Cardinal Ratzinger's Letter: The Smoking Gun Fires a Blank

The 1985 letter from Cardinal Ratzinger is being hyped by the media as proof that the Cardinal was soft on sex abuse. When I read the letter I sort of scratched my head. This is the smoking gun that proves the Church was soft on sex abuse?

Fr. Joseph Fessio puts this in perspective. (Read the complete column here.) Here's a portion of what he writes:

When John Paul II was elevated to the papacy in the Fall of 1978, he immediately changed the policy on priestly dispensations. I don't have the exact dates and numbers at hand, but I remember at the time that many of us were amazed that the hundreds of dispensations per year (and it may have been thousands) under John Paul II's predecessor, Paul VI, suddenly were reduced to almost zero. It was almost impossible to get a dispensation in 1980.

What was John Paul's intent? To restore the integrity of the priesthood and of marriage. These commitments are permanent. A priest may be removed from ministry, but he will not be given a dispensation to marry. Priests are to be made to take their commitments with utmost seriousness. They will be an example to married couples to take theirs seriously also. When a priest makes a promise of celibacy, it's forever; when a couple make vows of marriage, it's forever.

This is the decisive context of Cardinal Ratzinger's letter to Bishop Cummins. It is not a smoking gun. It did not mean that Ratzinger was not taking the priest's sins seriously. (He called the accusations "very serious" [gravis momenti].) It meant that he, following the policy of John Paul II, was taking the priesthood and its commitments very seriously.

And again, this entire affair had nothing to do with preventing further abuse by this priest. That had already been done, or should have been done, by the local bishop.

I think the media will have to come up with something more substantive than this before they string up Pope Benedict. But have no fear, they will keep trying.

It is certainly interesting how little attention the media gives to cleaning up the abuse in the public schools where children can be sent off to abortion mills without telling their parents, and where teachers and coaches in large numbers have abused kids. Somehow the media isn't particularly interested in that story. In fact they aid and abet the psychological and emotional molesting of children by gay activists.

The American College of Pediatricians recently warned about the damage to children from pro-gay promotion of gender confusion. But don't hold your breath waiting for the mainstream media to report that story. The kids are just collateral damage in the homosexual war against straight America.