Card. Levada: NYT articles, editorials "are deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness"

The head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (and former Archbishop of San Francisco) takes the recent New York Times hit pieces to task on several key points, and then writes:

The Times editorial wonders “how Vatican officials did not draw the lessons of the grueling scandal in the United States, where more than 700 priests were dismissed over a three-year period.” I can assure the Times that the Vatican in reality did not then and does not now ignore those lessons. But the Times editorial goes on to show the usual bias: “But then we read Laurie Goodstein’s disturbing report . . .about how the pope, while he was still a cardinal, was personally warned about a priest … But church leaders chose to protect the church instead of children. The report illuminated the kind of behavior the church was willing to excuse to avoid scandal.” Excuse me, editors. Even the Goodstein article, based on “newly unearthed files,” places the words about protecting the Church from scandal on the lips of Archbishop Weakland, not the pope. It is just this kind of anachronistic conflation that I think warrants my accusation that the Times, in rushing to a guilty verdict, lacks fairness in its coverage of Pope Benedict.

As a full-time member of the Roman Curia, the governing structure that carries out the Holy See’s tasks, I do not have time to deal with the Times’s subsequent almost daily articles by Rachel Donadio and others, much less with Maureen Dowd’s silly parroting of Goodstein’s “disturbing report.” But about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.

Read the entire piece, published in Catholic San Francisco.

Comments

[W. Vida]

I am not a catholic but I can totally agree with this critique. The NYT is a joke.

[Charles E Flynn]

Seeing Maureen Dowd get the assessment she deserves has made my day.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

See also http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0402/1224267548333.html

[Manuel G. Daugherty Razetto]

Kudos to Cardinal Levada; it was about time someone from the Curia addressed such messy issue which has become the preferential toy of the US Media.

[Term Papers]

Verry verry good buddy nice post.