Vale of tears, ctd.

The woes continued for the Catholic Church this week as documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Joseph Ratzinger, then-cardinal, now Pope Benedict XVI; Pope John Paul II; and other church officials were, by any account, snaillike in investigating yet another minister, Stephen Kreisl, whose record includes being accused of 15 male and female children.

He pleaded no contest to lewd conduct in 1978 for tying up and molesting two boys. He left the ministry in 1981, only to become a volunteer at a youth ministry three years later in Oakland, Calif. He was also imprisoned for six years in 2004 for molesting a girl at his Truckee, Calif., vacation home.

For those keeping score, here's a handy site which is tracking the Church's whole calamitous affair of, how can we say, unholy priests. Here is a detailed New York Times story about it, and here's a link to letters urging then-"Most Holy Father," Pope John Paul II, to defrock Kreisl.

[Photo: A 1985 letter, written in Latin, to the Diocese of Oakland signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The letter said that a California priest accused of molesting children should not be defrocked without further study. - Kim Johnson/Associated Press]

The Catholic Church's vale of tears

For a church which seems absolutely consumed with the topic of sex, from abstinence, to prohibiting condom use in Africa, to circumcision, to homosexual priests, to continued and near ubiquitous charges of molestation of children (some deaf, no less!), readers shouldn't be surprised that the Catholic Church and Joseph Ratzinger, the current pope, is summoning every possible excuse to deflect the allegations.

Indeed, charges against Catholic officials are mounting. Heaped onto the allegations, the short list includes that of:

• Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul, 55, who is an Indian priest accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old girl, may be extradited to the U.S. to face trial. He was alleged to have sexually assaulted the female church member while serving in Minnesota.

• Peter Hullermann, a German priest who, after receiving therapy for his pedophilia, was allowed to continue working. Current allegations have surfaced, spanning from the 1970s to the late 90s. Only in mid-March of this year was he suspended.

• Father Donald McGuire, who sexually abused two teen boys in the 1960s and was only convicted in 2006. He also allegedly had sexual relationships with at least seven teenage boys between 1969-2004. Here is a timeline of the egregious mess.

• Michael Teta and Robert C. Trupia — Two more, of which the late Tucson Bishop Manuel Moreno struggled with the Vatican to get defrocked.

I could, no doubt, continue. In the latest episode of blame-shifting, the Catholic News Agency is claiming that this New York Times article fails to mention that the lawyer Jeff Anderson has been the lead attorney in numerous suits against the church and has an obvious vested interest in seeing that new allegations come to light. Lawrence Murphy is the topic of The Times article, and he is accused of molesting up to 200 deaf children.

According to a William McGurn opinion piece, what Laurie Goodstein, the author of The Times story,

did not tell readers is that Mr. Anderson isn't just any old lawyer. When it comes to suing the church, he is America's leading plaintiffs attorney. Back in 2002, he told the Associated Press that he'd won more than $60 million in settlements from the church, and he once boasted to a Twin Cities weekly that he's "suing the s--t out of them everywhere." Nor did the Times report another salient fact about Mr. Anderson: He's now trying to sue the Vatican in U.S. federal court.

And the Catholic News Agency:

According to the Pioneer Press, Anderson charged that the Pope along with his predecessors was"the mastermind, head, of an international conspiracy to cover up their own crimes and keep them above the law."

Donald Marshall, who has accused Fr. Murphy of kissing him and attempting to fondle him when he was a teenager at Lincoln Hills Boys Home in Irma, Wisconsin, also spoke at the press conference.

Now 45, Marshall said he was shocked when he was told that “then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — had a chance to defrock Murphy but instead did nothing,” the Pioneer Press says.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger "may have not fondled me, but he's no different because he allowed it to happen," Marshall said, according to the Pioneer Press.

In fact, Cardinal Ratzinger was not appointed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) until 1981, well after the abuse took place.

His office addressed sexual abuse cases only when it involved abuse of the confessional until 2001, when it took over abuse cases from the Roman Rota. Allegations against Murphy came to the CDF’s attention in 1996 because of claims he abused the confessional.

The documents provided to the New York Times by Anderson and Finnegan, as well as the Times’ interpretation of them, have been called into question.

The documentation included the minutes of a key Vatican meeting between three Wisconsin bishops and CDF Secretary Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone. However, the same documentation revealed that these Italian-language minutes were translated “very roughly” into English using a computer translator.

Properly translated, the minutes show that the Vatican never ruled out the laicization of the priest, but a lack of records from the archdiocese created barriers to a canonical trial.

In his Wall Street Journal essay, McGurn provided additional documentation challenging the Times’ claims that the priest was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system. In fact, Fr. Murphy was stripped of his priestly faculties, a process McGurn declares the equivalent of taking away a doctor’s medical license.

McGurn challenged the press to continue examining the “hard questions” about Catholic prelates’ action in the Murphy case. However, he suggested reporters provide “some context, and a bit of journalistic skepticism about the narrative of a plaintiff’s attorney making millions off these cases.”

One can only wonder, however, what difference all this makes. We can't dispute the fact that lawyers are in law to make money. That Anderson is, perhaps, taking an active role in uncovering corrupt activity either says something about his good character or his bad character. But it doesn't matter which. The case against Murphy is only one case of a multitude leveled against the Catholic Church. In addition to cases pointed out here, the Murphy case

is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

And now, we have Ratzinger and other Catholic officials equating the ill-fated church with the persecution of the Jews.

If that sounds like a heinous analogical leap, you would be right.

Speaking in St. Peter’s Basilica, the priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews.

“They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence, and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household. Then he quoted from what he said was a letter from a Jewish friend he did not identify.

“I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

Quite the contrary, if any institution should feel a generous measure of guilt at this point, it should be the Catholic Church, and it should apologize to us all for the immoral acts it has both condoned, turned a blind eye to and exacted on humankind through these 1,800 or so years. Not to mention the less unseen, but just as disastrous, effects of teaching young children that they are created innately and spiritually sick and commanded to make themselves better by believing (however forced and obligatory that belief may be) or else face the fire. And in such a lowly spiritual condition, children are taught that confession is where they are to by reconciled to God, who, presumably, made them sinners to begin with. At least Protestantism claims to offer direct access to Jesus without a necessary, and also presumably, an equally or possible more sinful, intermediary, as we have learned, and it's in this sad context that the sex scandals with children only begin, making them, at once, even more internally wanton and deplorable than just the physical act itself.

Celebrities and Scientology

Kirstey Alley's recent brouhaha with The Today Show about whether Alley's new Organic Liaison diet program was a front for Scientology again makes me wonder how desperate some folks have to be desire something to fill a perceived spiritual void that they will believe some of the craziest nonsense ever invented (I highlight some of it here), and even donate money so they can become higher ranking members of the cult. Today, for instance, in writing story about the diet, noted that Alley donated $5 million to the organization about two years ago, giving her the Diamond Meritorious Award. Tom Cruise received the award in 2005 for donating $2 million. According to Wikipedia, among the ranks of other well-known celebrity Scientology members are: John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Catherine Bell, Nancy Cartwright, Beck, Jason Lee, Edgar Winter, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Anne Archer, Lisa Marie Presley, and opera singer Julia Migenes.

As it turns out, money really does by happiness and peace of mind, however strewn that path may be with sci-fi silliness. Here some other celebrities who have reported donated large sums to the church, along with their "awards:"

• Nancy Cartwright, 50, Patron Laureate Award: $10 million
• Kirstie Alley, 57, Diamond Meritorious Award: $5 million
• John Travolta, 53, Gold Meritorious Award: $1 million
• Kelly Preston, 45, Gold Meritorious Award: $1 million
• Priscilla Presley, 62, Patron Award: $50,000

Lay folks, as this New Yorker story reported about celebrity Scientologist, have to pay the piper for enlightenment as well:

An initial twelve-and-a-half-hour auditing session costs between six and seven hundred dollars, Greg LaClaire, a vice-president of Celebrity Centre, says. (Aspiring Scientologists can mitigate the expense by choosing to be audited by a fellow initiate rather than by a staff member.) In the Holiday 2007 Dianetics and Scientology catalogue, a deluxe Planetary Dissemination Edition E-Meter—billed as a “tool for Golden Age of Tech certainty,” to assist in “faster progress up The Bridge”—was offered, in “Diamond Blue,” for five thousand five hundred dollars.

Some, of course, have realized the falsities and possible abuses inside the church and have cried foul. This article relates some of their painful exoduses from the organization:

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years, in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a journey they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars for courses and counseling and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

Thus, Scientology isn't all that different than other religions in some regards: fantastical stories, claims that it produces inner peace and vanquishes internal and/or spiritual demons and driven by power and influence. Because it's human nature, celebrities can't necessarily be faulted so much for clambering after their spiritual selves in this way. But it's crushingly obvious that they, and to a lesser extent regular Joes fooled into the believing in the cult, like the family above, are purchasing their faith, similar to how fraternity and sorority members purchase their friends, both amounting to a deplorable and disingenuous business.

Why Israeli-Palestinian resolution is impossible

Yesterday's New York Times editorial, titled Diplomacy 102, suggested that it "would be a very important start" if

the (Obama) administration would hold both Israelis and Palestinians “accountable for any statements or actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks.”

And continuing:

We also hope that if progress lags (in moving forward with a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine), the administration will be ready to put forward its own proposals on the central issues of borders, refugees, security and the future of Jerusalem.

Mr. Obama has another chance to move the peace process forward. This time he has to get it right.

But the Obama administration has no chance to "get it right," as his predecessors had the same bleak prospects. Why? Because the conflict betweem Israel and the Palestinians go back thousands of years, with each side claiming, for religious and imperialistic reasons (which are often intertwined) that they are the "true" proprietors of the disputed land.

Case in point, Elizabeth, apparently on Israel's side, commented on the above-referenced editorial:

There will be no true peace in the Middle East until the Arab world acknowledges that the land of Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people there can be no peace.

Jews were living in ancient Israel, Judea and their capital of Jerusalem for over 1,800 years before the birth of Muhammad and over 2,000 years before the Muslim Conquest of the Holy Land.

Just because our ancestors were expelled into exile by the Romans does not mean we Jews have forfitted our rights to our ancestral land.

Now that does not mean there cannot be a peace agreement with the Arabs, it does mean though that this history deserve recognition.

Similarly, just as Palestinian refugees need to be recognized so too do the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries in the 40's and 50's.

The key to resolving this conflict is understanding the history and connections of the other side.

Meanwhile, Efraim Karsh's book "Islamic Imperialism," which makes the case that the push for Islamic expansion among Muslims is the key to understanding the constant and unending turmoil in that region, quotes numerous Arab sources touting Palestinian ownership of the lands. Citing Palestinian Authority Television from Oct. 2, 2000, Karsh records:

Since [the caliph] Umar and Saladin we haven't given up our original rights in Jerusalem and al-Aqsa, our Jerusalem, our Palestine. If time constitutes the [the criteria of] existence, then Israel's temporary existence is only fifty-two years long while we, the Palestinian Arabs, have lived here for thousands of years, and we, the indigenous population, will eventually expel the invaders, however long it takes.

Or, Karsh notes,

In other words, the "Question of Palestine," is neither an ordinary territorial dispute between two national movements nor a struggle by an indigenous population against a foreign occupier. It is a holy war by the worldwide Islamic umma to prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam to the infidels: "When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims." Like other parts of the world conquered by the forces of Islam, "the land of Palestine has been an Islamic trust (waqf) throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, [hence] no one can renounce it or part it, or abandon it or part of it." This makes the present struggle over Palestine a direct extension is Islam's historic fight against its two foremost medieval enemies — the crusaders and the Mongols:

"The Muslims had faced those invasions and planned their removal and defeat, [and] they are able to face the Zionist invasion and defeat it. This will not be difficult for Allah if our intentions are pure and our determination is sincere; if the Muslims draw useful lessons from the experiences of the past, and extricate themselves from the vestiges of the [Western] ideological onslaught; and if they follow the traditions of Islam."

So, this isn't a battle that's going to be won, I don't think, with Diplomacy 101 or Diplomacy 102 because the struggle itself predates modern diplomacy, democracy and rationality itself. The millennial struggle for that section of the Middle East can be reduced to only one of three conclusions: the efforts or intentions of Muslims regarding Palestine have simply not been to Allah's liking (thus conflicts continue) or Allah is impotent to assist Arabs in reclaiming the land from Israel or Allah wasn't there in the first place. Since the Koran was strewn together in the 6th century, much of it replicated the Bible, and coming long after even the New Testament was written, I would conclude the latter.

As Karsh correctly notes,

Only when the political elites of the Middle East and the Muslim world reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism, forswear pan-Arab and pan-Islamic imperialist dreams, and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of political ambition, will the inhabitants of these regions at least be able to look forward to a better future free of would be-Saladins.

But that's not the stated call for Muslims. The stated purpose, as Karsh notes, and as I have referenced previously, has been consistently the following down through the centuries:

• “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god by Allah.’ – Muhammad’s farewell address, March 632


• “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.” – Saladin, January 1189


• “We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.” – Ayatollah Khomeini, 1979


• “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is not god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.” – Osama bin Laden, November 2001

Thus, forging peace in that region, while reason and logic are far from its shores, becomes impossible while that particular brand of religion entangles every strain of independent thought.