UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Bishops Meet As US Plans Slip, +Pell Threatens and US Bishops & House Leader Hastert Are Linked To Child Abuse Related Crimes
As US bishops get set to hold their last national meeting before Pope Francis’ US visit, the pope and bishops’ 2016 US presidential election strategy appears to be in a “free fall”. Pope Francis, with his seemingly discredited No. 3, Australian Cardinal George Pell, and the pope’s criminally investigated Minneapolis USA Catholic officials, may turn out to be more of a net liability than an net asset, as a supporter for US Republican candidates and their low tax billionaire backers, at least by the time the elections are held in November 2016, given the current negative papal trajectory.
Two new US criminal court proceedings have uncovered revelations relating to child sexual abuse scandals that have significant US national political connections. These cases, as well as the recent overwhelming negative Irish vote on one of the pope’s marriage positions, and the unending public relations miscues of the combative and shameless Pell (with at least some tacit yet shameful papal blessing, it appears), have important and potentially adverse implications for Pope Francis’ upcoming US trip and for his potential effectiveness in helping to elect Republican candidates in next year’s US elections.
The pope’s and his worldwide subordinate bishops’ credibility with many Catholics continues to nosedive as Irish voters showed. And yet Pell and Australian bishops continue to act as if they are ‘out of touch’ with Catholics lived reality. The Australian 60 Minutes news program has replied to Pell’s direct complaints and indirect legal threats about their first segment featuring the pope’s handpicked abuse survivor adviser, Peter Saunders, with their latest scathing segment on Cardinal Pell here. Pell and the pope seem to be getting poor media management advice. 60 Minutes is surely not FOX TV! Pell, by his shameful and public combativeness against Saunders, a survivor of sexual abuse by two priests, is arrogantly mostly making Saunders case against Pell for him, as the pope shamefully and silently observes.
Pope Francis and Cardinal Sean O’Malley appear to have used a shameful “bait and switch” strategy with Saunders. They selected him to meet with the pope to unload privately his abuse survivor stories. Then they picked Saunders, a devout Catholic, for the abuse commission. After Saunders and others publicly accepted commission membership, the pope and O’Malley farcically told the commission members that the commission will not address “individual cases”. If the commission fails to address individual bishops’ accountability, yes, it is a farce! Thank God the brave Saunders was unswayed by the papal ploy. He has prophetically pursued the individual cases of both Pell and Chile’s Bishop Barros. Amen!
Also, Canadian government officials recently demanded that the pope visit and apologize for “cultural genocide” and for the Catholic Church’s historical negative role with “native Canadian” aborigines. The pope objects fairly to genocide-like atrocities AGAINST Catholics, like Armenian, Iraqi and Syrian Catholics. What about genocide-like atrocities BY Catholics against indigenous populations?
The Canadian demand just further buttresses California Native Americans’ objections to the unwarranted and unnecessary canonization process for Fr. Junipero Serra. The Hispanic Franciscan’s flawed canonization is evidently mostly another offensive political sop to try to attract US Latino voters for the pope’s US Republican candidate, as Pope John Paul II earlier tried to do with Serra’s beatification six weeks before the US election in 1988 aimed at drawing US Catholic Latino voters to a “Vatican friendlier” Republican candidate, G.H.W. Bush, it appears.
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