UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
The Vatican Titantic is sinking rapidly. The key 85 year old “Captains”, Pope Benedict and Cardinal Sodano, spent their formative years under Hitler and Mussolini and know how to survive a sinking ship. They, with their octogenerian Vatican clique, are now trying to commandeer a personal lifeboat by ramming through quickly a subservient new Pope who will do their bidding for their few remaining years, leaving younger Cardinals, Bishops and worldwide Catholics to swim for themselves thereafter. The Pope and his architects have been planning his nearby “refurbished convent” for many months, yet Cardinals are now being stampeded to vote early. Will all Cardinals be so shortsighted to fall for this? Will at least one-third of them slow the election process down and still salvage the Church (and themselves) instead? There is a way they can do this as described below.
Captains Ratzinger and Sodano, however well intentioned, have for three decades misdirected the Church after hitting the iceberg of priest child abuse, amidst increasing irrelevance to world Catholics. All Cardinals need to act now to begin to fix the Church first before it is too late, especially before an ineffective new Pope is installed for life to bail out the reckless Captains. Prosecutors are increasingly moving into the Church, while Catholics are steadily moving out, and all will continue to do so if the Church is not fixed promptly.
President Obama’s new Catholic chief of staff, Denis McDonough, just said on Meet The Press, in effect, that the Church will do fine if it does the right things. And what if it continues to do some bad things? President Obama and a U.S. Presidential investigation commission, similar to Australia PM Julia Gillard’s new commission, would have the clout to compel much of the fix needed. Will Cardinals instead try to fix the Church themselves now or risk sitting in future prison cells, as some of them very well may be doing soon, wishing they had fixed it when they could have.
Here’s what Cardinals can and should do. They need to block by a one-third vote any papal candidate that will not agree publicly now to take the following three actions:
(1) Serve only a three year term subject to re-election thereafter. Pope Benedict just proved by resigning that the papacy is not a lifelong position.
(2) Appoint now a special committee to identify and recommend within nine months needed structural and pastoral changes, as described in my April 2010 Washington Post web column warning Pope Benedict what he was facing, that he failed to acknowledge, and which is linked here at:
(3) Implement the needed changes so identified at a worldwide council held away from Rome within six months of receipt of the special committee’s recommendations as described in my Washington Post column. …
We all have a moral obligation to protect children and signing a petition is a simple, yet potentially effective, way towards meeting that obligation. Please take a minute and sign it at:
[Click here for the petition.]
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.