More Spin From John 'The Apologist' Allen

This is the portrait of a man who is a clerical restorationist, not a Vatican reformer. No amount of John Allen spin can change this picture.

The following is an extract from John Allen's Friday article in the National Catholic Reporter. The abuse crisis must really be generating serious angst in Vatican circles because John is really starting to blow his cover as an objective insider. Objective? I think not. Insider? Most definitely.

Ratzinger and Castrillón

Finally, a footnote about the impact of the Castrillón episode: Ironically, resurrecting that 2001 letter may have doomed Castrillón, but it could actually help Pope Benedict XVI. (Only in the minds of people who seriously need to hang on to the notions of a papacy that cares about something other than the papacy.)

Throughout the most recent round of media coverage, there's been a serious mismatch between Pope Benedict's actual record on sex abuse -- as the senior Vatican official who took the crisis most seriously since 2001, and who led the charge for reform -- and outsider images of the pope as part of the problem. (John, you are asking us to ignore all kinds of information which point directly to Cardinal Ratzinger in favor of your obvious agenda to exonerate Pope Benedict. Unfortunately for you, elevation to the papacy does not magically erase Ratzinger's past.)

While there are many reasons for that, a core factor is that the Vatican had the last ten years to tell the story of "Ratzinger the Reformer" to the world, and they essentially dropped the ball. That failure left a PR vacuum in which a handful of cases from the pope's past, where his own role was actually marginal, have come to define his profile. (There was no ball to drop because Ratzinger held the ball and he didn't drop it. Most likely because it was thoroughly stuck to his fingers and he wanted to be Pope. There are only a 'handful of cases' because the records from the CDF are still secret.)

One has to ask, why didn't the Vatican tell Ratzinger's story? (Most likely because there was no perceived need to invent 'Ratzinger the reformer' until now.)

At least part of the answer, I suspect, is because to make Ratzinger look good, they'd have to make others look bad -- including, of course, Castrillón, as well as other top Vatican officials. (Interesting Freudian slip. To 'make' Ratzinger look good, is not at all the same as showing Ratzinger was good.)

Lurking behind that concern is a deeper one, which is that to salvage the reputation of Benedict XVI it might be necessary to tarnish that of Pope John Paul II. (It didn't take long to tarnish the reputation of JPII when it came to defending their own criminal actions. The issue is these guys made their own personal decisions to continue the corruption and the lies--including Ratzinger. Blaming JPII is the Vatican's version of the Nuremberg defense.)

In this case, however, Castrillón has inadvertently licensed the Vatican and church officials around the world to use him as a foil, effectively waiving a cardinal's traditional immunity from criticism. (You and they wish. Hoyos has also pointed the finger directly at Ratzinger as an accomplice, has laid down a challenge to other Cardinals to either shit or get off the pot, and made no bones about the fact he isn't going down alone.)

From here on out, when spokespersons insist that Pope Benedict fought inside the Vatican for reform, the world will have a much clearer picture of what his opposition looked like. At stake wasn't just the question of cooperation with the police. Castrillón was part of a block of Vatican officials who thought the sex abuse crisis was fueled by media hysteria, that "zero tolerance" was an over-reaction, and that removing priests from ministry without lengthy and cumbersome canonical trails is a betrayal of the church's legal tradition. (The truth is more likely that Hoyos was using all those excuses to maintain his own clerical power and that of Vatican Cardinals. Exposure of corrupt Cardinals like Groer, Trujillo, Rode, and Sodano would not bode well for the future of Hoyos, Bertone or Ratzinger and there might not have been a Pope Benedict XVI, and the real truth might have put an end to the restorationist agenda.)

That's important to keeping the record straight, because the truth is that the real choice in Rome over the last ten years vis-à-vis the sex abuse crisis was never between Ratzinger and perfection -- it was between Ratzinger and Castrillón. (Uhm, I don't think so. I think it's pretty obvious they were all on the same page when it came to protecting their version of Catholicism which generates great wealth for them as individuals. For Benedict, for whom wealth wasn't much of a motivator, the system generated great power of another sort.)

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I'm not the only one who thinks John Allen is sipping too long and hard at the Vatican trough. Here are a couple of very good comments which also take John the Apologist to task:

John, time to come back to the Christian faith and get out of the Vatican! You write: "That's important to keeping the record straight, because the truth is that the real choice in Rome over the last ten years vis-à-vis the sex abuse crisis was never between Ratzinger and perfection -- it was between Ratzinger and Castrillón." You've been there too long and it is affecting your thinking. Throughout this entire crisis, the choice has always been between Ratzinger and Christianity [not Castrillon-----he's lost]. Admittedly, Ratzinger, as far as we know at this point, never wrote a congratulatory letter to someone who obstructed justice in a felony. WOW--------that makes him a Master Reformer! I don't think so! For decades Ratzinger has held positions of power in the Vatican and was very knowledgeable about what was going on in the back rooms. Did he ever hold a press conference and expose all the sexual rot that he knew about? Did he ever publish an article in a religious periodical demanding reform? Did he ever publicly reprimand and cause a demotion of an offender at the hierarchical level? Did he ever call for a Third Vatican Council to begin a restructuring process in the hierarchy of the church? Of course not! That's why he was made Pope; he was one of the good ole boys! And for this, you give him the status of Reformer Exemplar! Wake up, John, and smell the rot all around you!

One does wonder how many in the Vatican actually are Christian. And then there is this one which lays out some pretty damning evidence:

I'm sorry, John, but your attempt to rewrite history doesn't work. Ratzinger's letter to all the bishops reserving prosecution of child sex abuse by priests to his jursdiction came out months before Castrillon's letter supporting secrecy was distributed with JP 2's approval and without Ratzinger's objection. Ratzinger's letter places child sex abuse cases within the pontifical secret in which only priests participate and any information leaking from the proceedings was to be punished by excommunication. There was no language allowing referral of crimes to civil authorities;the pontifical secret implies it is forbidden and Castrillon'sletter was consistent with Ratzinger's.

Bertone, Ratzinger's past and current chief assistant strongly supported the maintenance of secrecy in 2002. Ratzinger also refused to answer questions from reporters at that time, even slapping a reporter on the hand for asking them.
Whatever "Ratzinger the Reformer" did for ten years was done behind this wall of secrecy which was precisely the problem.
Ratzinger may indeed wish to change this policy now. But it is dishonest to pretend he wasn't part of it. After all, he was always JP 2's loyal assistant.
The problem then and now was the reservation of all church power to the clerical boys club which believed it was above scrutiny. Regrettably Ratzinger has been making it worse, most recently in his new canon law reserving governance to priests and bishops.
If he were sincere in changing the system, he would eliminatethe cleric-only proceedings that caused the problems. He would write a new canon law in which priests and bishops are forbidden from exercising governance without the participation of lay men and women.

There are some other less apologetic articles which have recently come out in the evil media and if one has time on this lazy Saturday they are worth reading. There is this article from the Houston Press, and this article from Newsweek, and this article from Catholica.com.Au.

Finally, totally off topic, I must admit to great disappointment with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. My own Governor Bill Richardson is now susceptible to racial profiling when he attends Diamond Back games in Phoenix. I have a suggestion for Governor Richardson. New Mexico should pass a law which allows police to stop any car with Arizona license plates if there is suspicion of illegal immigrants. Police should be instructed that said illegals could be in the trunk of any Arizona car. If some poor white snow bird gets stopped six times on the way to Albequerque maybe they would get the point of their own immoral law.