Abandoned Altars

Give Guilt Top Priority, Pope Asks Priests

Vatican, Feb. 20, 2007 (NadirNews.com) - At an Ash Wednesday meeting with confessors, Pope Benedict XVI remarked on how the “best racket in the business” is realized in the sacrament of Penance.

The Holy Father was speaking to the confessors of the Roman basilica at a Lenten pep rally. After the officials of the Apostolic Penitentiary, led by Cardinal James Stafford, put on a stunning and energetic song and dance number, the Pope gave his address. “This is our busiest season for welcoming sinners,” he acknowledged, “and a heavenly opportunity to terrify them into submission.” He told them that the priest, as confessor, is a “vital instrument of our control of the sheep.”

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There’s an elephant quietly sitting in the nave that everyone on all sides of the clergy sex abuse crisis have been diligently ignoring, even the victims themselves. No clergy or even would-be reformers have really remarked on it yet, although it should be more obvious with each and every sad story. More importantly, it is a troubling issue that touches on the very heart and soul of Catholicism.

The monstrous truth is simply this: what the clergy sex abuse crisis clearly demonstrates is that the sacramental system has failed.

This is not just a case of hierarchical reneging of responsibility. There’s more to this than some bad apples. This is nothing that a few reforms can fix, some screening of seminarians or more pastoral responses by bishops. It is nothing less than a fundamental challenge to the entire Catholic Church, and it shows that the spiritual principles the whole structure is supposedly based on simply do not work.

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