The Legion, aided by the Vatican, keeps churning out numbers of priests.
Are these 61 men, trained in Maciel methodology, up to the standards described by Pope Benedict in his 2010 year end address to the Curia. And, please, Your Holiness, Maciel and henchmen did not abuse boys because of lack of doctrinal orthodoxy and moral teachings; they reeked of these. Do not overlook the psychological and mental health aspects of our priests; as Aquinas says, "Grace presupposes Nature; but cannot replace it"; they need to be healthy in body, mind, heart in order to be good priests. In this blogger's opinon They have to be honest, truthful, sincere and authentic men before they can be good priests, something that Legionaries are not trained to be!
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John Allen summary:
The Christmas address to the Curia is typically the moment in which popes take a look back at the year. The fact that Benedict spoke first about the crisis reflects just how long a shadow it cast over 2010.
Sound-bites from the pope’s speech have been widely reported, but to understand what Benedict was saying it’s important to bring the full context into view.
Reading the pope’s words, there can be little doubt about his personal anguish. He quotes at length from a 12th century vision of St. Hildegard of Bingen, which vividly describes how the “garment” of the church is “torn by the sins of priests.” The pope said the vision is directly applicable to current events.
“The way she saw and expressed it,” the pope said, “is the way we have experienced it this year.”
June 29, 2010, marked the close of a “Year of Priests” called for by Benedict XVI, and he situated his reflections on the crisis in the context of appreciation for the “great gift” of the priesthood.
“We realized afresh how beautiful it is that human beings are fully authorized to pronounce in God’s name the word of forgiveness, and are thus able to change the world, to change life,” the pope said.
“We realized how beautiful it is that human beings may utter the words of consecration, through which the Lord draws a part of the world into himself, and so transforms it at one point in its very substance; we realized how beautiful it is to be able, with the Lord’s strength, to be close to people in their joys and sufferings, in the important moments of their lives and in their dark times; how beautiful it is to have as one’s life task not this or that, but simply human life itself – helping people to open themselves to God and to live from God.”
Especially in that context, the pope said, we were “all the more dismayed” by revelations about priests who “twist the sacrament into its antithesis, and under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime.”
Facing that ugly reality, Benedict called for an examination of conscience about what went wrong, and offered a resolution to make things right.
“We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred. We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen,” he said.
Benedict vowed “to make every possible effort in priestly formation to prevent anything of the kind from happening again,” and also expressed his thanks both to those who work to help victims, and to “the many good priests” who exhibit humility and fidelity.
At the level of diagnosis, Benedict returned to a familiar theme, asserting that mistaken theories in Catholic moral theology in the 1970s helped make the sexual abuse crisis possible. By downplaying absolute good and evil and treating morality as a matter of weighing consequences, the pope said, those theories opened the door to justifying gravely immoral behaviour, including the sexual exploitation of minors.
As a result, Benedict called for renewed emphasis in moral formation on Pope John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which explicitly rejected theories such as “consequentialism” and “proportionalism,” asserting that some acts are always “intrinsically evil” and can never be justified.
