Conclave of Shame: Look Who's Electing the Next Pope

By Paul Adams
Ipolitics
February 24, 2013

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2013/02/24/conclave-of-shame-look-whos-electing-the-next-pope/

In this Feb. 6, 2008 file photo, Cardinal Roger Mahony officiates during Ash Wednesday services at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Popular pressure is mounting in the U.S. and Italy to keep Mahony away from the conclave to elect the next pope because of his role in shielding sexually abusive priests.

Nothing has undermined the moral authority of the Catholic Church more than its handling of the torture and rape to which many children in its care have been subjected.

It is not just the abuse itself that is so shocking. As the church often reminds us, it is an institution made up of human beings subject to human frailty.

It is the complicity of the church hierarchy — bishops, cardinals and popes — in covering up the truth and, in the course of doing so, abetting and condoning criminal behaviour.

As the American conservative Catholic commentator Michael Brendan Dougherty has remarked, the church should be telling these men: “Go to the monastery and wait for the cops.”