Define Irony

My pastor has struck again. Usually, I write on ways to better communicate and help people better understand Catholic teaching. I do my darndest to show fidelity to my pastor, my bishop, and of course, my most Holy Father. Usually my concerns are about what has gone wrong with secular society and how that has spilled over into what people believe about the Church. Usually. This posting is different. Since my pastor has side-stepped our bishop and then bashed the Holy Father, I am not going to post with fidelity to him. And he has done it all while not noting the plank in his own eye while pointing out the speck in another.

In fairness I need to post a link to the article. But not knowing how long our local paper will keep it active, I am trying to decide how much to pick out and quote or how much to merely comment on the article. The title of this post however, is due to a direct quote so I will show that in context.

The article is here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/04/06/1142699/a-stronger-younger-pope-is-needed.html#ixzz0kauO0i2i

And the part I am specifically addressing is quoted here:

It is my opinion, for what it is worth, that 10 years ago many American bishops should have been retired. They might be nice people; they just made terrible errors in administrative judgment. I think the same thing should happen today throughout Europe. I think it would be best if Pope Benedict were to retire. He may be a saintly man, but he is much too old to lead the church through this mess. We need a strong leader who will call the church to humility and penance for our past.

The central focus of the sex abuse scandal always has to be the victims. With that in mind, I have confidence in the good people who make up the church. Our managers have failed us in the past years, but management has never been the heart of the church: God is the center and that has not changed.

[Emphasis by me]

He basically claims he was "asked to weigh in" on the most recent sex abuse scandals and how the allegations are currently handled. While he does not identify the person or persons who asked him to weigh in, he does a fair job of explaining, albeit vaguely, for anyone but the fairly knowledgeable Catholic, the process the Church now has in place for preventing future occurrences and weeding out past ones. He begins to go off the rails when he claims that while the Church herself has a good system in place, there are still problems at the diocesan level.

His solution is that most bishops should have retired 10 years ago, especially and specifically including our most Holy Father in that list of the "much too old for strong leadership" category. (I was really glad our bishop responded to the article and set a few things straight because our pope is not too old, and Father was speaking without any authority whatsoever.) Now all of this was just one man's opinion and while I completely disagreed with his assessment of the facts, I do feel he has a right to voice his opinion on the age and competency of his fellow priests as long as he is very clear it was merely his (ahem, ill-informed) opinion.

But where I finally took umbrage was to the bolded sentence in the above quote, "They might be nice people; they just made terrible errors in administrative judgment." It is in bold again so no one can mistake my reason for my break in my normal blogging style. Administrative judgment, eh? Errors? Let me take you back to 2004 and show some "terrible errors in administrative judgment" concerning the exploitation of children.

There is currently only one person in the Catholic clergy who has been accused (and convicted, I might add) of crimes against children in the valley, and possibly in the entire diocese which includes the whole state of Idaho. That person was a deacon found to have copious amounts of child pornography on his computer. Which parish you might ask? Mine. Under the "watchful eye" of my pastor. Now I will grant that the awful images were on a computer at his employment and not at the parish. But it was a crime against children by someone in close contact with our pastor.

I do not hold Father personally responsible for the crime since he was not the perpetrator, but I do hold him accountable for the "terrible errors in administrative judgment" he showed after the fact. When was Father informed of the crime? Oh, sometime in late Spring, early Summer. When was the deacon relieved of his duties? Oh, sometime in early Fall! When did I come in contact with the deacon? When I was arranging for my infant son's baptism after he was born in mid August. There was only one good thing that came out of my son's illness at birth, a delayed baptism. He was too sick to be around people, but not so sick that he was in danger of death. So we delayed his baptism...until early November. The deacon had just been relieved of his duties a few weeks before.

Our entire parish was up in arms with our pastor's handling of the situation. We all felt so lied to. This was 2004! We were fresh on the heels of when the first scandals broke. Our priests and bishops had promised a "transparency in dealing with past abuse cases." It even went so far as our bishop writing a letter of apology for his part in a transfer in another diocese decades before. We knew that many people, back then, believed a pedophile could be rehabilitated. We understood that if you had only been in contact with one person, you would do what appeared to be the "normal and correct way of handling it." Our bishop asked our forgiveness and came clean with it. We didn't need to know the details because he was being upfront about it. We laid it to rest fairly quickly.

But when the scandal broke in our parish many people felt so betrayed that our pastor KNEW and yet he DID NOTHING! This was 2004! What did our pastor think; that because they were only images that real children weren't in danger? Didn't he learn anything? Pedophiles begin their crimes by those who are closest to them. This man was a husband and father. This man handled small children over a baptismal font! And yet this pastor felt it was fine to keep this under wraps for months on end. How absurd!!

The opinion piece by my pastor in our local paper brought up some very strong feelings in me. When my newborn son was in the NICU it was this deacon who came to give him a blessing. While I know because of my faith that the office of deacon gave my son the blessing, so it was therefore valid, I still can only see the image of a pedophile handling my newborn son. For my pastor to have the nerve to go to our paper and accuse others of "terrible errors in administrative judgment" based almost solely on their age is beyond ridiculous. That he does so now, in the shadow of his own reprehensible errors, is the definition of irony.