VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Scottish Daily Express [Glasgow, Scotland]
January 9, 2023
By John Glover
The Shetland actor caused in online stir when he criticised the late Pope’s ‘nice send-off’
Scottish actor Douglas Henshall has launched a savage attack on the late Pope Benedict, criticising his nice “send-off”, despite “protecting paedophiles”.
The actor known for his role in Shetland tweeted his salvo on the former Pope after his funeral on Sunday as 50,000 paid their respects to the late leader of the Catholic church.
Mr Henshall tweeted: “Why did the paedophile protecting pope get a nice send off. I really don’t get it.”
The comment caused on online storm. Heather Macphail wrote: “Not true. He was defrocking priests. Of course he didn’t want publicity. But he took action.”
Another wrote: “Terrible, unsubstantiated accusation that demeans you.”
Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013 around the same time as the UK’s most senior cardinal, Keith O’Brien. Cardinal O’Brien was forced to resign as the archbishop of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh, after serious allegations of sexual misconduct emerged following an investigation by The Observer.
He was accused by three priests and a former priest of improper sexual conduct in relation to a series of incidents in the 1980s but retained his title as cardinal despite his misconduct.
Pope Benedict refused to accept personal or institutional responsibility for the problem, even after he himself was faulted by an independent report for his handling of four cases while he was Munich bishop.
He never sanctioned any bishop who covered up for abusers, and he never mandated abuse cases be reported to police.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger saw first-hand the scope of sex abuse as early as the 1980s. Cases were arriving to the Vatican from Ireland, Australia and the US. He tried as early as 1988 tried to persuade the Vatican legal department to let him remove priests who were abusers quickly.
At the time, Vatican law required long and complicated canonical trials to punish priests, and then only as a last resort punish them if more “pastoral” initiatives failed to cure them.
The approach enabled bishops to move their abusers around parishes where they could re-offend. The request by Cardinal Ratzinger was turned down, citing the need to protect the priest’s right to defense.
However, in 2001 he tried again and persuaded Pope John Paul to let him to take hold of the problem head on, ordering all abuse cases to be sent to his office for a review. Charles Scicluna was hired to be his chief sex crimes prosecutor and together they began to take action.
It led to the Vatican authorising to fast-track the administrative procedures to defrock abuser priests and made changes to church law to allow the statute of limitations on sex abuse to be waived on a case-by-case basis; raised the age of consent to 18; and expanded the norms protecting minors to also cover “vulnerable adults.”
It had an immediate impact. Between 2004 and 2014 during Benedict’s eight-year papacy, the Vatican received about 3,400 cases, defrocked 848 priests and sanctioned another 2,572 to lesser penalties, according to the only Vatican statistics ever publicly released.
Nearly half of the defrockings occurred during the final two years of Benedict’s papacy.
Dave Sharp, a campaigner of abuse wrote about the late pope: “Throughout his professional life, Pope Benedict XVI was one of the chief architects of the cover-up of abuse in the Catholic Church. He concealed and transferred known abusive clergy and until his death misled investigators and the public about his direct responsibility for it”.