We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.
But at least McNamara said it. I think that we will never hear, "I’m sorry" from George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld. What we’ll hear is their self serving justifications until they are long gone, in spite of the known flaws in their cassus belli, in spite of their abject failure in conducting the war, in spite of their laxity in pursuing our real enemies.
I thought about these things as I listened to the Pope apologize to the sexual abuse victims who were molested by the pedophilic priests rampant in the Catholic Church. "Sorry" is not going to help those people. It may help them to go public with what happened to them. It may help children in the future to not be subjected to predatory priests. But while "Sorry" itself won’t help, at least he said it.
My concern is that he said it for the Church, not for the kids. He met with five of them. That was called historic. What about the other 10,995? The Catholic Church is crumbling for lack of Clergy. He could both recruit Clergy and rid the Church of pedophiles by allowing Priests to marry and live normal lives – something that was part of the Church in its first century. If the Pope is really "Sorry," he’ll do something definitive about the problem. And if he’s really speaking for "God’s World" [AKA earth], he’ll get out of the sexual regulation business altogether and drop the anti-birth control/rhythm method bit. The Church has been at it for several thousand years. It’s not working…
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