Catholic World Report

Special Report

According to a recently discovered letter, the priest from Wilno, Ontario continued for more than a decade in a prestigious Vatican post after two cardinals, and perhaps five other bishops, knew he had been credibly accused of sexual abuse.

By Jeff Ziegler

In 1858, 16 families from Prussian-occupied Poland, promised free land in Canada by a shipping company agent, sold their possessions and sailed across the ocean. “I shall never forget their bitter, despairing cries, when they found here on the other side of the ocean how awfully they had been misled,” a Canadian official wrote in an 1860 report. The official found agricultural work for them on the northern shore of Lake Ontario.

At the intersections of country roads, the settlers soon built wooden crosses, where they gathered on Sundays to pray the Rosary and a litany. “It became tradition to make the sign of the cross when one passed a cross at an intersection,” recounts a history of Canada’s first Polish settlement, Wilno. “Gentlemen would remove their hats also.” In 1875, a Polish priest arrived.

Today Wilno is “a very small village of about 200 people scattered over quite a big area, with a big church and a cluster of buildings on a highway around what used to be the railway station,” says Lynne Postill of Wilno Village Publishing. “The buildings are attractive and well kept and are either restaurants or gift stores.”

“In 1966 when I first went there, I think that the villagers were about 95 percent of Polish descent, of whom 100 percent were Roman Catholic and 99 percent attended church,” she recalls. “Today fewer are of Polish descent, and fewer attend church.”

Bernard Prince (an anglicized form of Prynz) was born in Wilno in 1934 and raised in a family of five children. “Bernard was a shy young man from a small village with a one-room schoolhouse,” says Postill. After graduating from an area Catholic high school, Prince entered a Trappist Abbey in nearby Quebec in 1951, choosing the life of the conversi (lay brothers)—who spent most of their time in manual labor—rather than that of the choir monks, who chanted the Divine Office. One resident recalls that Prince was the only young man from Wilno in his lifetime to become a Trappist.

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A Demographic Disaster

Special Report

The Chinese government is now studying the consequences of its one-child policy.

By Michael J. Miller

On April 24, 2010, the Associated Press reported that in 2009 the Chinese government commissioned a study of the possible effects of discontinuing or “refining” its one-child policy. The article cites Zheng Zhenzhen, who conducted the study and wrote in the November 2009 issue of Asian Population Studies, “Government control is no longer necessary to maintain low fertility. A carefully planned relaxation of the birth-control policy in China is unlikely to lead to an unwanted baby boom.” It also quotes Xie Zhenming, from the Association of Chinese Population, who anticipates gradual changes in family-planning laws over the next five years.

The AP article was published toward the end of a 20-day campaign, in heavily populated Puning County in Guangdong Province, to sterilize men and women who were accused of violating national birth control policies. In the village of Daba, a physician boasted that his surgical team was working non-stop from 8:00 in the morning to 4:00 AM the following day. On April 12, the fifth day, Puning officials announced that they were already halfway to their goal of 10,000 sterilizations.

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An Out-of-Touch Ogre?

Editorial

The media’s mau-mauing of Bishop Thomas Olmsted

By George Neumayr | July 2010

In the past, bishops sparked shocked headlines in newspapers by betraying Church teaching. Now a brave few make headlines by upholding it. Consider the case of Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has likened him to a member of the hierarchy during the “cruel and debauched days of the Borgias in the Renaissance.”

That sounds pretty bad. What, exactly, has Olmsted done? Shown corrupt indifference to the protection of children? Profited off the abuse of them? No, it turns out his cruel sin in the eyes of Kristof and company is that he wants to protect children, including the forgotten unborn ones often killed under the worldly logic of false compassion.

In May, it came out that Bishop Olmsted had upheld canon law after learning, to his alarm, that a nun at a Catholic hospital in the diocese of Phoenix, several months earlier, formally cooperated in the killing of an unborn child from a patient’s difficult pregnancy.

Olmsted had quietly, conscientiously, and properly followed Church teaching and discipline in the matter (under canon law, Mercy Sister Margaret McBride incurred “automatic excommunication” through her action; he simply informed her of that, and she lost her executive position at the hospital).

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On the Brink

Interview

British journalist Melanie Phillips discusses the West’s civilizational crisis.

By Daniel Allott

Melanie Phillips is an award-winning columnist for London’s Daily Mail. Educated at Oxford, she won the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996. She is the author of Londonistan and All Must Have Prizes, among other books. Phillips spoke with CWR about her new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power (Encounter Books).

How did you select the title of your book?

Melanie Phillips: It arose in my mind because that’s how I think about the situation in the West. So often I’m writing about all manner of things happening, where everything’s been turned backwards and inside out. Right has turned into wrong, justice into injustice, victim into victimizer and so on. And I know from the response I get from my readers that on very many issues they think that too. But they are perplexed by the fact that what they think of as clearly demonstrable reality is represented in a way that makes white black and black white. They feel absolutely perplexed and bewildered, and that’s why I called the book The World Turned Upside Down.

Could you explain the “Princess Obama” syndrome?

Phillips: Yes, it comes from the fact that I look at two phenomena, the cult that surrounded Princess Diana in Britain and the cult that surrounded Barack Obama when he was running for president. Of course the shine has come off Barack Obama, but I was looking at this extraordinary hype that surrounded him when he was running for president.

In both cases it seemed to me that the reason for the hysteria and the hype was that the public was projecting onto both of these personalities its hopes and fears…and they thought that both of these characters would transcend these difficulties.

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Editorial Jihad

Opinion

Another vicious, inaccurate, and contradictory New York Times attack on Pope Benedict

By Philip F. Lawler

Philip F. Lawler is editor emeritus of CWR.

The New York Times, with another front-page attack on Pope Benedict XVI, erases any possible doubt that America’s most influential newspaper has declared an editorial jihad against this pontificate. Abandoning any sense of editorial balance, journalistic integrity, or even elementary logic, the Times looses a 4,000-word barrage against the Pope: an indictment that is not supported even by the content of this appalling story. Apparently the editors are relying on sheer volume of words, and repetition of ugly details, to substitute for logical argumentation.

The thrust of the argument presented by the Times is that prior to his election as Pontiff, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did not take decisive action to punish priests who abused children. Despite its exhaustive length, the story does not present a single new case to support that argument. The authors claim, at several points in their presentation, that as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Ratzinger had the authority to take action. But then, again and again, they quote knowledgeable Church officials saying precisely the opposite.

The confusion over lines of authority at the Vatican was so acute, the Times reports, that in the year 2000 a group of bishops met in Rome to present their concerns. That meeting led eventually to the change in policy announced by Pope John Paul II the following year, giving the CDF sole authority over disciplinary action against priests involved in sexual abuse. By general consensus the 2001 policy represented an important step forward in the Vatican’s handling of the problem, and it was Cardinal Ratzinger who pressed for that policy change. How does that sequence of events justify criticism of the future Pope? It doesn’t. But the facts do not deter the Times.

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Hollywood's Treatment of Fathers

Film

Behind the ambivalence lies an awareness of their importance.

By Steven D. Greydanus

This month, over Father’s Day weekend, Disney releases Toy Story 3, the much-anticipated third installment in the groundbreaking Pixar series that made childhood icons of Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear. Early buzz on the threequel suggests it is good if not brilliant, and I’m moderately enthused about seeing it; I might even wind up taking my family to see it on opening weekend. There is, though, something ironic about marking Father’s Day with an installment in an animated series revolving around a household headed by a single mother, with a boy named Andy (and his kid sister) growing up fatherless.

Pixar has given us two of the most sympathetic and well-developed father figures in recent family-film history: the widowed Marlin in Finding Nemo and the family-man Mr. Incredible in The Incredibles. In Ratatouille, on the other hand, the human protagonist and his father never knew one another, while the rat protagonist’s father is one of the movies’ most familiar paternal stereotypes, the old-school, reactionary authoritarian who regards his progeny’s unique aspirations with dismissive incomprehension (though, like many such fathers, he is redeemed by a third-act breakthrough).

Last year’s Pixar release, Up, featured an elderly widower, Carl Fredrickson, who becomes a surrogate father figure (or grandfather figure) to a young boy named Russell, who lives with his single mother and is initially in some denial about the neglect and unreliability of his absentee father, who is with another woman. Russell’s fond memories of trivial moments spent with his father, and his wishful anticipation of his father being there for him at special events when deep down he knows he won’t, is one of the most melancholy evocations of the absent father in any family film since E.T.

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Ever Ancient, Ever New

Editorial

Summorum Pontificum and the young.

By George Neumayr | June 2010

Pope Benedict’s critics had hoped Summorum Pontificum would disappear without a trace. It hasn’t. His apostolic constitution authorizing wider use of the Traditional Latin Mass continues to bear fruit, some of it annoyingly visible to these critics.

Far from just a sop thrown to aging traditionalists, as some liberal bishops cast it, Summorum Pontificum has proven popular with the young. As Pope Benedict noted in its accompanying letter, the Traditional Latin Mass is old in origin but new in appeal: “young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction, and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Sacrifice particularly suited to them.”

An illustration of this appeared on April 24 in Washington, DC, when more than 3,500 people—many of them children, teens, college students, and young families—filed into the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for a Pontifical Solemn High Mass that lasted two and a half hours. The Paulus Institute, which sponsored the event to mark the fifth anniversary of Benedict’s pontificate, said it was the first Traditional Latin Mass offered at the Shrine’s altar since 1965.

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