A Masterful Defense of Our Sovereign Pontiff

The following is an excerpt from the National Review. This piece definitely deserves your full attention, and also, a full read. The entire piece can be found here. The photo below also appeared on the National Review website as an ad.

May God bless these people who willingly and lovingly tell it like it is.

It has been disappointing and irritating (but not surprising) that the New York Times has tried to set this controversy up as another Watergate, and with po-faced sanctimony reports each new weekly, unsubstantiated allegation of deviant clerical abuse in Moldova, Fiji, Timbuktu, Patagonia, and assumedly, the Moon. It wished to make it a war of a thousand cuts, escalating steeply and swiftly, on the Watergate pattern, to the destruction of the pope himself: the drumfire of endless outrage confected and displayed with pseudo-grave neutrality, from which debouches the tribal move to execute the chief. “The king must die”; regicide as tokenism, as liberal group therapy.

. . . 

Benedict XVI has declared the Church to be ashamed and penitent, has met with victims’ and their families, has expedited investigative and corrective procedures, has opened up access for complainants, and has imposed fail-safe strict controls, without delivering his clergy to the howling cannibals. He has handled it all like the great, scholarly, courageous, and profoundly civilized man he is, with humility, dignity, and effectiveness. He should now decree a reasonable deadline for past complaints and start to lead the Church out of the fire, and close down the decades-long turning of the spit that the Church’s enemies had been ghoulishly preparing.

As the pope tries to amputate what is bad, the Church’s enemies are trying to take advantage of that process to destroy the entire institution. This too is a pattern. Pius XII’s wartime performance was quite inadequate, but he did save 850,000 Jews, as is now coming to light. No one else did that. This child-abuse crisis is shameful and evil and disgusting. Only the Church can stop, punish, confess, repent, and prevent recurrence, all on the scale required. It is doing so, late and over-cautiously. But secular witch-hunts and lynchings are not part of the solution, and if they continue, it may be almost time for a few Counter-Reformationist measures. The scorching unction of the Church’s more rabid enemies might become more bearable to them if the Church’s adherents reconsidered their advertising budgets. In the case of the Times, its guardian angel, Señor Slim, would surely fly to its aid again with another infusion of 14 percent yield, usurers’ junk bonds.