DENVER (CO)
National Catholic Register
July 12, 2019
By John Grondelski
Over at Commonweal, Boston College theology and law professor Cathleen Kaveny tries to obfuscate the meaning of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s recent letter on the sexual abuse crisis… and perhaps score some points for the revisionist agenda of blaming that crisis on “clericalism” rather than the sexual immorality that—rightly—Benedict identifies as where the Church and modern culture began going off the rails in the late 1960s.
Kaveny claims that Benedict misidentifies the moral wrong behind the sexual abuse crisis: she thinks he is equating it with sacrilege (although she admits that “[h]e does not use the term”). She claims that this shift lets the Church off the hook, protecting the institution by identifying it as the victim rather than defending children victims. “Benedict’s letter seems to put clergy sex abuse in the category of sacrilege, not injustice.”
She wants to see the sacrilege versus justice question as an either/or proposition (not unusual for defenders of revisionist moral theology). It isn’t. It’s both.
I have always been very pleased by the fact that the 2011 retranslation of the Novus Ordo Missae restored the typical text, not ICEL’s “equivalent” translations. One of the important places where that translation recovered the real meaning of the text was in the introductory dialogue to the Preface. We used to say, “It is right to give Him thanks and praise.” We now respond, in keeping with the venerable ancient text, “It is right and just” (dignum et justum est).
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