The Cost of Father Maciel (FirstThings June/July 2010)

[struggle4progress]

The Public Square
Joseph Bottum

Cardinal Sodano has to go. The dean of the College of Cardinals, he has been found too often on the edges of scandal. Never quite charged, never quite blamed, he has had his name in too long a series of depositions and court records and news accounts—an ongoing embarrassment to the Church he serves. The Vatican has been responding in a disorganized way to the frenzy of recent press stories about often thirty-year-old abuse cases. What it should do is put its own house in order, moving out the unhelpful remnants of the bureaucracy that allowed those scandals to fester for so long.

The latest revelations concern the financial benefits Cardinal Sodano received from Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the corrupt conman who founded the Legion of Christ and its associated lay group, Regnum Christi. And those revelations follow hard on the 2008 convictions of Raffaello Follieri for wire fraud and money laundering. (Follieri’s company, you’ll remember, was trading in decommissioned church property, and it relied for its crimes on the prestige of having Cardinal Sodano’s nephew as its vice president.) That news, in turn, followed the cardinal’s reported role in thwarting a 1995 investigation into the subsequently proved accusations against the episcopal molester in Vienna, Hans Hermann Groër ...

Not that the Vatican has managed to tell this story. The responses of the bureaucracy in Rome have swung between unhelpful silences and wrong-headed whines ...

... a figure such as Cardinal Sodano has to be removed from his current position ...

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/the-cost-of-father-maciel

[hedgehog]

1. We don't need to remove Soldano from his position; we need

to eliminate his position!

[BrklynLiberal]

2. k n r