A few weeks ago, I foolishly planned out how I was going to address the sex abuse scandal on this blog. Since then, I’ve been dealing with four papers (three of which are due, or will be presented upon, next week), and the flow of new accusations and news stories has far outpaced my ability to keep up. The whole “papal resignation” meme hadn’t even started when I wrote the original Table of Contents. That, as I mentioned to Fr. Andrew earlier, is complete media fabrication. It’s an incredible example of “make the news, don’t report it.” No one in the Church – no one – had said that the pope might resign. And yet one of the British newspapers ran a story saying that he could, which was then picked up as a “Will he or won’t he” story. Diabolical as it is, it’s been incredibly effective: it got a number of the usual suspects (a liberal priest in Massachusetts to Hans Küng and the guy who tried to kill JPII) on the “pope should resign” bandwagon, and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are now claiming that the pope should be arrested.
So tomorrow: I’ll have a thorough look at the role clerical homosexuality plays in the church sex abuse scandal. You can count on it.