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Cardinal Egan Cracking Up

The Deacon’s Bench has a jaw-dropping post about an interview the retired Edward Cardinal Egan gave to a Connecticut magazine. Excerpt: Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology. In an interview in the February issue of Connecticut magazine, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, “I […]

The Deacon’s Bench has a jaw-dropping post about an interview the retired Edward Cardinal Egan gave to a Connecticut magazine. Excerpt:

Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology.

In an interview in the February issue of Connecticut magazine, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, “I never should have said that,” and added, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

He said many more things in the interview, some of them seemingly at odds with the facts. He repeatedly denied that any sex abuse had occurred on his watch in Bridgeport. He said that even now, the church in Connecticut had no obligation to report sexual abuse accusations to the authorities. (A law on the books since the 1970s says otherwise.) And he described the Bridgeport diocese’s handling of sex-abuse cases as “incredibly good.”

This is just insane, and, to anyone who has any idea of what actually happened there on Egan’s watch, incredibly offensive. Read the interview to see what kind of morally obtuse egomaniac Egan is. Better to pay attention to Msgr Charles Scicluna in the Vatican, whom Cardinal Ratzinger put on the Maciel case during the final days of John Paul II:

Hiding behind a culture of “omerta” — the Italian word for the Mafia’s code of silence — would be deadly for the Catholic Church, the Vatican’s top official for dealing with sexual abuse of minors by clergy said Wednesday.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna made the unusually forthright comment in his speech to a landmark symposium in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Church in the past decade.

“The teaching … that truth is at the basis of justice explains why a deadly culture of silence, or ‘omerta,’ is in itself wrong and unjust,” Scicluna said in his address to the four-day symposium which brings together some 200 people including bishops, leaders of religious orders, victims of abuse and psychologists.

Rarely, if ever, has a Vatican official used the word “omerta” – a serious accusation in Italian — to compare the reluctance of some in the Church to come clean on the abuse scandal with the Mafia’s code of silence.

“Other enemies of the truth are the deliberate denial of known facts and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of disclosure,” Scicluna said.

Don Eduardo Cardinal Egan, call the home office.

UPDATE: Michael Brendan Dougherty, who is a conservative Catholic, unloads on the disgraceful Egan:

And, speaking as a Catholic, who lived in the New York Archdiocese under Cardinal Egan’s reign, I can say Egan did punish some priests. But not child-abusers. He swiftly punished and evicted those Catholic priests that said the Traditional Latin Mass (later liberalized by Pope Benedict XVI), if he thought they didn’t pay him sufficient deference.

In short: Egan coddled child-abusers, and persecuted decent priests during his ignominious reign as a Prince of the Church. His entire interview reeks of a narcissism and self-regard that is so palpable it makes your eyes water.

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