{"id":23,"date":"2010-06-28T13:00:18","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/vatican-meltdown.html"},"modified":"2010-06-28T13:00:18","modified_gmt":"2010-06-28T13:00:18","slug":"vatican-meltdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/vatican-meltdown.html","title":{"rendered":"Vatican Meltdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grant you that it isn’t every day that the authorities<\/a> hold a country’s bishops for questioning for nine hours, confiscate their computers and cell phones, and drill into the sarcophagi of a couple of their deceased number. But when Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone protests<\/a> that the Belgian bishops had been held without food and water when they haven’t, and the Belgian bishops have to issue a correction<\/a>, that’s tells you the wheels are coming off the popemobile.<\/p>\n

Then there was today’s meeting between between the pope and his erstwhile protege, Cardinal Christoph Sch\u00f6nborn of Vienna, who has among other things<\/a> denounced Angelo Sodano, head of the College of Cardinals, called for a reform of the Curia, and suggested that the church take another look at clerical celibacy, divorce, and committed same-sex relationships. Sodano trooped into the meeting at the end with Bertone–on hand to mediate?–and a wacky press release<\/a> ensued that claimed that 1) Sch\u00f6nborn might have  in unspecified ways spoken out of turn; 2) Sodano didn’t really mean it when he denounced press chattering about priestly sexual abuse on Easter Sunday; and 3) only the pope gets to criticize a cardinal.  <\/p>\n

And speaking of wacky, it’s hard to beat Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio’s latest pronouncement<\/a> on The Crisis (h\/t Paul Moses<\/a>):<\/p>\n

The public perception by members of the Church is that somehow the
\nbishops engaged in a cover-up of crimes in the past or even in the
\npresent and were unresponsive to the needs of victims. We must all work
\nto change this perception since it is not accurate.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Golly, how could Catholics possibly have arrived at so colossal a misperception? Evidently it’s because the bishops heard no evil and saw no evil that they reported no evil. Or as DiMarzio put it, “the term ‘cover-up’ is inappropriate to describe the phenomena because
\nin most instances the abuse was unknown and never reported.” <\/p>\n

The next time Bishop Nick is in Rome, he might want to trek over to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and ask Bernie Law about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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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\/23","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=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}