The fight in this third millennium is all about family and life. Satan wants to destroy the family through which the future of humanity passes, and wants to impose his diabolical culture of death. In this there will be lies, half-truths, distortions, disinformation. There will be maligning and hate campaign. We in CFC-FFL have passed through this path of affliction. But this has helped purify us, and sharpened our focus for the crucial work of family and life. We stand with the pope.

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By Hilary White

ROME, April 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Three high-level Vatican cardinals have denounced the “campaign of hatred” that is being waged against the Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI over the clerical sex abuse crisis, saying the motive behind the campaign is the pope’s defence of the unborn and marriage.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herra, President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, said on Tuesday, “The Pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different” agenda.

Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, President of the Governatorate of Vatican City State, added that Pope Benedict “has done all that he could have” against sex abuse by clergy. Cardinal Lajolo decried a campaign of “hatred against the Catholic church.”

The former Secretary of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, “By now, it's a cultural contrast. The pope embodies moral truths that aren't accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the Church.”

Sodano pointed to the Pope’s apologies over the scandals, saying, “But it's not Christ's fault if Judas betrayed. It's not a bishop's fault if one of his priests is stained by grave wrongdoing. And certainly the pontiff is not responsible.

“Behind the unjust attacks on the pope are visions of the family and of life that run contrary to the Gospel,” Sodano said. “Now the accusation of pedophile is being brandished against the church.”

Veteran Vatican expert and papal biographer John Allen wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times of Benedict’s contribution, since his days as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to combating the abuse of minors by homosexual predators in the priesthood.

Allen wrote that after 2001, when responsibility for clerical sex abuse cases were placed under his competence at the CDF, Ratzinger’s reforms of the process made him a “major chapter in the solution” to the crisis. Before those reforms no one Vatican office had responsibility for such cases, which were normally handled at diocesan level. Upon reading documentation on cases from around the world, then-Cardinal Ratzinger “seems to have undergone a transformation. From that point forward, he and his staff were determined to get something done.”

Another leading expert on Vatican affairs and the current papacy, Italian journalist Sandro Magister, has catalogued the attacks by the left-leaning media on Pope Benedict, saying that they have been “a constant of this pontificate.” Magister said in an article this week that the hatred of the mainstream media for Pope Benedict can be partially explained by his success against the “progressivist” movement that has dominated the Catholic Church since the 1960s.

Magister wrote that for the media, starting with the uproar over his lecture in Regensburg in 2006, “striking Benedict XVI means striking the very man who has worked and is working, on that same terrain, with the greatest foresight, resolve, and success.” With the sex abuse scandals, he said, the same pattern is playing out with the media’s accusations being “against the very man who has done more than anyone, in the Church hierarchy, to heal this scandal.”

“The paradox is that Benedict XVI is a great ‘illuminist’ in an age in which the truth has so few admirers and doubt is in command, to the point of wanting to silence the truth,” Magister added.

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