VATICAN CITY
International Business Times
By Martin Baccardax
February 11, 2013
If a week is a long time in politics, eight years is an epoch in the modern Papacy
The shock resignation – the first in more than six hundred years – of the eighty-five year old Pope Benedict XVI comes at the end of an eight year rule of the Holy See that has seen the foundations of the Catholic Church shaken as never before.
A man most defined by his strict adherence to the oldest and most challenged portions of Church doctrine was always going to struggle to unite a global faith that was already reeling from what His Holiness himself had called the “cloud of filth” of a decades-long sexual abuse scandal that rose to the very feet of the Vatican’s cosseted leadership.
In fact, the allegations involved the man himself, who, as Joseph Ratzinger, severed as the Archbishop of Munich and Freising in the late 70s and early 80s and was said to have personally approved the transfer of a priest accused of molestation to his diocese in order to receive treatment and therapy.
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