UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Silences such as Christian involvement in child abuse, anti-Semitism, slave-owning, demand constant rupture. On such noise does the health of Christian society depend.
~ Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (NY: Penguin, 2013), p. 216.
Some things appear not to change, don’t they? Just as I had finished reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Silence, news broke that abuse survivor and member of the Vatican commission on abuse Peter Saunders had been pushed off the commission — apparently, because he has been too outspoken. As Paddy Agnew reports for The Irish Times, Saunders has recently been vocally critical of Pope Francis for reneging on a promise to attend meetings of the commission and address commission members’ questions about his handling of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church.
Last week, the film “Spotlight” was screened at the Vatican for the abuse commission. Pope Francis conspicuously did not attend the screening of the film, a “silence” widely reported by media outlets around the world.
And because he refused to keep silent about Pope Francis’s obvious (to all of us with eyes to see) unwillingness to confront the abuse crisis forthrightly and transparently, Peter Saunders has now been silenced. As Rosie Scammell and Stephanie Kirchgaessner report for The Guardian (first link above), following his sacking by members of the abuse commission, Peter Saunders told the media,
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