Feb. 4th, 2009

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I think that those members of the Church whose job is to deal with the outer world and to preserve the good name and reputation of the Body of Christ must now be feeling as though God were especially determined to pour out the vials of His wrath upon them. As if the misconceived and mishandled lifting of the excommunication of the Lefebvrites, and the ill-chosen new bishop of Linz, were not enough, another scandal, the third in a week, comes to besmich the Church's good name. This time, the Pope is completely innocent, but he will come under attack all the same. The media must be licking their chops at the feast of blood spread before them.

The founder of the Legion of Christ, Fr.Marcel Macial, was a vicious hypocrite. It was already more than suspected that he took advantage of his position to violate his vow of poverty and to abuse children; and the Pope had ordered him to spend his remaining time in prayer and penance. From the pastoral point of view, this is totally right. The man had only a few years (months, as it turned out) to repent his conduct before God, and he would never do it if he were fighting a trial - even an ecclesiastical one - and looking for legal and moral excuses for what he had done. But no doubt the media will accuse him of denying Maciel a canonic trial so that his misdeeds could be covered up. This is false: to Catholics, the actions of the Pope meant that he regarded Maciel's guilt as certain, and that was all that we needed to know. But the world outside is legalistic and sets great account by the performance of legal rituals - especially when they can be used to embarrass the Church.

Now, however, comes the news that Maciel had also had at least one female lover and fathered at least one child, who is now a woman in her twenties. This means that, by the time he fathered her, he must at been between sixty and seventy years old. And this, in turn, means that his lover is highly unlikely to have been drawn to him by his physical attraction; it is much more likely that she saw him as an elderly and besotted meal ticket. He certainly used legion funds to support his secret family, and while one might congratulate him on doing his duty as a father - or perhaps being prudent enough to know that a scorned or underpaid lover would go to the press - one has to say that the faithful did not pay alms and donations to the Legion of Christ so that the founder's girlfriend could be kept in the style she had become accustomed to.

Boy, are the media going to have fun with this. It has it all: an elderly lecher who also is a hypocrite priest who also is a pillar of the conservative wing of Catholicism; a "romance" (as they call it); a young woman in her twenties who can come out at some point to fill the headlines with suitably touching or indignant stories. And they are going to particularly love it because it has come just as President Obama suffered his fourth nominee malfunction in a row - being apparently unable to nominate secretaries of state who have paid their taxes regularly - and gave up every shred of bipartisanship What better time to bash anything that is Christian and/or conservative? And they will, they will.

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