George Weigel

Throughout the 20th century – the greatest period of martyrdom in history – persecuted Christians used the dross of this world to make religious artifacts.

Pope Francis’s recent “motu proprio” on sexual abuse, “Vos estis lux mundi” (You Are the Light of the World), was a welcome addition to church law, as world Catholicism seeks to heal the wounds of abuse victims, promote chaste living, foster mutual accountability within the body of Christ, and restore the credibility of the church’s leadership. The response to the motu proprio by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ably summed up that document’s achievement:

In Herman Wouk’s novel “War and Remembrance,” Warren Henry shocks his Bible-reading father, the novel’s hero, by claiming that human beings are “microbes on a grain of dust ... and when it’s over we’re just dead meat.” The Washington state legislature has now topped the cynical young Warren Henry by declaring that we’re useful meat, as in potential compost, such that one can legally choose to be composted after death, then used for fertilizer.

Judging from the immediate, volatile and sometime vicious responses to Ratzinger’s memorandum from the same quarters two weeks ago, too many on the Catholic left remain in denial about the link between doctrinal and moral dissent and clerical wickedness. ... One of these frothing pundits even went so far as to charge Benedict with being, in effect, a schismatic.