UPDATE Twelve hours later, the Diocese of Portsmouth is now back on the Internet, and the letter which Dr Egan sent to PF last Wednesday is available there. It is very good; I suggest you go there and read it.
I particularly applaud Bishop Philip's suggestion of lay involvement. For too long, this terrible malady has been left to popes, the Curia, and episcopal conferences to sort out. They have failed the Church and especially those vulnerable members of the Body of Christ who have been victims of abuse. This pontificate seems to me to have reverted to the worst (Maciel) days of the JP2 pontificate.
I wonder what did happen to the Portsmouth website ...
As I write this, at 21:46 on Thursday evening British Summer Time, an extraordinary situation prevails.
Try to get to the website of the Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth, and you will be told that "this site has been suspended".
Why might anybody want to access that site? Because Bishop Philip Egan has just published the text of his letter to PF suggesting an Extraordinary meeting of the Synod of Bishops to discuss the paedophile crisis. He suggests that it be preceded by a Congress affording an opportunity for laypeople to express their views.
The letter is, of course, easily to be found on the internet; and the substance of its suggestions are reported in the Catholic Herald and even the Tablet. So if this is an attempt at censorship, it is remarkably ill-judged.
I hope that when I open my computer in the morning, not only will this situation have been resolved, but that there will be an explanation of what has happened.
It would be unfair to PF, the Congregation for Bishops, the Papal Nuncio, and to Bishop Philip's Metropolitan Archbishop Peter Smith (I can't think of anybody else who is in the chain of Dr Egan's 'Line Managers') for suspicions of skulduggery to remain in the air.
Just one quibble, albeit a major one - it's overwhelmingly a homosexual problem.
ReplyDeleteYes, I noticed that. I wish I had taken a screenshot. I was writing an article about the letter. When I checked back, the whole site had disappeared.
ReplyDeleteThe grand disappearance happened this afternoon at around 5 PM.
ReplyDeleteDear father Hunwicke,
ReplyDeletewhen I started my ventures into cyber and IT things in the military, an experienced older comrade once told me:
"Never attribute to malevolence which is mostly just technical incompetence or hardware failure or a mixture of both"
During many years in the navy, I have found that to be true in most of the cases which I encountered.
Dear AVB. Amen.
ReplyDeleteOver 80 % of the sexual crimes were committed against Post-Pubescent boys, many of whom were between the ages of 14-17.
Because the media is overwhelming in support of the sin crying to heaven for vengeance it uses pedophiles as a descriptor of the soul-destroying criminals but there is no reason for us to internalise their tactics and mimic them.
As for pedophiles,roughly 3% of the population is homosexual while roughly 33% of pedophiles are sodomites.
As a category, sodomites are a clear and present danger to faith and family.
Whatever the problem was, it seems now to be overcome.
ReplyDeleteDear Michael
ReplyDeleteYou are right. My own fall-back inclination is to see Cock-up rather than Conspiracy. I sigh regretfully when Bishop Richard Williamson explains who really attacked the Twin Towers.
But it is not always easy to be completely oblivious of striking coincidences ... ...
There was one fine comment I would have loved to enable, but I rather wondered whether its specificity might have laid it open to being described as libellous.
ReplyDeleteAlbrecht von Brandenburg is correct. As long as PF continues to pretend that homosexuality is spelled C-L-E-R-I-C-A-L-I-S-M he is providing cover for the bishops in the U.S. and elsewhere also to avoid the crucial fact.
ReplyDeleteWe know the homosexual cabal runs freely in the Vatican. PF surrounds himself with the likes of [fill in your own list]. He is unwilling or unable to clean house and the bishops are mostly the same.
Only the laity can demand from each bishop an accounting of what he himself has done. He doesn't need an investigation for that. He already knows. Any bishop who refuses must resign or be driven out. And I mean driven.
I fear that the laity in general are so weakened by 50 years of moral, doctrinal, and liturgical devastation that they can no longer recognize the evil. They don't like abuse of minors but anything else is just consenting adults. Once you accept contraception, then you have no argument against homosexual activity.
So I am praying and hoping for something better, but I really expect that things are going to get a lot worse. We already see that those who stand up for the whole Catholic Faith are suspended, grounded, and fired. So prepare to support faithful and jobless clergy and set up house churches. As St. Athanasius said in the 4th century, "They have the buildings but you have the Faith."
STOP referring to this as a paedophile crisis. Only a tiny percentage was paedophila. It was a crisis of homosexuals going after teenage boys for the most part. By calling it a paedophile criss, you help the homoseuxlas avoid blame.
ReplyDeleteLike Michael Storck, I suspect cock-up here, but I suspect a specific form of cock-up.
ReplyDeleteThe web hosting for the Diocese probably has a limit on the amount of data that can be downloaded in any one period. This is the sort of economical hosting you'd set up, and then forget to review on a regular basis.
Then you do something like post a letter which attracts worldwide attention, with a very large number of downloads, and your web hosting package breaks its limits and has the computer equivalent of the sulks (your site is suspended) until you pay it more money.