Edward T. Oakes: The Moral Consequences of Episcopal Sin

I have long felt that we Catholics will know that this crisis has finally been put behind us, at least in the United States, when the bishops, in one of their collective annual meetings, passes a resolution actually thanking those newspapers who revealed the slime and filth lurking inside the presbyterate of too many dioceses and the attempted cover-ups by too many chanceries. Please understand: I am not naïve about the secular media. But if the Hebrew prophets could see the hand of God at work in the attacks on ancient Israel from the Assyrian empire, then Catholics ought to be able to espy the workings of divine providence when the media bring to light crimes that should have been made public from the beginning.

I am of course referring to the revelations of the Long Lent of 2002. Recent reports by the U.S. media rehearsing those same and other American stories of the distant past in the wake of truly new revelations in Ireland and Germany, all in an effort to try to bring Pope Benedict down, are a different matter. But to explain this second wave of reports for what it is””fundamentally an anti-Catholic campaign””requires that we first recognize some fundamental rules for discerning spirits.

Read it carefully and read it all.