Did Pope Benedict XVI Receive News of An Arrest Warrant Before Abdicating?

Two morally bankrupt criminals who deserve to be criminally prosecuted

Some lesser news blogs are reporting that Pope Benedict XVI's decision to abdicate yet remain living at the Vatican may have been prompted by the knowledge that criminal warrants against were about to be forth coming.  It's unclear whether the reporting is accurate or not, although it seems very clear that Benedict XVI was up to his ears in orchestrating the global conspiracy to shuffle around predator priests and protect the appearances of the Church rather than to protect children and youths from known child rapists. Here's a sampling from one such report:

On February 4, a week before Pope Benedict XVI's resignation, Vatican allegedly received a note from an undisclosed European government that stated that there are plans to issue a warrant for the Pope's arrest. Addicting Info reports.

With his resignation announced, the former pope will have a meeting with the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano on February 23 to beg for immunity against prosecution for allegations of child rape.

But for him this will not be easy as the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State calls upon the Italian President to deny help to Ratzinger. If the Italian President does cave there may be another venue to make sure he doesn't get away.

In addition to these alleged attempts by this European government to prosecute, a New York based organization, The Centre for Constitutional Rights, has accussed the Pope and his Cardinals of possible crimes against humanity for sheltering pedophile priests. The non-profit legal group has requested an ICC inquiry on behalf of the Survivor’s Network, citing the church’s “long-standing and pervasive system of sexual violence.”

Huffington Post is also reporting that there is a very real stagey behind the apparent decision to have Benedict XVI to remain residing at the Vatican after his abdication: enhancing his immunity from criminal prosecution.  Once again, the Vatican sees itself as above the law and not accountable to facing justice for horrific crimes against children and youth.  Here are article highlights:

Pope Benedict's decision to live in the Vatican after he resigns will provide him with security and privacy. It will also offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources and legal experts say.

"His continued presence in the Vatican is necessary, otherwise he might be defenseless. He wouldn't have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else," said one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity.  "It is absolutely necessary" that he stays in the Vatican, said the source, . . . .

The final key consideration is the pope's potential exposure to legal claims over the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals.

In 2010, for example, Benedict was named as a defendant in a law suit alleging that he failed to take action as a cardinal in 1995 when he was allegedly told about a priest who had abused boys at a U.S. school for the deaf decades earlier. The lawyers withdrew the case last year and the Vatican said it was a major victory that proved the pope could not be held liable for the actions of abusive priests.
Benedict is currently not named specifically in any other case. The Vatican does not expect any more but is not ruling out the possibility.

After he resigns, Benedict will no longer be the sovereign monarch of the State of Vatican City, which is surrounded by Rome, but will retain Vatican citizenship and residency. That would continue to provide him immunity under the provisions of the Lateran Pacts while he is in the Vatican and even if he makes jaunts into Italy as a Vatican citizen. 

The 1929 Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Holy See, which established Vatican City as a sovereign state, said Vatican City would be "invariably and in every event considered as neutral and inviolable territory".

 Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan notes what is happening to the Church in the Western world:

My niece – now as brilliant a teen girl as you can imagine – memorized the vows and was a ring-bearer. My sister could not explain or defend. To hear the shameless protectors of child-rapists mount a campaign against her own brother’s chance to love and be loved was too much. They have all drifted away.

Without women, the Church will die. One of the more obviously radical things Jesus does in the Gospels is to treat women as complete equals. Yet the Church that was constructed after Him was based on male supremacy and eventually male segregation in the priesthood – forbidding by celibacy even the influence of wives and daughters. Of course this creates a circular, hermetically sealed worldview. But I’ll tell you this: if women had been priests or priests had ever had kids, the child-rape scandal would have been stopped in its tracks. The criminals would have been busted, not protected.

If the hierarchy still refuses to get this, if it does not shift on women and married priests, it will, in the West, lose the mothers. And once you lose them, the church is all but over.