Dolan of Milwaukee chided for special pleading

Holy Father smiles, waves, dismisses "petty gossip"
Man with private army not intimidated by deaf children

Timothy Dolan is another former archbishop of Milwaukee. He has a blog where he argues* — à la Wild Bill Donohue — that everybody's molesting children and the New York Times just has it in for him:

The problem with your column, Your Excellency,** is that it makes the move that church officials always and reliably make: sure, pedophilia was bad, but the church has learned its lesson, cleaned up its act, paid the victims, and anyway, child rape happens elsewhere, too. In other words, it is unfair to focus on the crimes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: we’re only human.

But the church does not claim to be only a human institution, except when it wants mercy; it claims to represent Jesus and his way of salvation in the world. If the actions of the hierarchy and the pope himself with respect to these crimes are measured by the words of Jesus, then the crimes, the coverups, and the special pleading that is going on as I write this, merit the following quotation:

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."

I think that divine judgment has been rendered already.

Robin Darling Young
University of Notre Dame

Dolan says hey everybody, don't be so hard on the Roman Catholic Church's top shelf bureaucracy. After all, judges, doctors, parole officers — child rapists run rampant under their watches as well.

Except the judiciary, the AMA, and the department of corrections never asserted they were Christ's Own Moral Authority on Earth. None of them ever claimed to be the One True Faith™ and that all other faith (and especially no faith) was defective, less than fully human.

None aspired, by continual presentation of the corpse, to instill a lifelong sense of guilt and shame for having somehow participated in the torture and murder of a first-century rabbi. None coerced their constituencies to weekly donations for the maintenance of a pope's embroidered silk collars, golden cloaks, and marble obelisks.

None abused their trust and (alleged) authority more profoundly.

* Complete with a citation to NRO.com: nice touch.
** "My Excellency" would be a great title for a blog.