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	A Critic Blinded by Hatred By Father Raymond National Post April 15, 2010 http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=60ab942b-97f5-43b7-ab89-49d3067e3ca4 Do you remember the carnival game Whack-A-Mole? Up pops one mechanical mole from his hole, you whack it down and up pops another. There is no pleasure to be taken in revisiting the sordid mess of sexual abuse, but the regular appearance of Christopher Hitchens in these pages requires it. Moles are naturally blind. Hitchens is blinded by hatred. A few weeks back Hitchens appeared here, vomiting forth his bilious anti-Catholic defamation. Having convinced himself that God is a fraud, he merrily concludes that by definition all religious believers are fools or knaves, and thus attributes to them all manner of evil. He hated Mother Teresa. Not from a distance, mind you, but signed up to provide offcolour commentary on her funeral Mass, all the better to denounce her between the altar and the grave. It was, not for the last time, a disgusting performance. No surprise then that, in full frothing fulmination, he slandered Pope Benedict XVI for "obstructing justice on a global scale." My colleague Rex Murphy then shovelled out the Hitchens stall, but so prodigious is the excrement that there remains work to be done. It is not fair to make Rex, only having recently joined us here, do the dirty work every week. On Tuesday, Hitchens, waging his atheistic holy war against Benedict, wrote that then-Cardinal Ratzinger's signature had been found on a -- get ready for it -- "permission to rape." Not daunted by previously relying upon a Wisconsin case reported in The New York Times and discredited in these pages, Hitchens now thinks he has found a smoking letter in a case from Oakland regarding Stephen Kiesle. If only the Oakland diocese had handed over the priest to the criminal justice system rather than petitioning Rome in 1981, Hitchens wrote, decades of subsequent abuse could have been avoided. Up pops the mole: Here we have it, Ratzinger is told about an abuser, and he makes sure that no one tells the police! Kiesle continues to work with children on direct orders of Rome! Ratzinger issues the Vatican-embossed "permission to rape"! Whack! In 1978, the priest was arrested, convicted and sentenced by the California courts. From that moment, he was never again allowed to exercise any priestly ministry. In 1981, already barred from any priestly work, Kiesle asked to be formally dismissed from the priestly state. Such requests presume that all ministry has already ceased. The dismissal came in 1987. Ratzinger's only involvement was to write in 1985 that because the case was very grave, it required careful scrutiny. After Kiesle was dismissed, he abused another minor in 1995 as a married man, for which he was convicted. For someone who hates the Catholic Church as much as Hitchens does, it should be sufficient just to tell the truth about the wicked things done and the necessary reforms that were too long in coming. He could consult a number of reports on the matter, some of them commissioned by the Church, others by law enforcement, still others by government inquiries. It is not really that hard to understand how the shape of this is different today than in 1975. Can it be that Hitchens and his ilk, riveted by this issue for years, still don't know the basics of Church law on priestly discipline?
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