VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - An Italian magazine report which sought to prove that what some priests tell Catholics in the confessional is not always what the Church preaches in public has enraged the Vatican.
To write the cover story in this week's L'Espresso, reporter Riccardo Bocca visited 24 churches in five large Italian cities and confessed sins he never committed or invented ethical dilemmas for the priest.
(...)
An editorial in the Vatican's newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano, said the report had "profaned" the sacrament of Penance, also known as Reconciliation, in the name of "an ignoble scoop".
source.
The way in which the reporter did his job was profoundly disrespectful to the Catholic religion.
That being said, it just reinforces my jaded attitude towards Church leadership.
I'm not surprised. No conscientious Catholic would be surprised. The priests do not preach the doctrine, collectively speaking. They're either culpably ignorant, dissenters or cowards. The courageous and knowledgeable ones are few and far between. They're the ones holding the Church together.
And we wonder why the Church is in the State it is?
The article got one thing wrong:
In one confessional in Naples he told the priest he felt guilty over his father's death after the family allowed a doctor secretly to detach a respirator. The father had for years been paralyzed, confined to a bed and unable to breathe autonomously.
Although euthanasia is officially condemned by the Church, the priest told him not to worry too much because God would be the ultimate arbiter.
"If I had a wife, a father or a son who for years was alive only because of artificial life support, I would pull the plug too," said the priest, who then gave him absolution.
To the best of my knowledge, it's not morally wrong to take a terminally ill man off a respirator and "let nature take its course". What is wrong is to starve or dehydrate people-- depriving them of the normal means of staying alive. Also wrong is doing something to the patient to hasten death-- like injecting a drug or suffocating them.
This goes to show the ignorance of the MSM on Catholic matters.
One bright light:
Apart from abortion -- which all 24 priests unanimously condemned --
Nice to know that the priests at least got that vital one right.
I wish the Vatican would be a little more forthright on this point.
I don't put a lot of faith in our Catholic leadership these days. I really don't. The best predictor of future results is past results.
H/T: Adam's Blog.
