UNITED STATES
The Nation
Frances Kissling
February 19, 2013
“In Benedict, the Catholic Church got the pope it deserved,” writes John Patrick Shanley in The New York Times. Shanley, author of the play Doubt, pulls no punches. Pope Benedict, he correctly charges, is “a protector of priests who abused children. He’d been a member of the Hitler Youth. In addition to this woeful résumé, he had no use for women.”
This pope led a multinational corporation mired in financial scandals and unable to fire the most egregious criminals in its midst. There is almost no country he can visit where Catholics have not suffered because of the Church. In Africa, the church’s opposition to birth control and to condoms to prevent AIDS transmission contributes to high rates of maternal death and AIDS. In Mexico, site of one of Benedict’s recent trips, Catholics were still outraged over the case of Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, the ultra-conservative order of priests, who raped young seminarians, fathered several children, abused drugs and misspent church funds. In 1998, eight Mexican priests charged Maciel with sexually abusing them. A year later, the priests were told the case had been shelved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who, for the uninitiated, later became Pope Benedict). In the US, the investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, whom the Vatican claimed paid too much attention to poverty and not enough to fighting against abortion, was widely derided by Catholics and others as a further example of the Vatican’s foolishness, and gave rise to a popular “Nuns on the Bus” anti-poverty tour. No wonder he’s tired and his doctors say no more travel.
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