Penance should be painful, especially for Bishops who've fallen down in their responsibilities as Cardinal Pell has. Check out the scene of the King of England being whipped in public as penance for his wickedness @2:60. Bishops should consider something like this both for themselves and their subordinates, because many people simply don't believe the apologies for past Crusades and all that:
[The Syndey Morning Herald] AUSTRALIA'S leading Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, has decided to throw his weight behind the historic apology to victims of sexual abuse issued at the weekend by Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne.
In a statement yesterday Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, said he ''wholeheartedly endorsed'' Archbishop Hart's letter of apology which went to 219 parishes in Victoria, saying the letter ''speaks for me, too''.
In the letter Archbishop Hart spoke of a ''crisis of faith'' and acknowledged that victims of clergy abuse had been betrayed, while the church had not always responded properly.
Link here...
2 comments:
I do not doubt the advisability of formal penance on bishops' part; but what, precisely, has Cardinal Pell done wrong? The 2002 claims of sexual abuse committed by him turned out to be entirely false, the word of a squalid perjurer. As for subsequent media frenzies against him, no-one with the slightest knowledge of his tabloid attackers' anti-Catholic agenda and predominant ethnic background will take these frenzies seriously.
Dear James,
thanks much for the comment. It's good to hear from you and you raise an important question. What has the Cardinal done, wrong? Well, for starters, making an empty apology devoid of action suggests a certain paucity of integrity all too common in the modern episcopacy. One might say it's almost a prerequisite for the office.
Apart from the facile nature of his apology, it might serve us well to ask what exactly is he doing to make some amends for his past negligence and other heterodox statements?
We weren't too happy about his Gay Mass or the way he handled Dom Alcuin Reed either, but falling down on the job with the recent sexual predator raises some questions about what other creatures might be lurking around Sydney and its environs.
http://eponymousflower.blogspot.com/2010/07/australian-priest-at-large-on-cardinal.html
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