This site emphasizes the spiritual dimensions of peacemaking, whether those be within organized religion, in the creative arts, or in the spirituality of daily living. We attempt to emphasize the positive work of peacemaking in all aspects of our lives. We are therefore sickened by recent revelations of widespread child abuse by the Roman Catholic clergy throughout Ireland and then in Germany that only reinforced the crisis begun by similar news here in the United States.

We were in Ireland as the Church’s position changed from evening news to evening news: under the relentless and courageous pressure of the media, most especially of women reporters and lay victims of abuse in the studio audiences, the Church’s stonewalling gave way to empty gesture, then to false apology, and finally to repentance: admission of horrendous guilt and guarantees of remedy, both institutional and financial. The stonewalling, it appears — as with any arrogant and corrupt corporation enjoying its immunities — was coordinated at the highest levels.

The Vatican’s most recent response in the past several weeks, like the initial reactions of the hierarchies in the USA and Ireland, has been nothing less than vile: baiting the moral conscience of the laity, perversely vaunting its own victimhood and immunities, hypocritical, anti-Semitic, homophobic and divisive, equating itself with the church as a whole, protective not of the victims of abuse past and present, but of its own privilege and position.

In our latest essay we try to come to grips, once again, with the career of Joseph Ratzinger and his effect upon the Catholic Church in the 20th and 21st centuries.