ninme

Yesterday I wrote that Hugh Hewitt was having a truly remarkable interview with a priest friend and former student of the new pope’s. Well, the transcript is up.

Radio Blogger - Thoughts on Pope Benedict XVI, from someone who really knows him.

JF (Father Joseph Fessio, the Chancellor/Provost to Ave Maria University in Florida): Well, I was just going over his first sermon, and by the way. What led up to that was pretty amazing. You know, we’re waiting for the announcement. It starts to rain in St. Peter’s Square. People bring out their umbrellas. It’s getting kind of dark and dismal. Suddenly, the sun breaks throught the clouds. Warmth stretched through the square. The curtains open, and it’s Cardinal Ratzinger. That was in the evening.

HH (Hugh Hewitt): Yes.

JF: And after that, of course, it was pandemonium and joy and confusion. And the next morning, early in the morning, he presides over the Mass, and he reads a homily, four single-spaced, type-written pages, in Latin. Now that’s amazing.

HH: Yes, that is.

Something to think about. Anyway, this is what had me sit up straight and say, “Holy Hannah!”

HH: Father Fessio, when we left, we were talking about the American Church, and some great bishops who are here leading the American Church. But the American Catholic Church is in somewhat of disarray after the child molestation scandals and a great deal of financial hardship in the wake, and unhappy settlements and non-settlements in some diocese. What does the new Pope think about what happened? Why it happened? And how the Church emerges from it?

JF: Well, first, Hugh, to me, it was a moment of supreme joy when I realized in the midst of this crisis, so dark and often a crisis of leadership in the Church, that these sinful men like ourselves could get together in a room and elect such a great Pope. I mean, the fact that he’s even a bishop or a Cardinal is almost a miracle, but that he should the suppport of all these others was just a tremendous grace being given to the Church. I have talked to him about this at great length. His office, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, was the one that was handling appeals to accusations on the part of priests. And I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I do recall we were pretty much in agreement. And that this crisis is not really a sexual crisis, and it’s certainly not a pedophilia crisis, because most of these were young boys, you know, post-pubescent. It was really a crisis in the teaching of the Church being accepted. And I think it goes back all the way to 1968. This is something that you may not agree with me on, as a Protestant, but I believe the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception is the most profound teaching the world has seen. It recognizes the sacredness of marriage that every act of intimacy in marriage is meant to be open to love and to life. And that you neither leave out the love and clone people, or leave out the life and contracept. But once you separate procreation from union, fruitfulness from pleasure, then there’s no possible way you can justify restricting sexual pleasure to married people. Because if it’s just pleasure not connected to having children, then it’s like drinking wine or dancing, or if you don’t do those things, like playing golf or doing crossword puzzles, if that’s your pleasure. And therefore, even though people naturally know it’s wrong, they have no principles by which to know it’s wrong. And so, when temptation comes, people are going have no…against it. And therefore, in the 1960’s and 70’s, when bishops, priests, seminary professors were saying oh, it’s a matter of conscience, you know, this isn’t infallable, what they did was they took away the intellectual foundation for the unity of fruitfulness and embassy in marriage. And when they did that, there was no argument against homosexual acts, against extra-marital acts, against pre-marital acts, against bestiality. And I think, therefore, that if we would have had doctrinal courage on the part of the bishops, to maintain the Church’s teaching, we wouldn’t have had this crisis.

HH: Was there also some systemic flaw in the seminaries that produced so many criminal predators? Because there was the positive law, even if the moral law in your view had failed, and was not being taught. There was still the positive law that was being broken.

JF: Which positive law were…

HH: The American law which said you cannot be a predator of children.

JF: Well, yes. But I don’t think they started as predators, and by the way. The problem is not essentially predators of children, it’s homosexual acts. And that is as crisis is, it only covers boys who were under 18. I mean, there’s another crisis that’s not public.

HH: Yes.

JF: …which is consentual homosexuality with people that are statutorally above the age. Another thing which happened on this is that we had a lot of bishops who were specifically chosen because they were supposed to be reconcilors. People who get along. The Apostolic delegate in those years, Archbishopd Jadot, his profile for bishops was someone who was, you know, a man of all views. Someone who was not controversial. Well, what happens when a bishop like that is told that there’s something going wrong in seminary? Well, first he doesn’t want to hear it. Then he won’t believe it. If he does believe it, he won’t do anything about it. And then when he goes to Rome, he’ll tell Rome things are okay. And if Rome gets a report, he’ll say well, that’s just an exception. So what happened is there was a culture of deceit that began to be inculcated in many of the bishops in the United States.