The “Golden Retriever” wagged his tail as he asked 67 million U.S. Catholics to create an atmosphere of healing and reconciliation for the victims while the “Rottweiler” tugged at his chain with a not-so-subtle admonition, "Also, I ask you to love your priests, and to affirm them in the excellent work that they do." In other words, “Lay off! There aren’t enough priests to go around as it is.”
A good number of the abuse victims were not healed by Benedict’s anemic apology. Becky Ianni, who was abused by her parish priest from age 9 to 11, said, “He talks about feeling shame for the scandal but it’s a far cry from the shame that victims have had to live with our entire lives. We don’t really need his sense of shame, we need him to take firm actions to correct the situation.”
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the website, Bishop Accountability, which documents sexual abuse, said that words are cheap, but action has a price and she is skeptical that Benedict is willing to ante up.
Doyle wants the church hierarchy that sheltered pedophile priests from the law and allowed them to continue to abuse the bodies and souls of Catholic children to be held accountable, “Rather than shifting attention to pedophile priests, he needs to focus on the culpability of bishops. The crisis occurred because many U.S. bishops were willing to hide their priests’ crimes from the police with lies.”
So far Benedict, who is the only church official with the authority to discipline bishops for their role in perpetuating the sexual abuse, has failed to do so. Only a sucker’s bet says he will.
While Benedict is in his Retriever coat, there are a number of other people to whom he needs to apologize: to gays whom he called emotionally immature and homosexuality “objectively disordered;” to the 50 percent of Catholics whose gender disqualifies them for the priesthood; to impoverished mothers who continue to have children they can ill afford because of the Rottweiler’s dogmatic stance against family planning and birth control; to the tens of millions of tithing Catholics who live in squalid poverty while he lives in opulence on their nickels.
While a “kindly” Pope Benedict XVI can get away with blaming priestly pedophilia on someone else’s secularism, all the other sorrow caused by his doctrinal intransigence rests squarely in Joseph Ratzinger’s gilded lap.
So who is the real Bishop of Rome, the Rottweiler or the Retriever? A few words of caution should inform one’s rumination on that mystery. Zebras never change their stripes and dogs only rarely change their dispositions.
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