VATICAN CITY
International Business Times
BY Angelo Young | February 11 2013
For the first time in 719 years the head of the Catholic Church is resigning. The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Benedict XVI, 85, will step down on Feb. 28.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became the 265th pope in April 2005, carrying on the legacy of his predecessor Pope John Paul II to defend traditional doctrine against what was viewed by many Catholics, especially conservatives, as controversial and too liberal interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, a conference of the Cardinals that modernized the church in the early 1960s. …
As a cardinal, Ratzinger convinced Pope John Paul II to centralize the church’s own internal investigations surrounding sexual abuse by priests under the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctine of the Faith, which oversees church doctrine. While he claimed the move would allow the church to address the abuse issue more efficiently, it was viewed by many – especially those outside the church — as a kind of Vatican-administered cover-up operation moving priests around rather than treating them as sexual predators and assisting law enforcement in prosecuting their crimes.
In 1999, Ratzinger was persuaded to back off a high-profile sex abuse case involving a priest in Mexico by the name of Marcial Marcial Degollado, accused of sexually abusing two boys, and had relations with two women with whom he fathered six children. Degollado was later honored by Pope John Paul II, after which new abuse accusations emerged. After Ratzinger become pope he had Dellogado removed on the basis of “very serious and objectively immoral acts.”
Lawsuits and accusations of massive cover-ups of accused sexual criminals followed Ratzinger when he became pope. Critics say as cardinal, the pope was at the center of a policy of covering up sex abuse cases and keeping allegations secret rather than assisting law enforcement in prosecuting these criminals and pursuing justice for sex crime survivors.
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