{"id":188,"date":"2011-03-08T06:19:54","date_gmt":"2011-03-08T06:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/bill-donohue-v-moi.html"},"modified":"2011-03-08T06:19:54","modified_gmt":"2011-03-08T06:19:54","slug":"bill-donohue-v-moi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/bill-donohue-v-moi.html","title":{"rendered":"Bill Donohue v. Moi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BillSheesh. You tell<\/a> Donohue he’s right and defend his bud Dolan, and what do you get? A smack <\/a>across
\nthe chops for having the chutzpah to suggest that the doctrine of
\nscandal, used time and again to rationalize the shielding of pedophile
\npriests, has not served the Church well and ought to be jettisoned.<\/p>\n

Now,
\nI understand that people shouldn’t go around telling people of other
\nfaiths what to believe. And I am, as Bill helpfully informed his
\nreaders, a Jew not a Catholic, though I’m not sure why that deprives me
\nof “the ethical standing” to thus express myself. It would have been OK if I belonged
\nto a more ethical religious community? Or are all non-Catholics–to say nothing of those he calls<\/a> “dissident Catholics”–too ethically challenged to do so?<\/p>\n

In any event, the last time I checked, Scandal was not an article of faith but a medieval teaching (Yo, Aquinas!<\/a>)
\nthat has gotten itself ensconced in the Code of Canon Law. Because it is is
\nnot based on revelation, it is one of those teachings that the rest of
\nus are entitled–nay, even invited by the Church–to conjure with, even
\nat the risk of good manners.<\/p>\n

In its doctrinal form, Scandal
\nderives from the medieval psychological notion (I used to study this
\nstuff) that examples of bad behavior create more bad behavior, such that
\nit’s better to keep such behavior under wraps than to publicize it. As a
\nresult, Canon 1352 s.2 provides<\/a> for the total or partial suspension of excommunication and other serious penalties “whenever the offender cannot observe
\nit without
\ndanger of grave scandal or infamy.” The use of this canon to justify not getting rid of pedophile priests has been legion.<\/p>\n

I
\ndo consider it a blessing in disguise that Bill offered his readers my
\nemail address without linking to the post itself. Most of my angry
\ncorrespondents seem to calm down once I refer them to what I actually
\nwrote, and I’ve had some nice exchanges with them. I’m still waiting for
\na defense of the doctrine, however. So far, no one’s had a good word
\nfor it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sheesh. You tell Donohue he’s right and defend his bud Dolan, and what do you get? A smack across the chops for having the chutzpah to suggest that the doctrine of scandal, used time and again to rationalize the shielding of pedophile priests, has not served the Church well and ought to be jettisoned. Now,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nBill Donohue v. Moi - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/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\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/bill-donohue-v-moi.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bill Donohue v. Moi - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sheesh. You tell Donohue he’s right and defend his bud Dolan, and what do you get? A smack across the chops for having the chutzpah to suggest that the doctrine of scandal, used time and again to rationalize the shielding of pedophile priests, has not served the Church well and ought to be jettisoned. Now,…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/bill-donohue-v-moi.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-03-08T06:19:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/Bill%20Donohue.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Bill Donohue v. 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Moi"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/","name":"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","description":"Beliefnet Voices","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d","name":"Mark Silk","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","caption":"Mark Silk"},"description":"Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}