VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Oct. 12, 2012
Synod of Bishops 2012
Benedict XVI raised some eyebrows last night when, addressing a crowd in St. Peter’s Square recalling Pope John XXIII’s famous “discourse on the moon” on the eve of the Second Vatican Council fifty years ago, he said the church’s joy today is “more sober” than it was then, because in the meantime “we have learned and experienced that original sin exists.”
“We have seen that even in the Lord’s field there is discord,” Benedict said, “that even in the net of Peter we find bad fish, that human weakness is present even in the church.”
Though the pope didn’t say so out loud, it’s difficult not to imagine he had the child sexual abuse scandals at least partly in mind when he crafted those lines.
Today, awareness of the impact of the church’s “bad fish” found a clear echo in the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, in the form of a speech delivered by Bishop Brian Dunn of Antigonish in Canada. The diocese has been among the epicenters of the scandals, in part because Dunn’s predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lahey, was charged in 2009 with having child pornography on his laptop as he tried to reenter the country. Lahey eventually pled guilty in 2011, and was laicized by the Vatican in May.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.