How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Pope?

Pope Benedict XVI has pointed the finger of blame at everyone but himself in this priest abuse scandal. And it becomes clearer every moment that it’s Archbishop/Cardinal/Pope Ratzinger who is to blame for every child who has been molested by pedophile priests in the Roman Catholic Church for the past 30 years. For thirty years, the decisions, rules and requirements for secrecy ordered by Ratzinger to be followed by all priests regarding pedophile priests in the RCC have allowed pedophile priests to continue in their criminal perversions. Yesterday, Pope Ratz sent an eight-page pastoral letter to Catholics in Ireland. He apologized to the people who have been harmed by pedophile priests. But he did not accept any blame for his own actions. And he didn’t address the problem of pedophile priests that is burgeoning in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Pope Ratz confined his apologies to people who had been harmed by pedophile priests in Ireland. In that eight-page letter, Ratz criticized bishops for “grave errors of judgment and failure of leadership”; Ratz blamed local Catholic leaders for betraying parishioners; he spoke of “a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations”; he even had the balls to attribute Ireland’s priest-abuse problem to “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties.” But he never once admitted that it was he himself that had committed each of these errors. He blamed underlings. Pope Ratz's culpability is a fact that can be researched and verified by anyone who wants the information. Now that everyone in the world can search out this information for himself and confirm that Pope Benedict XVI is the perpetrator of all the errors of judgment and failures in the Roman Catholic Church for the past 30 years that have lead to this horrendous betrayal by the church of the children and their parents in the RCC, it is a monumental problem for the Vatican (the city-state in Rome that runs the Roman Catholic Church) and all of the Pope’s henchmen in the Curia (the administrative apparatus of the Vatican). How is the Vatican and Curia going to handle this Pope Benedict problem? Don’t for one moment assume the Vatican will ask, “what would Jesus do?” Because Jesus--as a model for righteous behavior--has not been a consideration in the Vatican since well before Popes took up their regal residence in the Vatican palace around 500 AD. The Vatican has only ever been concerned with power and image. It’s the Vatican, after all, that in all its arrogance and grandiosity decided unilaterally in 1870 that popes are infallible. A more perfect example of nonsense and balderdash never existed. The better question would be--how would the Cosa Nostra handle such a serious problem with its Capo di Tutti Capi? Just asking...