are unjust and incorrect," the statement continues. "In fact, the Holy Father has shown an example of great leadership, by apologizing to victims and by supporting the initiatives of Bishops to prevent future cases of abuse." In one of the articles, Christopher Hitchens wrote: The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil — a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice — and speedily at that. Hitchens is also a vocal critic of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, describing her as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud."

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