UNITED STATES
The Worthy Adversary
Posted by Joelle Casteix on April 9, 2013
On April 5, The Wall Street Journal reported that:
As the church’s most powerful official in Argentina, [Pope Francis] didn’t comply with a Vatican call to create guidelines for handling sexual-abuse allegations in the country.
But then, in the next paragraph:
On Friday, Pope Francis met with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who heads the office in charge of leading the Vatican’s global crackdown on abusive priests and instructed him to continue the Vatican’s strategy for fighting sex abuse. The pope urged him to “act decisively with regard to cases of sexual abuse, pushing above all the measures to protect minors,” the Vatican said. Swift detection, Vatican officials have said, is crucial to stopping abusive priests.
So I ask: Why is it so important for Pope Francis to crack down on abusive priests NOW, when it wasn’t such a big deal three weeks ago, when he was still Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires?
How can he possibly implement a program on a global level when he couldn’t even draw up simple guidelines to prevent abuse in his own country … on time?
Yesterday, he couldn’t do his homework. Today, he’s the principal of the school. Only one conclusion comes to mind – and it’s not terribly optimistic.
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