Uh oh

So it looks like Cardinal Dolan paid abusive priests a few grand so they would get out of town.  According to the NYT, and picked up on rather gleefully by such notable sources as the radically anti-Catholic Huffington Post, this occurred while he served the Archdiocese in Milwaukee.

First impression?  It stinks to high heaven.  It sounds like a golden parachute for kiddie rapists.  Now, that doesn't mean it was.  I would need to know more, and hopefully Cardinal Dolan and the Church will comply.  I think the quicker the response, the better the outcome. Even if it turns out to be something truly deplorable, as so many in the media no doubt hope suspect, being open and transparent would ease the guilt of the Church as a whole.  If there was guilt, and the Church once more appears to be more concerned with covering its own arse than looking out for what is right, then we might as well hang up our crucifixes for a while, at least in terms of influencing our society.

FWIW, I'm not one who tries to make the Church appear blameless throughout history.  At an RCIA class, I heard a couple seminarians suggest that the Reformation was all part of some big misunderstanding, that there was nobody really selling indulgences for profit.  No.  It was just a big mix up, exploited by Luther.  Well, that's not how the historic tea leaves line up as I read them.  Nor does the Church emerge from the age of later Roman Imperialism, the Middle Ages, the Age of Exploration, or even the modern age unscathed, again, at least as I read the history. 

That doesn't mean anything about the truth of its message, of course.  If every American owned slaves, we don't suddenly conclude that therefore all men aren't created equal.  We conclude that equality is true, and Americans sucked at living up to their own lofty ideals.  Even when we disregard any good that Americans did in the slavery issue, we still insist that the ideal that we are created equal is true.

So even if the Catholic Church once again descends into its own dark night of the scandals, it doesn't mean that the Faith proclaimed to the world is wrong.  It just means that the Church, peopled by people, can be warped and twisted by those people like anything else.  Hence the need for a redeemer.  Oh, and it's also why I tend to be somewhat forgiving by non-Church entities that try to do the right thing and still fail.