Nightmares Continue for Benedict XVI

Earlier in the past week, Fire Dog Lake summed things up thus for the continued bomb shells hitting the Roman Catholic Church during the week before: "It’s been a bad week for Pope Benedict. From Italy to Belgium to Washington DC, courts everywhere seem to be taking a hard look at some of the activities of the Catholic church, and they’re not liking what they’re seeing." In a follow up piece, Fire Dog Lake looks at the continued stories that keep emerging and making for Adding to the free for all is the fact that now some bishops are throwing the blame for the Church's failure to purge predator priests at the feet of Benedict XVI (pictured above with his handsome and much younger personal secretary) who for 20+ years headed up the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF], formerly "The Holy Office", a/k/a the Inquisition. The Church hierarchy is truly reaping what it sowed even as the apologists for the Church try desperately to label the disclosure of new damaging facts as "anti-Catholicism." It will be interesting to see if more bishops in acts of self-preservation seek to throw the blame sex abuse cover ups squarely on Rome. Here are some highlights:
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[O]n the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. . . . the headline Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal was a nice picture of Benedict from an earlier era, with a caption that summed it up pretty well: “Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1982. The office he led, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had been given authority over abuse cases in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm.”
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the heaviest blows to the church in this piece came not from the reporters but from Roman Catholic bishops and academics:
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Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, an outspoken auxiliary bishop emeritus from Sydney, Australia, who attended the secret meeting in 2000, said that despite numerous warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up to the abuse problems than many local bishops did.

Then there’s this from Archbishop Philip Wilson, now head of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference . . . : Archbishop Wilson said in an interview that . . . he had to call Vatican officials’ attention to long-ignored papal instructions, dating from 1922, and reissued in 1962, that gave Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Holy Office, sole responsibility for deciding cases of priests accused of particularly heinous offenses: solicitation of sex during confession, homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality.
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(The Vatican has recently insisted that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office was responsible only for cases related to priests who solicited sex in the confessional, but the 1922 instructions plainly gave his [Ratzinger's] office jurisdiction over sexual abuse cases involving “youths of either sex” that did not involve violating the sacrament of confession.
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It’s stunning to see bishops putting themselves out there with criticisms like this. No “unnamed Vatican sources tell us . . .” or “senior Vatican officials say . . .” or “leaks from lawyers suing the Vatican revealed . . .” These are bishops, speaking on the record, lamenting the way in which then-Cardinal Ratzinger handled child abuse cases in his time at the CDF.
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If Benedict did not order the cover ups while he headed up CFD, then its obvious that such orders came from John Paul II. If such is the case, one has to wonder when Benedict XVI will throw John Paul II under the bus to save his own hide. Of course, if and when he does so, delusional efforts to canonize John Paul II will likely become dead on arrival.