INDIA
UCA News
Fr Myron Pereria, Mumbai India June 24, 2014
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, former Vatican Secretary of State and right hand of Pope Benedict XVI, has been implicated in a multi-million dollar fraud and embezzlement case. He is also in hot water for his new apartment, infinitewly more luxurious than the pope’s own lodgings.
This somehow typifies and also casts a depressing shadow on the way the Church government has been run over the past few decades.
The degree of ‘moral turpitude’ at the highest levels astounds the imagination. Are cardinals and bishops no better than crude politicians after all?
For a long time, for centuries in fact, the Catholic Church was one of the few institutions where a young man, with no family connections and little money, could rise to eminence on the basis of intelligence, shrewdness and ambition alone.
If in addition, he was servile enough to authority and avoided scandals, especially sexual ones, he could go far.
As a tried and tested formula, it worked for centuries, and still does. As proof, just look at the popes, the bishops and the senior clergy who have “made it”. All of them belong to an institution called the Church to which they have given their lives, from which they draw certain benefits, and whose stability and public image they are sworn to uphold.
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