J'Accuse

"Breaking with tradition, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's musings veered away from Christ's Passion and into the Catholic Church's current problems. ... Some years before, as head of the Vatican body investigating abuse by priests, he argued that accused clergymen should not be handed over to the secular authorities. Rather, he wrote confidentially to bishops around the world in 2001, they should be investigated under utmost secrecy within the church--thereby avoiding public hysteria and second-guessing by the media. ... The recent revelations of sex-abuse scandals in Europe have smashed the perception that predatory priests are an American anomaly. ... The church's standing is falling to new lows among believers in its European heartland. Sensing the growing public alarm, some within the clergy are pushing for profound institutional and ecclesiastical changes, including an end to the priesthood's fundamental tenet of celibacy. ... Benedict himself stands accused of poorly handling the case of a pedophile priest when he was Archbishop of Munich and Freising in the early 1980s. ... The Pope's defenders say he has tried hard to force the church to confront its demons openly. ... But he has been remarkably unforthcoming about the latest scandals. ... His reluctance to speak out surprises and hurts many Catholics. ... Papal officials, however, defend Benedict's silence. 'The Pope was not part of what happened back then, and he shouldn't be part of it now,' says a Vatican insider. Indeed, the Vatican has mounted an aggressive campaign to portray the scandals as an attempt to besmirch the Pope and discredit the church as a whole. ... 'They all want to involve the Pope at all costs,' [Frederico Lonbardi] tells TIME. 'It's a desire to destroy the church, and this is an operation that has been well planned. They don't like the church's teachings on moral questions and sexuality, and this is how they think they can strike.' ... As the scandals have multiplied, so to have calls for profound change in the priesthood. One perennial proposal dusted off in recent weeks is the abolition of celibacy among priests: commentators in Germany and Italy have suggested it may help prevent abuse. Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schonborn has called for a thoroughgoing review of the causes of abuse, writing, 'Part of it is the question of celibacy.' ... The Vatican argues that there's no connection between vows of celibacy and sexual deviance, and the Pope himself, a staunch conservative who recently defended celibacy as 'an expression of the gift of oneself to God,' is unlikely to budge on the issue", my emphasis, Bobby Ghosh at Time, 29 March 2010, link:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1973213,00.html.

What nonsense. In 1963, yes 1963, a priest approached me to enter the priesthood, and I'm not even Catholic! I told him the church was finished. That poverty, chastity and obedience no longer sold and that Catholic seminaries would fill with homosexuals if clerical celibacy did not end. Ratzinger, come off it. Who are you kidding? Are you Lloyd Antoinette Blankfein, "doing God's work"? Ratzinger, you need many more divisions to sweep this mess under the rug. A basic legal principle is, "Every man is presumed to intend the natural and probable consequences of his own act", Allen v. US, 164 US 492, 496 (1896). . Even members of the Catholic hierarachy? Yes.