Pope Benedict XVI Had the Power to Stop Priest Molestations He Ignored It Its Just That Simple, The Queerty, July 3, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI Had the Power to Stop Priest Molestations. He Ignored It, It's Just That Simple

The Queerty
July 3, 2010

http://www.queerty.com/pope-benedict-xvi-had-the-power-to-stop-priest-molestations-he-ignored-it-its-just-that-simple-20100702/

Ya know how You People keep saying President Obama has the power to end terrible things like the dismissal of openly gay soldiers with the stroke of a pen? Well his counterpart over in Vatican City, Popemaster Benny & The Jets XVeye, once had the power to end terrible things like priests abusing children. Of course this was back when he was just Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

In what the Vatican will surely dub a hit job, the New York Times goes balls deep into Pope Benedict's responsibility in cracking down on children being molested:

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, an outspoken auxiliary bishop emeritus from Sydney, Australia, who attended the secret meeting in 2000, said that despite numerous warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up to the abuse problems than many local bishops did. [...] But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

But hey, I'm sure he wanted to do something about CHILDREN BEING MOLESTED. But like Obama struggling with the debate over unit cohesion and retention and recruitment, then-Cardinal Ratzinger didn't want to risk upsetting the Catholic Church's well-oiled machine, or risk losing even more priests or setting up problems for indoctrinating new ones. The mission must come first!