Ratzinger gave his old job to an American when he (Ratz) was bumped upstairs. Cardinal William Levada now heads Ratzinger’s old Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This week he expressed his sorrow and sympathy for what the church has enabled priests to do to generations of children by…writing a long article saying how awful the New York Times is.

He starts by singling out Laurie Goodstein.

Only after eight paragraphs of purple prose does Goodstein reveal that Fr. Murphy, who criminally abused as many as 200 deaf children while working at a school in the Milwaukee Archdiocese from 1950 to 1974, “not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims.”

But in paragraph 13, commenting on a statement of Fr. Lombardi (the Vatican spokesman) that Church law does not prohibit anyone from reporting cases of abuse to civil authorities, Goodstein writes, “He did not address why that had never happened in this case.” Did she forget, or did her editors not read, what she wrote in paragraph nine about Murphy getting “a pass from the police and prosecutors”?

Oh dear god – he doesn’t even get it. He doesn’t even get a point as glaring as that. Why does he suppose Murphy got a pass from the police and prosecutors? Does he think all rapers of children get passes from the police and prosecutors? Does it not occur to him that Murphy got such a pass because he was a priest? Does it not occur to him that this hints at the level of undue deference paid to religion even by secular law enforcement, and does it not further occur to him to feel searching anguish at the thought of the kinds of advantage this has given predators? No, it apparently doesn’t, not for a second. He’s apparently much too busy concentrating on His Gang to feel any sympathy or concern for anyone else. And this is all too typical of the selfish self-centered clueless blind morally bankrupt outfit he helps to run.

As a believer, I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.

And that lack of doubt perhaps helps to explain why your organization does such a crappy job of preventing harm to its subjects right here on planet earth. You have no doubt that everything will be all fixed up later on after everyone is dead. Well how convenient! Meanwhile, let them eat brioche.

…about a man with and for whom I have the privilege of working, as his “successor” Prefect, a pope whose encyclicals on love and hope and economic virtue have both surprised us and made us think, whose weekly catecheses and Holy Week homilies inspire us, and yes, whose pro-active work to help the Church deal effectively with the sexual abuse of minors continues to enable us today, I ask the Times to reconsider its attack mode about Pope Benedict XVI and give the world a more balanced view of a leader it can and should count on.

The pope is not our ‘leader.’ He is not ‘a leader.’ He is the head of an archaic reactionary authoritarian religious organization. He is not a leader and he is in no way a leader that ‘the world can and should count on.’ We do not want your leader, Mr Levada.