This story is very big and wide and deep, and it’s not something we can be reckless about – not if we are serious about honoring the pain of the victims, because justice cannot be a half-and-half thing. Their justice must be balanced with justice for the pope, too. The few people I have known or corresponded with who have had some experience of these bad priests are not looking for the collapse of the church to assuage their pain.
But this story -if framed poorly and reported recklessly- can contribute to such a collapse, as I’ve written. This is not a case of all of us having a bit of battalion fun by taking easy swipes at Bush or Obama. This is a case where the fanning of passions with conveniently framed “facts,” culled from dubious sources, can have a very deleterious effect on the world: take down Benedict and you quite possibly take down the papacy for the foreseeable future. Take down the papacy and you have dislodged the centering pole of the whole “big tent” of Christianity, and you snuff out all the smaller churches which grew from her taproot. You leave the people with what? Judaism (with antisemitism is on the rise), or Islam or secularist authority.
Some may think secularism is sufficient to the life of the world, but billions disagree, and want more than that.
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