The Chris Moeller Archives

Benedict resigns

Today is a glorious day for the Roman Catholic Church. The seven-year elective monarch of Vatican City, Benedict XVI, 85, has resigned his position because of what aides call his “advanced age.” He must not have taken to Twitter.

Before and after Benedict's papacy, he has been the legal shield of protection for scores of pederast priests and their parochial protectors, whether they be infamous Americans, like Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, or the kidnapper and rapist of 11-year-old Wilfried F. under Benedict's own direct jurisdiction when he served as the Archbishop of Munich in the late ‘70s. He was among those that mastered the art of shuffling the rapists from parish to parish to hide their villainy. He slips into retirement, having failed to protect the weakest and most innocent members of his flock, and having never excommunicated a single cleric for any offense other than whistle blowing the sexual crimes against children.

And here you've been told that the unbelievers were the moral relativists.

Benedict, formerly Josef Ratzinger, was nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” by his peers, but his purported tenacity was always of the conservative theological sort, never in pursuing justice for children who were forced to suck the penises of their church confessors or be anally-raped by them. When it came time to protect these children-- to borrow a phrase from a Reuters reporter, not only did Ratzinger not bite, he didn’t even bark. Word came out last month that Cardinal John Mahony, the former Archbishop of Los Angeles, was covering up the crimes of the pedophiles in his jurisdiction. At the time he was doing so, then-Cardinal Ratzinger was leading the church's global body for investigating such matters, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, still better-known today by its previous name, the Inquisition. There’s a lot of speculation that the details about to emerge in the Los Angeles case might better illuminate the timing of Benedict’s exit.

The odds-on favorite to lead the church now is Francis Arinze of Nigeria, who served on the jury that named Ratzinger to the church's top post, has labeled homosexuality a sin on par with infanticide, and who has been possibly the Vatican's most outspoken critic of birth control, hailing as he does from the continent that has been most ravaged by AIDS, and not coincidentally, is also the one in which Catholicism is most rapidly spreading.

It will be interesting to see how Ratzinger treats his retirement. There’s very little precedent for a Roman Catholic Pope living after his spiritual reign. When the third distinct person of the Holy Trinity assigns a task, a man only walks away from it every six centuries or so. The last one to do it did so the year (1415) Henry V's army won at the Battle of Agincourt. This would be a unique retirement in any case. You very likely won't see Ratzinger travel outside of Rome or Vatican City. It sounds as if justice may still very well await him in several legal jurisdictions upon the Earthly plane.

posted by CM @ 6:58 PM