{"id":32,"date":"2010-07-12T10:59:39","date_gmt":"2010-07-12T10:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/thanks-getreligion.html"},"modified":"2010-07-12T10:59:39","modified_gmt":"2010-07-12T10:59:39","slug":"thanks-getreligion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/thanks-getreligion.html","title":{"rendered":"Thanks, GetReligion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because GetReligion’s Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede<\/a> that I’ve offered<\/a>
\nthe “best defense” of the Goodstein\/Halbfinger NYT article<\/a>
\non Pope Benedict’s performance as head of the Congregation for the
\nDoctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough
\nto smack
\nher around<\/a> a little in a subsequent post, let me acknowledge the
\nvalidity of her latest grounds for criticism.<\/p>\n

First, G\/H may fairly be charged with taking a swipe at then-Cardinal
\nRatzinger’s position on Liberation Theology. Here’s what they wrote:<\/p>\n

As Father Gauthe was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal
\nRatzinger
\nwas publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that
\nthe church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the
\ncardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, if I’d been their editor I would have changed that to read “…for
\npreaching that empowering the poor and oppressed was the church’s
\ncentral mission….” In the context of the article as a whole, I count
\nthis venial sin.<\/p>\n

Second, and more importantly, Hemingway claims that the G\/H time-line
\nregarding when the CDF “dithered” is “a mess.” With respect to the
\nparagraph above, for example, her point is that the prosecution of
\nFather Gauthe and the crackdown on liberation theologians took place in
\n1980s, but that knowledge of the CDF’s full responsibility for abuse
\ncases indicated in a letter from 1922 didn’t surface until some time in
\nthe 1990s.<\/p>\n

I’ll stipulate that there is indeed considerable fuzziness about when
\nthe 1922 letter came to be known inside the Roman Curia. For all we
\nknow, the CDF’s staff canonists may have been aware of it all along. But
\nthat’s not the point. The CDF had some considerable responsibility for
\nabuse cases all along. And we know in
\ndetail<\/a> from the Kiesle case in the early 1980s that the CDF under
\nRatzinger didn’t merely dither; it brought to a standstill a proceeding
\nthat had been moving forward. As I noted, G\/H allude to the Kiesle case
\n(which Goodstein and Michael Luo <\/i>looked
\nat<\/a> earlier this year). Had I been the editor, I would have made a
\nlittle space to name and describe it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because GetReligion’s Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I’ve offered the “best defense” of the Goodstein\/Halbfinger NYT article on Pope Benedict’s performance as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough to smack her around a little in a subsequent post, let me…<\/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-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThanks, GetReligion - 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\/2010\/07\/thanks-getreligion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thanks, GetReligion - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Because GetReligion’s Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I’ve offered the “best defense” of the Goodstein\/Halbfinger NYT article on Pope Benedict’s performance as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough to smack her around a little in a subsequent post, let me…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/thanks-getreligion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-07-12T10:59:39+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Thanks, GetReligion - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/thanks-getreligion.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Thanks, GetReligion - 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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\/32","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=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}