Roamer's column

"Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that in due time He may exalt you. Cast all your anxieties on Him, for He cares about you. Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith... And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace... will himself restore, establish and strengthen you..."

The passage, taken from a letter of Peter, will console and strengthen the present Peter in this pathetic hour of The New York Times and the Maureen Dowds of this world ("Yup, we need a Nope. A nun who is pope" - with dowdy wit like that what need is there for discussion?); never mind the Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, of whom atheists say they give atheism a bad name; never mind the Philip Pullmans ("My books are about killing God") and Hans Kung, that bitter pope-manqué who denies the Pope's infallibility and felicitously flaunts his own.

From the very start of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's elevation to the papacy, his enemies inside and outside the Church lined up to discredit him as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, the Panzerkardinal and, by no means the final slur - what can you expect from somebody who had been conscripted into the Hitler Youth? Some of his critics emerge from outside the atheist stable.

Tina Beattie is a Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton University. Lecturing on the Holy Father's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Beattie did a bit of feline spitting when she came to that part of the encyclical where Pope Benedict insisted that the solution to population problems lies in "the primary competence of the family in the area of sexuality". When I read that, wrote Beattie, I thought, "try telling that to Josef Fritzl's daughter". You cannot get more outrageous than that; or can you?

Year for the Priest

Perhaps it was providential and therefore paradoxical, prophetic on the part of the Pope, that this year was dedicated to priests, for priests, that they might grow in holiness as they toiled in the vineyard of the Lord. Against a background of how some of them disgraced themselves and their vocation by indulging in repulsive acts that soiled the Body of Christ, never mind the mind and souls of their victims, the choice of such a year held the promise of purification.

Last month, The New York Times fastened on to a horrendous story about one of these priests - dating back three or four decades - and before you could blink, somebody was calling for the Pope's head on a platter; if "he headed a secular organisation, or if he were a politician, he would be forced to resign". He neither does the one, nor is the other. But once heads and politicians have been brought in, a bit of perspective is in order.

Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem of sexual predators in non-Catholic state schools and found that, "The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests". The question was asked, "So, in order to better protect children, did media outlets start hounding the worse menace of the school systems, with headlines about a 'Nationwide teacher molestation cover-up' and by asking, 'Are ed schools producing paedophiles?'"

A propos, Associated Press ran a story, which read in part, that "the number of abusive educators - nearly three for every school day - speaks to a much larger problem in a system that is stacked against victims... And no one - not the schools, not the courts, not the state or federal governments - has found a sure-fire way to keep molesting teachers out of classrooms".

It is not my intention to brandish the tu quoque argument, but it is mete and just to point a finger at a hypocritical secular media that sees motes in priests' eyes - quite rightly - and, quite wrongly, misses massive beams protruding from the eyes of sexual predators in secular schools all over the United States. Tu quoque does not diminish by an iota the shameful "filth" in the Church, the word is Pope Benedict's, but it does serve to highlight the German Chancellor's observation that the problem is societal.

Murphy

The New York Times' story alleged, among other things, that Pope Benedict intervened to prevent a priest Fr Lawrence Murphy, from facing sanctions for scores of cases of sexual abuse of minors in his care. Unerringly false.

Curiously, the author of that story wrote a sympathetic piece about Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, last year, after he published his autobiography. Widely known for mishandling sexual abuse cases during his tenure and guilty of using $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to pay to a former homosexual lover who was blackmailing him, Weakland is one of two principal sources used by the newspaper. The other, Jeffrey Andersen, has cases in the United States Supreme Court pending against the Holy See and a massive pecuniary interest to go with them.

Two more implausible sources it must have been difficult to find, but nobody can accuse The New York Times of not overcoming every obstacle in its search for truth; swathes of the world's media joined in the dissemination of distortion.

One source the newspaper lamentably failed to contact was the priest who presided over Murphy's canonical trial in Milwaukee between 1996 and 1998, the year Murphy died.

Fr Thomas Brundage went public so that, as he put it, he could "tell the back story of what actually happened in the Murphy case on the local level; to outline the sloppy and inaccurate reporting on the case by The New York Times and other media outlets; and to assert that Pope Benedict XVI has done more than any other pope or bishop in history to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of child abuse..."

What agenda prevented The New York Times contacting Fr Brundage? After all, its story included many references to him and even quoted from his handwritten documents, which, he pointed out, were not written by him! If anybody should be resigning in this affair it is the editor of this newspaper and those who failed so miserably to put the story together and still managed to push forward canard as truth.

One problem with the newspaper's attempt to implicate Pope Benedict in the Murphy case was that it called into question his years as prefect of the Congregation for the Faith. But Cardinal Ratzinger only became directly responsible in 2001, prior to which - and I quote John Allen Jr, a highly respected journalist working with the National Catholic Reporter, a newspaper with a liberal slant - "Ratzinger had nothing personally to do with the vast majority of sex abuse cases, even the small percentage which wound up in Rome."

It was only after 2001 that the Congregation played a leading role in the sex abuse crisis and once the cardinal was in charge he reviewed "all the files on every priest credibly accused of sexual abuse anywhere in the world, giving him a sense of the contours of the problem that virtually no one else in the Catholic Church can claim".

'There is a war going on'

Truth is, the mistakes in the Murphy case were made in Milwaukee, not in Rome; and they were made, as the current archbishop of that diocese pointed out last week, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by civil authorities, by Church officials and by bishops, and "by law enforcement and medical professionals". None of this is to diminish the gravity of the crimes committed by Murphy; still less to minimise the horrendous afflictions visited upon his victims. It is to highlight the dishonesty employed to implicate Benedict XVI even at the cost of mishandling the truth (let us be charitable in this uncharitable world).

In a piece that appeared in Newsmax, Edward Pentin quotes an open letter sent to the Corriere della Sera by the atheist philosopher Marcello Pera, who was president of the Italian Senate when he co-authored a book Without Roots - The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam with then Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004; a book that should be required reading.

"There is a war going on. It's not just against the person of the Pope, because, on these grounds, it would be impossible. Benedict XVI remains impregnable because of his image, his serenity, his clarity, firmness and doctrine."

Secularists are questioning whether the Church as a whole is capable of looking after children, educating them, or treating them in a Catholic hospital. By striking at the head, they hope to strike at the roots.

The means employed by Communism and Nazis have changed, he argued, but the end, in this "pitched battle of secularism against Christianity", remains the same: the destruction of religion. "Today, it won't be secular reason that triumphs, but another kind of barbarism"; one with ethical and barbaric vocations that include killing the foetus, calling the embryo a "clump of cells", killing an old man because there is no family to look after him, hastening the end of life because it is suffering from an incurable condition.

And The New York Times notwithstanding, Christ is Risen.