{"id":585,"date":"2009-07-05T12:26:52","date_gmt":"2009-07-05T12:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/contraindication-papal-honor-o.html"},"modified":"2009-07-05T12:26:52","modified_gmt":"2009-07-05T12:26:52","slug":"contraindication-papal-honor-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/contraindication-papal-honor-o.html","title":{"rendered":"Contraindication: Papal honor for abusive prelate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Juliusz<\/span>Pope Benedict has to his credit always been brutally frank about his disgust over sexually abusive clergy, and in his talks for this year for the Priest he has made the personal holiness of clergy a touchstone. Remember his Way of the Cross <\/a>meditations<\/a> for Good Friday in March 2005, less than a month before his election?<\/font><\/p>\n

“How much filth there is in the church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him,” he wrote. “The soiled garments and face of your church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have soiled them! It is we who betray you time and time again.” <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/font>So how to explain this item out of Poland, as reported in The Tablet <\/a>of July 4?<\/p>\n

\n

A DISGRACED archbishop who resigned after sexually molesting local seminarians has received a message from Pope Benedict XVI, congratulating him on his “saving work for the good of the Church”. <\/strong><\/p>\n

“Guiding your sheepfold, you gave a testimony of faith in the resurrection of Christ which drove away all fear,” Pope Benedict told Juliusz Paetz [shown above], the former Archbishop of Poznan. “Venerating Mary as Mother of the Church and Queen of Poland with a son’s love, and piously worshipping the saints and blessed of your land along with your people, you laboured for spiritual progress.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a telegram to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination as a priest and published by the Poznan archdiocese’s Przewodnik Katolicki weekly, the Pope praised Archbishop Paetz’s “fruitful service” for the Church in Poland and abroad. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Pope John Paul II accepted the March 2002 resignation of Archbishop Paetz after he was accused of repeatedly abusing trainee priests in his western archdiocese. However, he continued to live in the Poznan Curia and participate in church events, including a youth rally in June 2007 and theology faculty anniversary this April. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The archbishop, now 74, has attended several recent audiences with Pope Benedict in Rome, where he owns a luxury apartment, and was shown on state television in May 2006 greeting the Pope during his pilgrimage to Poland. In November, a parliamentary commission investigated his past after media claims that he had acted as a Communist-era secret police informer while working at the Vatican in the 1970s and early 1980s.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Commenting on the Pope’s message, the mass-circulation Gazeta Wyborcza daily said Archbishop Paetz’s continued public appearances had caused “distaste among many local people”, while the Polska daily said the Pope’s “great respect” for the archbishop was “surprising in view of Benedict XVI’s severe statements on clergy who violate celibacy”.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Surprising indeed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pope Benedict has to his credit always been brutally frank about his disgust over sexually abusive clergy, and in his talks for this year for the Priest he has made the personal holiness of clergy a touchstone. Remember his Way of the Cross meditations for Good Friday in March 2005, less than a month before his election? “How much filth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nContraindication: Papal honor for abusive prelate - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/07\/contraindication-papal-honor-o.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Contraindication: Papal honor for abusive prelate - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pope Benedict has to his credit always been brutally frank about his disgust over sexually abusive clergy, and in his talks for this year for the Priest he has made the personal holiness of clergy a touchstone. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}