Orange County Weekly
by GUSTAVO ARELLANO
Let’s cut the beatitudes: Pope John Paul II was a moral, abject failure when it mattered.
Screw his ecumenical efforts. Never mind his opposition to communism. Forget his apologies for the horrors that the Roman Catholic Church inflicted upon so many of the world’s innocent throughout two millennia. All those “breakthroughs” were inevitable, none of them particularly revolutionary, the media spectacles surrounding each vanity and striving after the wind. ...
Closer to home, Catholics should remember John Paul II’s ignorance of what’s shaping up to be his Church’s spiritual genocide—the priestly sex-abuse scandal. His defenders will mention that what the pope told the 12 American cardinals who visited the Vatican in 2002—“There is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young”—was penance enough.
That was too little, too late. By then, the pope already knew. He knew as early as 1985, when Tom Doyle, a priest with the Vatican Embassy in Washington, helped author a confidential report alerting American Catholic officials about the pederast storm on the horizon. He knew as early as 1990 that bishops were advising one another to send potentially incriminating documents to the Apostolic Delegate, the papal representative to the Catholic Church in the United States, because the office has diplomatic immunity. He knew in 1993, when he first addressed the American sex-abuse scandal by accusing the media of treating his prelates’ cover-up “as an occasion for sensationalism.”
He knew! Last year, he propped up former Boston Cardinal Bernard Law with a cushy job in St. Peter’s Square—the same Law who resigned in 2002 lest the feds make him sing about his role in the rape of children! John Paul II opposed the zero-tolerance policies that American bishops installed in 2002 to ensure that child rapists would never officiate over Mass again! John Paul II never removed scoundrels such as Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony and Orange Bishop Tod D. Brown from their posts despite their active shielding of child-molesting priests from the law. In fact, many of these scoundrels—demons such as Mahony, Law and the entirety of the United States’ delegation of cardinals—will vote soon on John Paul II’s successor, ensuring that their patron’s twisted policies will endure.