Last week, hell froze over when America‘s Michael Sean Winters complimented George Weigel’s criticism of the New York Times.
Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, also wrote a defense of Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church in The Philadelphia Inquirer today.
Weigel points out that the Church, more than any other institution or group guilty of child sexual abuse, has cleaned its house in this country and is itself the victim of anti-Catholic prejudice:
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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To be sure, the Catholic Church ought to hold itself to a higher moral standard than other similarly situated institutions. But after too long a period of denial, the Catholic Church is now at the forefront of combating the sexual abuse of the young in the United States. And no one in the church has done more, over the last decade, to compel the sclerotic institutional culture of the Vatican to face these problems than Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.
These are the facts. Thus the concern naturally arises, on this Easter, that those who continue to portray Catholicism as a global conspiracy of sexual predators are indulging in the last acceptable prejudice, anti-Catholicism, while aiming at nothing less than the destruction of the Catholic Church’s credibility as a global moral teacher.
Here’s the entire piece.
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