Dear Pope Emeritus Benedict/Your Holiness,
I’d like to wish you an uneventful retirement, even though you and I both know, let’s face it, that you’re swiftly approaching your own Best Before date. Soon, you’ll be shuffling off to go meet Jesus in person, likely a comforting prospect for a frail almost-86-year old cleric.
Meanwhile, you may wonder why you haven’t heard from me sooner, way back when you first donned your white zuchetto skullcap. Continue reading
As a recovering Catholic (and educated by the nuns of Mt. Mary Immaculate Academy, a convent boarding school), I’ve been closely following the systemic child sexual abuse scandals that have disgraced this church for many years.
And as somebody who has spent over three decades in the public relations field, I’ve also been following one inept church leader after another who conspired to protect predator priests in some kind of bizarrely inexcusable attempt to safeguard the reputation of their institution. This was commonly done by simply transferring known abusers from parish to parish where they could then find fresh new victims. Recently, I read this conclusion in a famous report:
“The most saddening finding is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders for the safety and welfare of the child victims. There was no attempt to investigate, to identify victims, or to protect any other children from similar conduct.”
The trouble is, these words were not written about the Roman Catholic church. Continue reading
“For more than a thousand years, becoming a nun was the best – and often the only – way for a young Catholic woman to get an education and to earn a modicum of independence. In the modern West, though, women have many other options preferable to joining a ‘patriarchal apartheid’ in which female clerics are given no voice in the power structure and yet are expected to submit to it.”
That’s Lisa Miller, author of Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife – bad news for organizations described as ‘patriarchal apartheid’.
You have both a catastrophic public relations and staff recruiting crisis at hand. Continue reading
The Ethical Nag 