BishopAccountability.org
	Commentary: Bishops' Actions Damage Catholic Church's Credibility By Bill Wineke Channel 3000 January 9, 2011 http://www.channel3000.com/news/26418254/detail.html Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki says he is "deeply ashamed" of events in his church that led the archdiocese to file for bankruptcy last week. He ought to be. Not personally, of course. Listecki has been head of the 640,000-member archdiocese for only a year. He did not personally cover up the 200 or so incidents of priestly sex abuse the church has already settled in Milwaukee. Nor did he personally approve the $29 million in church funds used to make those settlements. But he is head of the diocese, and he is part of a world-wide hierarchy that seems incapable of comprehending that it has conspired for decades to undermine the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church. My only argument with Listecki, then, is that he asserts the reason the church is filing for bankruptcy is because "priest perpetrators sexually abused minors." Actually, the reason the archdiocese is in trouble is that many of Listecki's predecessors covered up the abuse, transferred the offending priests to new parishes and tried to keep everything under the table. It was just a few years ago that Milwaukee Catholics learned that former Archbishop Rembert Weakland spent about $500,000 of church money to pay off a homosexual lover. Now, they learn their church has used $29 million, much of it contributed by poor parishioners, to pay claims against deviant priests and has no money to pay for claims still outstanding. At least Listecki concedes that the church owes something to victims. In Belgium, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard told members of a parliamentary commission on sexual abuse of children that he sees no reason at all why the church should be responsible for the actions of its priests. "Where will it all end up?" he asked, according to the Catholic News Service. "Pretty soon authorities will ask for compensation for (unhappy) children resulting from in vitro fertilization. And what about the studies showing the psychological impact on children who have two papas or two mamas … Will we have to compensate them as well?" Right. The Belgian archbishop equates child sexual abuse with in vitro fertilization and same-sex parenting. But, in terms of inflicting long-term damage on the credibility of the church, no one will soon top the actions of Bishop Thomas Olmsted, of Phoenix. A few weeks ago, Olmsted announced the excommunication of a Catholic nun, Sister Margaret McBride, because she, in her capacity as an executive of St. Joseph's Hospital, consented to the termination of a pregnancy in a mother who suffered from acute pulmonary hypertension and who, medical experts agreed, would die if she continued with the pregnancy. This was not a case of choosing the mother's life over that of the baby. The medical experts agreed that the baby had no chance of living outside the mother and the mother would not live if she continued the pregnancy. Olmsted not only excommunicated the nun, he then removed the hospital's Catholic designation because its leaders refused to repent their actions. You have to have a mighty strange theology to insist that a Catholic mother of four deserves to die because she wanted to bring forth a fifth child and that the hospital that saved her life no longer deserves to be called Catholic. Listecki is right to be deeply ashamed. Though I'm not sure he and I would agree on what it is he should be ashamed about.
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