Filibuster Cartoons
 |
|
 |
The Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI have been facing a renewed round of criticism lately over that sadly all-too-familar and all-too-persistant phenomenon within the Catholic faith: pedophile priests.
Among the most egregious recent allegations, many are now charging that the Pope himself, during his pre-papal career as a bishop and cardinal, displayed a chronically lax approach to dealing with such known offenders. In 1980 a sex-offender priest was re-located to Ratzinger’s diocese, a fact which the future pope was apparently indifferent — until he offended again, at which point he was finally fired.
Then there was the high-profile case of a molester priest at a Wisconsin Catholic school for the deaf, who also ended up being re-located under Ratzinger’s watch, rather than defrocked. Ratzinger also instituted new Vatican rules in 2001 calling for suspected abuse cases to be reported to his Rome office directly, in what critics have characterized as a deliberate attempt to sideline the rule of “secular authorities” (ie, the police).
A huge component of Benedict’s clerical career has been devoted to the proper care and maintenance of the Church’s elaborate internal bureaucratic systems. And indeed, the Pope has maintained that an underlying root cause of the entire pedophile problem is that the existing Church procedures for discipline and dismissal are not being followed correctly by the lower levels of the hierarchy. This was the case he made in a much-publicized apology to Irish Catholics earlier this year.
The problem, of course, is that there is not always a clear logical correlation between “following proper Church procedures” and “reacting in a common-sense manner.”
