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I posted a topic on the increasing incident of pedophilia cases attached to the RCC in the US a few months back. At the time, there was some criticism that this was possibly just a "jump on the bandwagon" phenomenon of people wanting to make some easy money off the RCC. I suspect these replies were conditioned by the lack of public awareness of the matter, since the RCC has always attempted to keep these cases quiet. But there were more than 70 accusations in a joint case brought against one priest alone in the Boston archdiocese, along with several hundred more accusations and court cases lodged against a few dozen priests there. Hundreds of similar cases have now appeared in California, in Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. And individual cases in Austria, France, and Germany have begun coalescing into largescale attacks, probably as a result of the strength drawn from numbers against the formidable might of the RCC.
I have to say that if the Americans cardinals have stated unequivocably that they don't like the Pope's "zero tolerance" policy, I'm surprised. Typically, there is zero room for manuevering at that visible and august a level in the RCC. Behind closed doors, there might be argument--but disagreement in public? I'll be looking to hear soundbites from the cardinals' response, later.
Mind, I wouldn't be amazed to find that some of the cardinals felt that way privately, however much they bowed to the Pope's will in public. For example, the Philadelphia Archbishop, Tony Bevilacqua, who's 78, is a harsh, aggressive man not known for seeing the viewpoints of others. He's lashed out repeatedly in print and aloud at accusation of pedophilia in his archdiocese, calling them as a group, sensationalist lies designed to make the RCC pay for something that never occurred.
What's also interesting is that several of these stern, stubborn, religiously arch-conservative and elderly men, all in their 60s and 70s, who met with the Pope, were appointed by him to their current positions.
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