Michael Liccione has written an outstanding piece over at What’s Wrong With the World about the recent escalation in attacks on Pope Benedict in relation to the scandals, with Dawkins and Hitchens demanding that the pope be arrested and tried in an international court:
With whatever degree of justice, the scandal has now reached Pope Benedict XVI himself.
The complaint is not that he abused anyone himself during his long career, but that he was criminally negligent in failing to take due action, as an archbishop and then as the Curia’s most powerful official, against many of the priestly perps who came to his attention. Some of the better-known enemies of the Church, such as Richard Dawkins, now propose to arrest the Pope for that and put him in the dock, presumably at the International Court of Justice. The interest of such a ludicrous proposal does not lie in its legal plausibility, which I am unqualified to judge and is probably academic in any case. Its interest lies in the challenge it poses to explaining the irrationality behind it.
I believe myself qualified to discuss that, not only as a lifelong Catholic who has spent much of his professional life serving the Church, but also as a victim of molestation myself, in my early teens, at the hands of a priest-teacher of mine. My abuser died years ago; I have not seen fit to sue the Church; indeed my experience was one of the factors that led me to reject progressive Catholicism and ascribe to what is generally understood as orthodox Catholicism. I understand, of course, why many victims have rejected the Church, even religious belief generally, and have lived very troubled lives. How could anybody not understand that? But the generalized furor, among people who are neither victims nor loved ones of victims, strikes me as positively irrational. My way of explaining that can only issue in a statement of faith. But I believe that’s just what’s called for, if only at the end.
What’s irrational about the furor? [continue reading]
Bingo:
“The rage stems, in my long experience, from a free-floating bitterness about prior issues people have with the Church. Those issues are themselves mostly about sex and power among adults, such as celibacy, women’s ordination, and the authority the Church claims for her teaching generally. Maureen Dowd is one prominent purveyor of that attitude, but her distinctive style of thought—if it can be called thought—is not worth a digression here.”
Those who love the Church wish to see the predator priests and the Bishops who protected them punished. For those who hate the Church this is merely another weapon in their ongoing war against the Church.