Invitation to Cardinal Is Withdrawn

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Source: The New York Times

A former top Vatican cardinal who planned to lead a Latin Mass in honor of Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday at the Basilica in Washington has been disinvited by the conservative Catholic group organizing the event because of fresh controversy over the cardinal’s role in the sexual abuse scandal.

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, a Colombian who formerly headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, came under fire last week when a Web site posted a letter he wrote in 2001 praising a French bishop for refusing to hand over to the police a priest who had raped children.

“I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration,” Cardinal Castrillón wrote to Bishop Pierre Pican, who was convicted in France for failing to report sex crimes against children. “You have acted well, and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest.”

The cardinal compounded the controversy last week when he said at a conference in Spain that Pope John Paul II had authorized the letter and told him to send it to bishops around the world.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/us/22priest.html

[Wilms]

1. Institutional.

What hath God wrought?

[xchrom]

2. So conservatives are devouring each other?

Cracks in the vatican masonry.

[msanthrope]

9. It was done by mutual agreement, per the article. Good way to avoid bad PR. n/t

[rpannier]

3. Hoyos is a glaring example of what is wrong in the Church

Pican is a worm for not cooperating with the police
But, Pican is one guy who influences only himself

Hoyos is encouraging all clergy to thumb their noses at the police and that's much worse

[roguevalley]

4. disgusting: acted well. Teachers can go to jail not reporting. why

can't they?

[pundaint]

5. If only God didn't need ministers to assert Its will.

[harry_pothead]

6. If the Cardinal was involved in rape cover-ups, the group was right to disinvite him.

This is the exact thing we have been calling on the catholic church to do. Props should fly when they do it.

[cap]

8. it is nowhere near enough... it's time to take away his cardinalship

or whatever the precise term for demoting a cardinal is

[Angry Dragon]

7. Perhaps they are finally listening

[struggle4progress]

10. Pican was given a three month suspended sentence and fined one franc.

So the court was unwilling to exonerate him of his failure to report but also unwilling to inflict any substantial punishment. Pican's argument has been that the incidents became known to him through the confessional ande were therefore privileged. The abusing priest earned an eighteen year sentence. The letter of Castrillón to Pican can be found translated, with unsympathetic commentary, here, where it is also noted that Castrillón explains his letter as approving of the Pican's refusing to break the confessional seal