Weigel my hero

I was disgusted by the tabloid journalism printed in Time magazine this past week. But I don't have the time or energy that George does to voice a rebuttal. What a marvelous rebuttal it is:

By every available piece of evidence, Ratzinger, in his last half-decade as prefect of CDF and as Pope, has been determined to root out corruption within the priesthood (whether that involves the rare cases of genuine pedophilia, the far-more-common homosexual predation on adolescents and young men, or clerical concubinage in Africa and Latin America), while at the same time acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests are not sexual predators – a point it would be refreshing to see recognized, in print, by Time and others...

...Yet the Time indictment – that the Catholic Church is institutionally incapable of acknowledging its errors and the sins and crimes of its sons and daughters – is absurd. No, the Pope has not followed the established media narrative and groveled before the cameras like a congressman caught in deviltry with a staffer. Benedict XVI's response has been far more serious. He has met, prayed, and wept with abuse victims in the United States, Australia, and Malta. He has called the Irish bishops to task in the sharpest terms, while acknowledging that those bishops' failures have broken some victims' capacity to find anything good in the Church. He has frankly acknowledged that the real threat to the Church comes "from sin within the Church," without absolving the media of their failures of reporting and analysis in recent months. And he has insisted that "the Church has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice."

That kind of leadership, rooted in that kind of theological and spiritual depth, deserves something more than a snarky cover headline adapted from one of the worst novels ever written.