Pope Benedict XVI must resign

Pope John XXIII was a very popular pope. He was often referred to as “Good Pope John”. He was a man who was admired by Catholics and non Catholics alike. That cannot be said about Pope Benedict XVI. If anything, he is both a fool and a hypocrite. I wrote a fairly long statement about him being a hypocrite in my article published in my blog on March 22nd so there is no need for me to go over that material again. This current article however is about his foolishness in how he handled the sex abuse problems while he served the church as a senior church leader.

The Pope played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, according to a shocking documentary that was shown on the BBC on September 30, 2006. According to the expose, in 2001, when the pope was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety. The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it and to keep victims quiet. Further, his edict threatened that if the victims repeat the allegations, they would be excommunicated.

Is this the action of a dedicated church leader who has the best interests of his flock in mind? No. This is the action of a criminal who tried to keep secret the sexual abuses of priests by threatening victims with excommunication if they complained to the police. There are some people in England who want the pope arrested as soon as he steps out of his plane in Heathrow in his upcoming visit to that nation.

There is a law against harboring criminals in most countries and the Pope Benedict (He was Cardinal then) when he failed to act against three abusive priests in the U.S. who were brought to his attention when he headed the Vatican's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the office responsible for disciplining priests. He was Archbishop Ratzinger in Munich when he approved a decision to send a priest who preyed on boys for therapy in 1980 instead of having the priest defrocked and turned over to the police. The priest was later sent to another parish where he again abused a child.

He acted (or didn't act) in the 1990s to make sure a publicly beloved priest, Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who taught for twenty-four years at St. John's School for the Deaf, in the Diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, never stood trial for sexually abusing hundreds of students. Instead of listening to the Milwaukee's bishop's pleas to defrock the unrepentant pedophile, then-Cardinal Ratzinger and his second-in-command at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Bertone, halted church reprimands, because the pedophile priest (Murphy) begged to be let off the hook because he was ill and the church's statute of limitations (one month from the date of each incident of abuse) had expired. The lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision for the church to do nothing. Can you believe it? A month after a priest sodomizes your son, if he hasn’t been found out; it’s too late for the church to defrock him. But it certainly wasn’t’ too late to have him arrested then. In 1974 a group of men accusing Murphy of having molested them as boys filed complaints with the police. These did not result in charges, due to the criminal statute of limitations. He admitted abusing 30 boys and was suspected of molesting two hundred boys.

Milwaukee Archbishop, Rembert G. Weakland wrote to Cardinal Ritzinger (now the pope) in 1996 in which he emphasized the seriousness of the accusations against Murphy. He said that Father Murphy was "accused of solicitations of a penitent so as to commit a sin against the six commandant of the Decalogue (c. 1387)." This means he was molesting children in the confession booth. He made a plea for help from the highest authority but it took the Vatican office eight months to respond to his letter.

A psychiatrist who treated a priest accused of sexually abusing boys in the early 1980s says a German archdiocese, headed at the time by the future pope, neglected repeated warnings the priest should not be allowed to work with children. The priest was convicted a few years later in Bavaria of sexual abuse.

Before being elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, the pontiff was Cardinal Thomas Ratzinger who had, for 24 years, been the head of the powerful Congregation of the Doctrine of The Faith, the department of the Roman Catholic Church charged with promoting Catholic teachings on morals and matters of faith.

An arch-Conservative, he was regarded as the 'enforcer' of Pope John Paul II in cracking down on liberal challenges to traditional Catholic teachings so it follows that if a priest was molesting children as father Murphy was doing, it was up to Cardinal Ratzinger to deal with it. The Cardinal determined that this priest would remain in ministry; they did not even order him out of ministry. No one in the archdiocese was alerted as to what he had done although it was common knowledge in the area. The Vatican allowed this man, this predator, to die honorably as a priest."

In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger sent out an updated version of the notorious 1962 Vatican document Crimen Sollicitationis - Latin for The Crime of Solicitation - which laid down the Vatican's strict instructions on covering up sexual scandal. It was regarded as so secret that it came with instructions that bishops had to keep it locked in a safe at all times. Cardinal Ratzinger reinforced the strict cover-up policy by introducing a new principle: that the Vatican must have what it calls Exclusive Competence. In other words, he commanded that all child abuse allegations should be dealt with directly by the Vatican.

During an interview with Patrick Wall, a former Vatican-approved enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis in America, he told the host of the BBC programme: "I found out I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself."

Father Tom Doyle, a Vatican lawyer until he was sacked for criticizing the church's handling of child abuse claims, later said, "What you have here is an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy and to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen. He further said, "When abusive priests are discovered, the response has been not to investigate and prosecute but to move them from one place to another. So there's total disregard for the victims and for the fact that you are going to have a whole new crop of victims in the next place. This is happening all over the world."

Colm O'Gorman, who was raped by a priest when he was 14, said, "What gets me is that it's the same story every time and every place. Bishops appoint priests who they know have abused children in the past to new parishes and new communities and more abuse happens."

The allegations could not come at a worse time for Pope Benedict, who is desperately trying to mend the Church's relations with the Muslim world after a speech in which he quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor who said that Islam was spread by holy war and had brought only evil to the world.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and the Vatican's former secretary of state, and close friend of the pope, pronounced his ringing endorsement shortly before Easter mass 2010, in front of thousands of worshippers huddled against the rain in St. Peter's Square. He said, "Holy Father, on your side are the people of God, who do not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes strike at the community of believers.”

He had the unmitigated gall to say that what is being announced around the world with respect to priests abusing children is “petty gossip” and it just goes to show how the Vatican is taking this problem it’s facing to heart. It is trying to do what it has always tried to do; cover up the shit so it can’t be seen. Unfortunately for the Vatican, the Catholic Church and the Pope, the stench is overwhelming and nothing, not even the sweetest perfume is going to remove it from our nostrils. The stench will linger on for years.

He has implied that the Vatican is especially outraged by accusations that the pontiff perpetuated a climate of silence and cover-up around pedophile priests. He said that the faithful had come to "rally close around you. No doubt there are people who will give the support but I think there are a great many who will not offer the pope any support at all.” He also said to the pope, "We are deeply grateful to you for the strength of spirit and apostolic courage with which you announce the Gospel," Sodano said, before embracing the pontiff warmly. Sodano's statement did not go down well with groups representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

There is growing concern within the Vatican that Benedict's pontificate will be defined by the sex-abuse scandal. However, the Vatican's attempts at damage control so far seem to have worsened matters. One such attempt last week backfired when the Pope's personal preacher, in his Good Friday sermon, compared criticism of the Church over child abuse to "collective violence suffered by the Jews." The statement caused outrage among Jews and forced the Vatican spokesman to repeatedly say Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa had not voiced the official position of the Vatican. Yet, the official Vatican paper, L'Osservatore Romano, published the remarks in his sermon online.

After the Vatican mass, Benedict stepped onto the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica and delivered his Urbi et Orbi ("To the city and the world") message, in which he touched on the struggle of earthquake survivors in Haiti and Chile, on the suffering of Christians in Iraq and Pakistan, and on strife in the Middle East. The Pope however remained silent about the sex-abuse uproar surrounding him during the Easter weekend celebrations. But the top Roman Catholic cleric in Belgium, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, in his Easter homily, denounced the "guilty silence" of church officials in the widespread pedophile scandal. He said, "For decades, the Church, like other institutions, has badly managed the problem of pedophilia in its ranks while it had an evangelical obligation to protect the dignity of these children. With a guilty silence, it often gave preference to the reputation of certain men of the Church over the honour of the abused children. We must, by declaring the truth, restore their dignity which was abominably exploited."

Benedict, who turns 83 on April 16, 2010, has watched as sex-abuse scandals have engulfed the Church in Ireland, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland and his native Germany. Before he became Pope, evidence of long-term abuse of children rocked the Church in Canada and the United States.

The molestation allegations against the Roman Catholic Church not only have horrified all reasonable people, but have been seized upon by the Church’s enemies to flay it to perdition. Though it is distressing, I cannot blame them for that. The facts are grim and are compounded by the excruciating reluctance of ecclesiastical authorities to do the obvious and the necessary to put such a scandal behind them.

The Roman Catholic Church flourishes as an organization (as opposed to a faith) only because it is a dictatorship. Once elevated, the pope can speak with the authority of nearly 2,000 years, a fairly clear succession of about 270 predecessors, and the canonical jurisdiction to interpret all texts and traditions and impose his will on the clergy. Those who disagree are free to dissent within the Church, lapse or apostacize (such as Martin Luther and Henry VIII). In congregational churches, the authorities can be revoked, and can proliferate and fragment, as in Islam, where every mullah is relatively autonomous. In other Episcopal churches (Eastern Orthodox, Anglican-Episcopalian, Lutheran), schisms may occur. But the ark of the “one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” of Rome moves on, “timeless and immutable.” It will move through and beyond the present squalid controversy, like a great ship pushing through narrow contaminated waters until the last, sordid details from the furthest corner of the Catholic world have been churned up and have assaulted the senses of the just. This is as it should be.

In the vast honeycomb of the Roman Catholic Church, there are 1.2 billion nominal adherents, of whom probably 800 or 900 million consider themselves to be communicants, roughly as many as in all of Islam. After every conceivable enticement has been dangled in front of every possible retroactive complainant to reach into the mists of personal antiquity and produce a grievance, thousands have done so. Many have been frauds, such as the scurrilous allegations that scarred the last years of the late archbishop of Chicago, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, before the accuser recanted and repented.

But there have certainly been many thousands of legitimate abuses, perhaps a few scores of thousands, among the many hundreds of thousands of clergy and many hundreds of millions of people entrusted to them at some point. It is the nature of the world that it could scarcely be otherwise.

What is noteworthy in this torrent of alleged and, in many cases, undoubted, abuse, in secretive Catholic institutions, is not that these ghastly incidents occurred, but the unevenness of their occurrence and the clumsiness of the high official responses, and some of the antics of the Church’s manner in which they faced these problems.

These derelictions that have come to light are shameful, disgusting and outrageous, but they are not especially surprising. All of the modern popes and curial cardinals, and surely most of the bishops, must have had some general awareness of these acts. I suppose it is understandable, but not so easily excusable, that they were not immediately uplifted, as the rest of us are supposed to be, by the possibilities of confession, repentance and the shriven joy of mending one’s ways.

The failure of the popes to order an audit of these matters throughout the Church, to impose a remedial regime, to punish and reward, atone and make restitution pre-emptively of the inevitable arrival of secular law-enforcers, bus-loads of incentivized and spontaneous litigants and the teeming assault squads of the media, was unpardonable. It was that worst of acts, both immoral, mistaken and yes, criminal too.

Only those intimately aware of how the Holy See operates and well-acquainted with the personalities involved could hazard an explanation of why it all went so horribly wrong. The most likely explanation is the dismal, commonplace combination of fear, willful ignorance, misplaced hopefulness and arrogance of office. That usually assures that the very last nauseating sinfulnesses will, eventually ooze out like pus from an infected sore.

Pope Benedict XVI reminds me of the young Italian dictator, Mussolini shouting to his followers: “There is no God! If there is, may he strike me down now! You have five minutes … Time’s up God!” I have often wondered if the Duce thought of that bravura as, bearded and hiding in a German army uniform among real Wehrmacht evacuees in an open truck, he tried to flee Italy at the end of the war, before he was apprehended, quietly led off the truck and later after being briefly detained, summarily executed, and was then displayed, hanging upside down over a Milan gas station, his corpse desecrated by the Italian masses who had screamed their adulation of him for 20 years before.

Roman Catholics have been fleeing the Church by hundreds of thousands of parishioners each year. The Church is suffering from a serious infection caused by self-inflicted wounds. It is bleeding profusely and unless treatment begins and the bleeding is stopped, the Church will continue to fester and bleed and never fully recover.

The Roman Catholic Church cannot remove the pope from office. Once elected, it is a life-long position that can only end with the pope’s death. However, he can abdicate and this is what he should do. If he chooses to remain as the pope, his continued reign will damage the image of the papacy, the Vatican and the Catholic Church. It is now time for the cardinals to approach him and ask him to do the right thing for the Church. When approaching him, they should scream out in unison; “Resign!”