On Friday, July 2, The New York Times laid out the full extent of Pope Ratz’s irresponsibility over the last twenty years regarding pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church.
The article, “Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal” begins by saying, “In its long struggle to grapple with sexual abuse, the Vatican often cites as a major turning point the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly…but church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.”
The Vatican’s penchant for declaring that media bias, particularly NYT bias, is at the root of the recent firestorm about pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church, will surely be the Vatican’s fallback position re this new article.
We find out that although the Vatican has maintained that Cardinal Ratz immediately got behind a faction in the church hierarchy demanding immediate investigation of molestation charges, Ratz actually was the leader of the foot-dragging and protection of pedophiles that has characterized the Vatican’s response to reports of molestation of children in the RCC for the last twenty-plus years: “The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregeation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm,” the article reports, “ but for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.”
The most damning revelation is that in 2000 a group of Bishops were so outraged that Ratz was being unresponsive to the growing pedophile problem, that the Vatican sponsored a secret meeting to hear their complaints: “The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became so concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican convened a secret meeting to hear their complaints — an extraordinary example of prelates from across the globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform, and one that had not previously been revealed.
“And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has been described by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices. It was mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures that at least one bishop attending the meeting argued had been ignored.
“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.
“But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction,” the NYT reports. “More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.”
It's maddening to read that, “During this period, the three dozen staff members working for Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were busy pursuing other problems. These included examining supernatural phenomena, like apparitions of the Virgin Mary, so that hoaxes did not ‘corrupt the faith,’” while other sections of the Ratz’s Doctrine of the Faith “weighed requests by divorced Catholics to remarry and vetted the applications of former priests who wanted to be reinstated.
It is clear that Ratz has always had priorities other than protecting the children in the Roman Catholic Church. Priorities such as: protecting the image of the RCC, ridding the RCC. not to say the entire globe and perhaps the universe of homosexuals, plus making sure that the world accepts the myth that the Pope and the Vatican are equal in omniscience and power to God, if not a bit higher and more powerful than the Great I Am!
I can only say, read the article. It’s illuminating.
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