Cardinal Levada's Interview

Tonight on The News Hour (PBS) we watched Cardinal Levada, an American, being interviewed. The interview will be posted on the News Hour website by sometime Wednesday; for now, there's only a preview, here. 

Cardinal Levada is the man who now has Pope Benedict's old job.

He evaded or otherwise failed to answer several of the questions. And once or twice, you just couldn't help feeling he wasn't being truthful, as when the interviewer (Margaret Warner) asked whether the current scandal had taken the Cardinal by surprise, and he said it had. And then a few minutes later, he said, yes, he had dealt with child abuse cases in his diocese when he was a mere bishop. "Many," he said. And then we remembered that this man has been in charge of handling them all, worldwide, for the past 5 years. And the scandal took him by surprise?

He also, albeit less vigorously than some others, tried to blame "the media." It is of course true that there is child abuse everywhere, not just among Catholic priests; in America, the accepted statistic is that one of every 4 girls is the victim of incest. One in four!! But no, the press did not cause this scandal, and to try to change the subject and shift attention to the press is not a good way to deal with the scandal.

Come on, Cardinal Levada! What your people desperately need now is some straight talk, not to mention action, from the Vatican. You know, something to lend credibility.

Or maybe not; what do I know? Perhaps, what they should have, painful though it be, is a lot more exposure to you and the others like you.