The Arrogance and Moral Bankruptcy of Pope Benedict XVI

I'm no fan of the Catholic Church hierarchy or the current occupant of the throne of St. Peter. Indeed, in my opinion, many organized crime members have more moral integrity than those involved in a global conspiracy to cover up the sexual abuse of children and youths. A column in the Toronto Star does a great job of lying out the case for why Pope Benedict XVI ought to be forced to abdicate something he would do but for his arrogance and lack of shame. They say that power corrupts and when one adds to that a lack of accountability, the corruption becomes nearly complete. Benedict XVI is a case in point as are most members of the Church hierarchy. Here are highlights from the column:

Dictators, who tend not to die peacefully in their beds, are among the few on this planet who can claim a job for life. And then there’s the pope.

No challenge to his authority, no Catholic Spring, no curia putsch allowed there; can’t be dislodged for reasons of poor health, psychological trauma or colossally bad judgment in ministering to the world’s nearly 2 billion faithful.

Faith, however, has never in modern memory been so fragile, so at risk, as under Benedict XVI, with alarming numbers abandoning the Church, at least in the West.

Benedict may be indubitably pious and unmatched as a scholar-pope but, on his watch, the Catholic Church has sunk into a morass of unprecedented scandal. The latest crisis — explosive documents obtained by an Italian investigative TV show in what’s been dubbed “Vatileaks’’ — arises from a three-way private correspondence, which included the pope, with an archbishop who blew the whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the Vatican, an alert that got the poor man transferred . . .

At its most suspect core, however, the Vatican has been unable to contain or adequately address the ever-expanding grotesquerie of predator priests and lay practitioners sexually abusing children.

To be fair, most of the tawdry abuse that has come to light in recent years occurred during the papacy of Pope John Paul II. For all his charisma and political courage, John Paul never confronted the pedophilia rot among his clergy, the Church more concerned with protecting its reputation than protecting children. But, in his quarter-century as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — disciplinarian-in-chief — Benedict, or Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as he then was — was directly responsible for dealing with priests who violated their oaths. Instead, known perpetrators were quietly moved around parishes and, on too many occasions, continued to commit sordid crimes.

As Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Ratzinger approved the transfer of a priest, Rev. Peter Hullerman, who’d sexually abused boys. Hullerman received psychiatric treatment, returned quickly to pastoral work with children and continued ministering to youth even after being convicted of molesting boys in 1982. Not until 2010, after new accusations of sexual abuse emerged, was Hullerman suspended from his priestly duties. Pope Benedict’s hands are dirty.

Grand juries, district attorneys and government commissions (as in Ireland) have done all the heavy lifting for the Church, . . . . Left to its own devices, the Vatican would probably have dithered for, oh, another couple of centuries.

Last week, the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted a landmark international symposium on clerical sex abuse, with attendance by representatives of 110 bishops’ conferences and 30 religious orders. . . . . But canon law has not been changed to reflect the scourge of abuse by clergy, and there’s no indication it will be. And only one actual victim was invited to speak at the symposium.

I’ll say it again: Benedict’s hands are dirty. Can’t even slide him out of the picture gracefully as a pope emeritus, no matter how doddering he gets, no matter how complicit he might be proven to have been in the concealing of predator priests. Benedict turns 85 in April. He’ll die a pope. But, for many of us, he will have been predeceased by his church.

Yet despite all of this, the filth that is the Catholic hierarchy is still treated with deference and even allowed to testify before Congress. One has to wonder when the KKK and neo-Nazi groups will be afforded this privilege - they certainly are no less morally bankrupt than the Catholic Church leadership.