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	Papacy under Fire The Courier-Journal March 27, 2010 http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20100327/OPINION01/3270329/Papacy+under+fire The scandal of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, which led to the dismissal of 700 priests in the United States alone in a single three-year period, now threatens to engulf the papacy. Quantcast Click to learn more... If that assessment sounds extreme, consider the Nixon-era echoes in a National Catholic Reporter editorial about Pope Benedict XVI: “The focus now is on Benedict. What did he know? When did he know it? How did he act once he knew?” At the moment, neither Catholics nor the larger public know the answers to those questions. What is clear is that for 33 years — as archbishop of Munich, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, since 2005, as pope — Benedict has been in a position to be involved in the handling of sex abuse by the clergy. The record is deeply troubling. In one case — reported this week by The New York Times — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and then the archbishop of Munich, was informed that a German priest whom he had ordered into therapy for pedophilia was to be returned to pastoral duties. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in a different German parish, and German prosecutors are now weighing charges against the priest. Equally unsettling, Times reporters obtained memos and documents that disproved initial Vatican assertions that the priest's assignment had been handled entirely by the archbishop's deputy. In another instance reported by the Times , Cardinal Ratzinger, by then a top official in Rome, was one of several Vatican leaders who decided against defrocking an American priest accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin. Cardinal Ratzinger failed in 1996 to reply to two letters about the case from the archbishop of Milwaukee, and the Vatican appeared keenly interested in secrecy in the case. The priest, who was never dismissed, died in 1998. Meanwhile, horrifying new allegations of abuse by priests are roiling Europe. The Pope this week accepted the resignation of a bishop in Ireland and addressed a letter expressing “shame and remorse” to Irish Catholics in the wake of government investigations that reveal decades of sexual abuse of hundreds of thousands of children and widespread cover-ups by the church. Additional abuse allegations have surfaced in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The Vatican has reacted angrily to reports and questions about the Pope's role and has denounced what it terms efforts to “smear” Benedict. But the wronged parties in this sordid history are not popes, priests or the church. The victims are the uncountable children who have been molested by sexually predatory priests. The time is long past for the church to drop its reflexive defense of the institution and to offer a full accounting of what was done in its name. The place to start is with the complete truth, and now more than ever the messenger must be the Pope himself.
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