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	Thomas Spence: Aiming Sex-abuse Rage at Pope Is Wrong The Dallas morning News April 7, 2010 http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-spence_06edi.State.Edition1.27f8f83.html This Easter marks the 25th anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church. I will turn 50 this year, so I have now been a Catholic for half my life. This personal watershed naturally provokes reflection, especially as it coincides with another humiliating media scourging of the church over the priestly sex-abuse scandals. Never once in these 25 years have I doubted my conversion, though in many ways the experience of Catholic life has been quite different from what I expected. Like many converts who have read themselves into the church, I experienced some rude surprises in the first few years. Not every priest, I found, was St. Thomas Aquinas, and not every bishop was St. Charles Borromeo. Nevertheless, blessed by the ministry of holy and dedicated priests and edified by the companionship of faithful Catholics, I found happiness in the church beyond what I ever imagined. Then came the shock of the clerical sex scandals that erupted a decade ago in Dallas and swiftly spread across the country. The villainy of so many priests was distressing enough, but even worse was the betrayal of their flocks by so many bishops. An acquaintance with church history gave me some perspective on the scandal; I knew things had been worse. But nothing had prepared me for such an overwhelming sense of betrayal. I understand the emotions of those who this Easter season are consumed with rage over the scandals. The focus of that rage on Pope Benedict XVI, however, is difficult to square with the facts. "There is no doubt that the episcopate is an office," wrote Pope John Paul II, "but a bishop must resist with all his strength any tendency to become a mere official. He must never forget that he is a father." This reality, it seems to me, is at the heart of the scandals. Many bishops acted like bureaucrats, trying to remove one difficult item among many on their desk by shuffling troublesome employees and hoping the problem would go away. That is not how a good father responds to a mortal threat to his children. This betrayal of a sacred paternal duty is why a feckless bishop arouses far more fury than, say, a malfeasant school administrator. Anger over these clerical crimes was normal and even necessary – the temple needed cleansing. Thank God the press in Dallas and Boston and other cities exposed these horrors. Yet the current media storm, led by The New York Times, is a different matter. The accusation that Benedict was personally complicit in old cover-ups is inciting popular anger at the man most responsible for the Holy See finally confronting the problem of sexual predators among the clergy. Numerous journalists have exposed the seriously flawed reporting on which this accusation is based (John Allen's critique in the liberal National Catholic Reporter is particularly devastating). Proof that The Times is now a less reliable retailer of scandal than the National Enquirer, however, has not discouraged those zealots who sense an opportunity to take down a pope. Perhaps with hindsight, an Archbishop Ratzinger would handle the case of a peccant priest differently than he did 30 years ago. But the evidence is overwhelming that as a priest, a bishop and a pope, Benedict has been an exemplary father. Why, then, would anyone concerned about justice attack a pope who fully embodies the quality most needed to address this crisis? After all, the collapse of fatherhood is ultimately the cause of most of the sexual abuse of children in our society. The answer, ironically, is that the enemies of the Catholic Church – of Christianity itself – are at war with the very idea of fatherhood. Their agenda, then, is essentially inhuman. And if the history of the last century teaches us anything, it's that truth is an early casualty of an inhuman agenda. Thomas Spence is the president of Spence Publishing Company in Dallas. His e-mail address is tspence@spencepublishing.com
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