My cousin blogs about the Pope's US visit

I've found out that there's another member of my family with a blog: Mark Ockerbloom, one of my cousins, who is a night-time news anchor in Boston. (Our names are similar enough that searching online for one of us often turns up the other. In his case, though, "Mark" is his first name; in my case, it's the first part of my family name.)

One of his recent posts asks about the effect of Pope Benedict's US visit on area Catholics, in the light of recent sex abuse scandals in the Church. This is this Pope's first visit to the US. Thus far in his papacy he's shown himself not quite the Pope that many people were expecting from his earlier career. The priest at our parish's Mass last Sunday spoke intriguingly of the two encyclicals he's written; I have not yet read them, but I've posted links to them for folks who want to check them out.

I remain disappointed, however, in his handling of the sex abuse issues. In the press coverage I've seen of the Pope's visit, he's expressed regret for the wrongdoing priests, but I haven't seen a word about the bishops that knowingly concealed their crimes and shuffled them from parish to parish as they continued to rape and abuse children. Indeed, the Pope is still keeping Cardinal Law in positions of responsibility in Rome, where the former Boston archbishop also happens to be out of the reach of US law.

It's easy to point to bad priests as the problem. It's harder, but necessary, to reform the hierarchy that enabled them, and that, unreformed, erodes the moral authority of the Church.