Pope Benedict, Catholic Church Need to Repent

The Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal continues to grow and adding to Pope Benedict XVI's problems is the fact that now a molestation charges has come forth for abuse that occurred while Benedict's brother, Georg Ratzinger, was head of the Regensburg Domspatzen choir in Bavaria during Georg Ratzinger's watch. Up until now, Ratzinger has claimed ignorance of sexual abuse issues, although he has admitted to physically abusing boys. Adding to the media free for all is a new Newsweek article that looks at the inadequacy of the Church's faux apology and its failure to take meaningful disciplinary action. Based on the Boston abuse explosion, I suspect that the expose in Europe is just beginning and may in the laity are about over looking the other way at a system wide cover up of child molestation. First, here are highlights from Newsweek that look at the Pope and the Church's failure to act, as well as the laughable punishment visited on Cardinal Law, former archbishop of Boston:

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I'm not sure I can take it anymore, my Catholic friend K. wrote to me in an e-mail. Maybe I should become an Episcopalian. Fury does not begin to describe her mood. More than 10,000 children in Europe smacked, tortured, and raped by priests who were supposed to protect them. Bishops and spokesmen denying or minimizing their role—appearing, for all the world, like old men who seem not to understand the seriousness of what they've done.
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In Germany the pope's older brother, Georg Ratzinger, confessed that he'd occasionally slapped boys in the choir at Regensburg, but that it always made him feel bad; he had no knowledge of sexual abuse at the school. In Rome, Vatican spokesmen denied that Pope Benedict XVI knew about the predatory activities of a pedophile priest under his jurisdiction when he was Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982. His deputy from that period confessed it was he and not his boss, then Joseph Ratzinger, who reinstated the offending priest (post–remedial therapy) into a parish—where he proceeded to abuse more children.
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Reporters will continue to investigate the question, what did Benedict know and when did he know it? This is appropriate. But his continued complicity in the matter of Cardinal Bernard Law taints him already, no matter what is revealed in Munich.
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Law presided over the Boston Archdiocese for nearly 20 years. During that time he ignored repeated pleas from the mothers and aunts of abused children, coddled offending priests, and demanded silence from victims until—after the number of cases exceeded 500—he was forced in 2002 to resign his post. Today he is the archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, a position that, according to a 2004 New York Times article, earns him $12,000 a month. He reports "to no one but the pope," according to that story, and lives in "a palatial apartment." As an active member of the College of Cardinals, he can help elect the next pope and works on at least seven Vatican committees.
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But how can I continue to send my kid to church? insists K. To that, the most heart-wrenching of questions, there is no answer. Stay . . . Or walk away, and teach your child an independent justice. For an institution that protects itself above its children may not, after all, offer the best Sunday lesson.
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In terms of Benedict XVI's new problems with his brother's increasingly questionable denials, Timesonline has the following highlights:
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Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's brother, was drawn further into the paedophile scandal embroiling the Catholic Church yesterday after a former member of the school choir that he ran claimed to have been sexually abused.
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[S]ex abuse allegations against four priests and two nuns were being investigated and that one inquiry related to claims made by a former Domspatzen choirboy that a teacher abused him for months in 1971.
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The teacher, identified by German media as Father Sturmius W, had been a theology student and an assistant at the Cathedral boarding school attached to the Regensburg choir, and subsequently became a priest. . . . Father W, 61, was stripped of his duties last week after the former chorister came forward last week. The accuser, who was 11 at the time of the alleged abuse, was named by Stern magazine as Alexander Probst, now 50.

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Obviously, as more facts continue to come to light, it will be interesting to see what lies Georg Ratzinger and Benedict XVI may have told in their effort to save their own butts and effect damage control. The hubris of the Church hierarchy and the total lack of concern for children and minors is unbelievable.