Holy Week is a big week for the Pope. He's on a worldwide stage almost every day. Benedict's role in enabling and protecting child rapists has become more widely known over the past weeks and months. And, there's increased talk of something that would never have been suggested. The Pope should quit. Here's a column from Margery Egan in today's Boston Herald:
The Pope should resign. He should offer himself up to authorities for prosecution, like the sacrificial lamb he’s supposed to represent here on earth.Expect Bill "Hollywood is controlled by anal-sex loving Jews" Donohue to continue his defense of the enablers and protectors of child rapists. He's been all over the cable shows spewing and spitting about how everyone is picking on the Catholic Church. It's hard to find anyone else who'll defend the horrific behavior of the Catholic hierarchy.
Long ago he should have opened the secret church books on priestly abuse. He hasn’t. Courts finally forced that in Boston almost a decade ago and, oh, what horrors we found. Remember? The Vatican hierarchy then blamed our scandal on a decadent American culture. Now the same priestly disease has swept Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, on and on across Europe and beyond. So was all the world, from the 1950s on, just one huge, decadent Gomorrah? Or was the Catholic hierarchy, from the ’50s on, run like an international crime organization aiding and abetting child abuse, then covering up its cover-up?
A few years back, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating caused an uproar by comparing secret-keeping American bishops to La Cosa Nostra.
He was but ahead of his time.
On the Chris Matthews show this morning, Andrew Sullivan said Benedict has no moral authority. It's true. Even the Vatican admits there's a problem, which is a rarity:
On Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, acknowledged that the way the church responds to the abuse scandal is "crucial for its moral credibility."The church has had decades to make amends. It hasn't. It won't.
He noted that most of the cases that have come to light recently occurred decades ago.
"But recognizing them, and making amends to the victims, is the price of re-establishing justice and 'purifying memories' that will let us look with renewed commitment together with humility and trust in the future," he said in a statement on Vatican Radio.
