Dear Pope Ratz: Don’t Ask Yourselves, Ask Me!

Get this! The guy in the Vatican who bears the main responsibility for the monumentally wrong-headed, uncivilized and unconscionable goings-on in the Vatican for the last 30 years--Cardinal Raztinger, now Pope Benedict XVI—on Monday addressed the current abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and said in a Christmas message to the Vatican hierarchy: “We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred, We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen.” He also said the abuse scandal had reached “a degree we could not have imagined” this year.

Well, maybe Ratz could not have imagined it because he and the Curia and all the Church sycophants who unctuously kiss his ring and live in Vatican City—a rarified, isolated little universe in Rome where the inhabitants are protected by Italian law from knowing or understanding anything about what goes on in the world---but any 16-year-old outside of Vatican City could have imagined in full-color and easy-to-read prose exactly the degree to which the abuse scandal would gain traction and become known to the world.

It was Ratz who was Pope John Paul’s “enforcer” and whose job it was to silence all Roman Catholic dissidents. It was Ratz who was was made head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1981 and whose job it was to deal with priests who were accused of molesting children. And although this month the Vatican has found and made public a letter from 1988 that shows that Ratz had tried to find ways to punish pedophile priests, the Vatican says he was unsuccessful.

And why do you think he was unsuccessful? Because he didn’t want to be successful. 

Ratz also said in his Christmas message that we have to realize that even in the 1970’s the devastation of pedophilia was not well understood. 

Now that is pure bullshit! The effects of pedophilia on the victims has been well understood for decades everywhere in the world but in the Vatican, which, for reasons not well understood, has chosen to ignore the information on pedophilia that has been available.

And who, we might ask, is the boss in the Vatican that within the last year has allowed a Vatican spokesperson to report to the world at large that the abuse scandal was a concoction of the New York Times and RC haters who wanted to discredit the Church? Who allowed a Vatican spokesperson to opine that press coverage of the RC Church abuse scandal was like anti-semitism? Who allowed a Vatican spokesperson to say that women priests are worse than pedophiles? Pope Ratz,that’s who.

So…yesterday, for Christmas, the Pope declared that he and his cohorts must look all over and in every nook and cranny and find the reasons WHY the RC Church is in the sad state it’s in.

Well, Pope, you have two options:

No. 1) You can ask me and I will tell you; or,

No. 2) Look in the mirror. There he is: The RC Church abuse-enabler for the last 30 years.