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| Interesting Fallout from the Legionaries Scandal By Damian Thompson Telegraph April 13, 2010 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100034343/interesting-fallout-from-the-legionaries-scandal/ My traditionalist priest friends are, thank God, not susceptible to the sin of Schadenfreude. But, if they were, they might note that several Vatican officials dragged into the financial side of the Legionaries of Christ scandal were stubbornly opposed to Pope Benedict XVI’s attempts to improve the worship of the Catholic Church by liberating the pre-Vatican II form of the Roman Rite. As I said yesterday, I can’t see how Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Dean of the College of Cardinals, can cling on in the light of accusations of his links to the fabulously wealthy Legionaries made by Jason Berry in the National Catholic Reporter. And Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, formerly John Paul II’s private secretary, must also be a nervous man. Dziwisz is accused by Berry of accepting charitable donations that smoothed the way, shall we say, for Legionary supporters to attend the “private” Masses of John Paul. Cardinal Ratzinger abandoned those semi-public occasions when he became Pope, perhaps because he suspected something was not quite right. Also, Berry reports that Ratzinger pushed away one of the Legion’s “charitable” bungs when it was offered to him in an envelope. His puritanical attitude towards money was one of several things that distinguished him from the curial backslappers, who were sometimes surprisingly effective at limiting his access to John Paul II. Another was his wish to act more firmly against senior clergy accused of sex offences. Something I’d like to know: in their obsession with getting as close as possible to papal Masses, did the Legionaries exert any pressure on Archbishop Piero Marini, John Paul’s MC (and the designer of liturgies whose rubrics owed more to the Metropolitan Community Church than to Catholic tradition)? Archbishop Marini, you may recall, was given a slap-up party by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor in Westminster to celebrate the publication of a book subtly dissing (as we say these days) Pope Benedict’s reforms. |
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