UNITED STATES
Rockland County Times
Posted March 1st, 2013
BY DIANE DIMOND
I don’t pretend to know why Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign in almost 600 years. But I’m going to bet it had something to do with the constant drumbeat of scandal that marked his eight-year reign.
Before he became pope, he was Joseph Ratzinger, a German cardinal. You may not know, however, that he had long been in charge of the Vatican office to which all reports about sexually misbehaving priests were directed. In other words, for years, every single complaint about sexual abuse by a priest crossed the desk of Cardinal Ratzinger.
Agreed, he was just one man within the vast Vatican framework. But he was at the top. He was the man within the organization who was in a position to know about every accusation and what action (if any) had been taken to learn the truth about allegations of sexual abuse.
The information about priests with multiple complaints against them was at Ratzinger’s fingertips. He could easily have looked up information about all those priests who had been transferred from parish to parish — and the children who claimed they, too, had been abused.
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