It’s dangerous putting
one’s head above the trenches at the moment. Take Cardinal William Levada, the
Pope’s successor as head of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith.
Earlier this week, he wrote a strongly worded article denouncing the New York
Times’s coverage of Benedict XVI’s alleged involvement in various sex abuse
scandals. “I am not proud of America’s newspaper of
record, the New York Times, as a paragon of fairness,” he
wrote. An abridged version was published in the New
York Post on Friday.
On
the next day, documents about Levada’s own involvement in an alleged cover-up
was handed over to the AFP news agency by a lawyer of the victims of pedophile
priests in Oregon. Levada was Archbishop of Portland from 1986 to 1995. During
that time he reassigned a priest after he had undergone therapy for inappropriate sexual behaviour with teenagers in the 1970s. He
testified that:
“The
abuse in question had happened 20 years before, or so… the recommendation of the therapy was
that he was not at risk for re-abusing and that it would be prudent to reassign
him… and prudent also to put conditions that would make sure that he would
not be overstressed to do some inappropriate behavior.”
Just a coincidence? I think not.
