CANADA
The Globe and Mail
MICHAEL VALPY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Feb. 12 2013
Benedict XVI’s eight-year reign as Pope was a losing battle against perception – most tellingly the perception that, as absolute ruler of the Roman Catholic Church, he did far less than enough to rid it of the cancer of sexually abusive priests and may have been complicit in its spread.
The 85-year-old German intellectual also vacates the Throne of St. Peter tarnished by accusations that he rejected all theological efforts to move Roman Catholicism toward a more progressive, contemporary morality and institutional comportment around feminism, sexual orientation and sexual behaviour, and ham-fistedly failed to reach out to those who seek God by other paths.
As well, he’s been given failing grades on his great goals of reigniting Christianity as the bedrock of European life and halting the spread of secularism and moral relativism in a materialist world.
Has it all been true? “Perception is 90 per cent of truth. It’s what people latch onto,” said Prof. Mark McGowan of University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College, one of Canada’s outstanding scholars on the Catholic Church.
And yet the historical record of Benedict’s papacy is far more complex – perhaps no more so than on his record of handling the church’s horrific calumny of sex abuse.
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