Non-Catholics and a lot of Catholics impatient with Pope Francis's response to the pederast scandal in the Catholic clergy and hierarchy might imagine him as an absolute monarch or even the version of that which his next to last predecessor, John Paul II wished he was, or perhaps his immediate predecessor Benedict XVI who, in a number of ways, was JPII's William Barr, someone who went along with JPII even as he demonstrably knew JPII was wrong and making the breaking scandal worse. Those who went to see the movie Spotlight, about the Spotlight story that brought the abuse scandal to the world's notice would likely be unaware that it had been breaking for some time before the Boston Globe's renowned team of journalists took it up, there had been much earlier reporting in the Globe and elsewhere that there were serious crimes being committed by priests raping and molesting children and some adults, stories that were certainly known to the Bishops and Cardinals and in the Vatican, itself going back quite a way. In just about every way the papacy of John Paul II made that worse. And up until the time he succeeded JPII, Cardinal Ratzinger was a first hand witness to some of the worst enabling by the, then, Pope, we know that because as soon as he was Benedict XVI, he started to make some amends. Amends which he, in his long retirement, is undoing.
Now, with his recent letter, the self-retired pope in the wake of the recent world meeting of bishops to address the sexual abuse scandal, he is, again, making things worse.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published a new letter blaming the continuing Catholic clergy abuse crisis on the sexual revolution, developments in theology following the Second Vatican Council, and modern society's aversion to speaking about God.
The letter, one of a handful the ex-pontiff has shared publicly since his resignation in 2013, immediately drew criticism from theologians and Vatican watchers. They noted it does not address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict's own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office.
The former pope instead points the finger at a range of esoteric issues, from a supposed societal "mental collapse" brought on by the protests of 1968, to a claim that the sexual revolution declared pedophilia to be "allowed and appropriate," and to "vehement backlashes" by theologians against a 1993 encyclical by Pope John Paul II. . .
. . . A lengthy 5,500-word text, the former pope's letter was published overnight April 10 by several right-wing Catholic websites, including the EWTN-owned outlets National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency.
The Vatican press office did not immediately respond to requests to verify the letter's authenticity, but the city-state's news portal reported on the text at length, saying it was first written for a German magazine for clergy, Klerusblatt.
As soon as a person informed on things Catholic saw the letters EWTN, they should have yelled, BINGO! because if there is anything that is a sign that Ratzinger is either participating in or being manipulated by the well-financed billionaire gangster funded attempt to take down Pope Francis, it is seeing those usual suspects in on it. EWTN is the right-wing kingdom of someone I called The Nazi Nun for decades before she died, the inaptly named Sr. (I can't bring myself to use the "M" word for her) Angelica.
Two other certain signposts that this is a politically motivated document is shown by how the gang around Benedict didn't inform Pope Francis' administration about it until it was released to right wing media and that his longtime secretary, Bishop Ganswein, someone who is decidedly on the record of being in the anti-Francis camp seems to have been involved.
Even the Vatican appears to be struggling to understand what to do with a former pope who wants to engage in public debate. As Benedict's latest letter appeared on several right-wing Catholic websites overnight April 10, the Holy See Press Office seemed unprepared, unable even to respond to questions about whether the text was authentic.
In fact it was Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict's personal secretary, that confirmed for many journalists that the text was indeed from the former pontiff.
I haven't trusted Georg (Georgeous George) Ganswein* from the first time I laid eyes on his fashion plate picture next to the red Prada wearing Benedict. If you suspect there might be a story there, all I can say is lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It's nothing the right-wing camp wouldn't go with if they thought they could make hay of it.
With this, if it is, in fact, his intention, the retired pope has set himself up as a modern form of anti-Pope, something which some wondered might happen if he lived long enough, especially the day that Pope Francis was elected and immediately proved he had no intention of continuing in the tradition of JPII and Benedict XVI. It was a big mistake to allow a self-retired Pope to maintain a status that did't make it clear that he is not a Pope any longer, something that as authoritarian but far more responsible Pope, Pius XII made clear when he produced a document saying that if, as many expected, he was taken hostage by the Nazis, he was, in every sense an ex-Pope and that he would revert to the status of a Cardinal, a document that, probably, only chance kept from its unprecedented execution with his kidnapping. I never trusted Cardinal Ratzinger and trusted him as Benedict XVI by the slightest of margins. He was a really terrible Pope, leading me to think that anyone who was as beholden as he was to Augustine's City of God theology was bound to be a disaster as a pastor.
If you want to have a more informed and more charitable view of what he is up to, this piece by Michael Sean Winters, which calls it "a regrettable text" implies that it is the product of a mind in decline.
When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations for the sex abuse crisis. Apparently the text is authentic, so we must search for other reasons why it gets so much wrong — and so much that the retired pope would know is wrong. Let us examine the difficulties with this text.
I will leave it to you to read Winters' fine analysis of the letter, he clearly criticizes it from a starting point more inclined to think well of Benedict XVI than I am as well as someone certainly more informed of the issues than I am. I would call your attention to what he says about the actual facts, as supported with statistics, that the seminary formation of the majority of those convicted of sexual crimes against children was pre-Vatican II, which, as he points out, was hardly fully implemented for decades, it, in fact, isn't now, having been undermined and attacked by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, though Benedict was one of the theologians who worked on some of the major documents of the Council. It is clear in his letter that he is still obsessed with the events that turned him from a moderately liberal theologian into an arch conservative, the student demonstrations of 1968 which upset his placid academic theologian's quiescence**. The sexual abuse crisis is a product of the elitist clericalism he and JPII reimposed on the Church and the twisted view of sexuality as well as the all male-unmarried priesthood. Anyone who doesn't admit the role that that exclusion played in producing so many child abusers as priests is denying an obvious reality.
My view of this is more along the lines of this article by Jamie Mason which points out that the glaringly wrong and politically reactionary nature of the anti-encyclical, that it is far better an explanation of how the past two Popes managed to make things worse and how they learned nothing from even the worst aspects of this. He certainly saw the corruption under the papal administration he was the second in command in, but that seems to have made no impression on him.
If you want more depth to the story, there is a fourth article dealing with various critiques by theologians, which I won't go into, though some of the things said in it are important to understanding that this has more to do with the billionaire, fascist financed war against Pope Francis and the Vatican II Church than it does the pedophile scandal.
* I seem to remember the house of Versache used Gorgeous George as a inspiration for a line of clothes for women, using his image in their ads.
** You have to wonder at the moral obtuseness of someone who learned so little from the sins of the Church while he has obsessed for a half a century over the very short and relatively harmless student demonstrations of 1968.
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