UNITED KINGDOM
UK Progressive
by Denis G. Campbell
Pope Benedict XVI is gone in ten days. Many inside and outside the Catholic Church are saying, “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” This papacy, controversial from his initial selection to replace John Paul II, was hit with damning revelations of a child sexual abuse cover-up that reached all the way up to Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahony. It was alleged in numerous court documents that Mahony deliberately sought to evade the law by sending sex-offender priests to treatment facilities in states outside of California who specifically did not require health professionals to report these crimes to authorities.
So the question remains, if the child sex abuse scandal reached all the way to a Cardinal, one of 130 or so global leaders of the church, could the trail reach Pope Benedict? It’s not a stretch since, as Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany, Pope Benedict was the church’s lead authority handling the controversy. Add in reports of Cardinal Mahony paying off $660 million dollars of child sex-abuse settlements with monies from church cemetery funds (a practice illegal for all but religious cemeteries), one can see how truly despicable a crime and cover-up this all is. Mary Dispenza, a woman who received a sex-abuse settlement back in 2006 said it best, “I think it’s very deceptive, and in a way they took it from people who had no voice: the dead. They can’t react, they can’t respond.”
Benedict did not help himself while leading the church. A hard right conservative, he lashed out at homosexuality and the use of any and all birth control measures including condoms and The Pill. But no stain is as deep as his two decades as Pope John Paul II’s point man on the growing allegations of sexual abuse of young boys the last four decades.
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