An eye-opening account of corruption and secrecy.
Why Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, became the first pope to be cited for crimes against humanity.
Gawthrop (The Rice Queen Diaries, 2005, etc.) focuses on the complaint before the International Criminal Court to explore the deeper roots of the crisis within the Catholic Church. The author shows how resurgent opposition to discussions of reform initiated during the pontificate of John XXIII—e.g., birth control, abortion, ordaining female priests—provided the ground under which the now-exposed coverups of priestly rape and sexual abuse could take root. Because Ratzinger's rise within the church’s hierarchy spans 30 of the 50 years that have elapsed since John XXIII's reign, Gawthrop forcefully establishes that he had the power to stop the abuse. The author traces the origins of the coverup back to 1962, when John XXIII commissioned the policy document Crimen Sollicitationis. Key in this was the maintenance of “pontifical secrecy…the utmost confidentiality…permanent silence.” There were no provisions for investigation, no acknowledgment of crime and no suggestion about turning offenders over for prosecution by the criminal authorities. As head of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, Ratzinger continued this policy and ensured that all cases were referred to him personally. Detailing specific cases where Ratzinger intervened and how he affected their outcomes through stalling, delay and other means, Gawthrop shows how the succession of investigations and the arrogant responses of the hierarchy contributed to bring things to a head. The author also thoroughly documents the broader context of the hierarchy's theological and political commitment to overturn the legacy of Vatican II.
An eye-opening account of corruption and secrecy.Pub Date: June 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55152-527-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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