For twenty-four years the archconservative, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition. As the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, he earned the monikers, “God’s Rottweiler” and “panzer cardinal.” It was his job to enforce doctrinal purity, both within the clerical rank and the rank and file . . . a task he performed with an apostolic zeal bordering on mania.
In 2002, when the scope of the pedophile priest scandal in the United States was becoming too obvious for even the Vatican to continue to ignore, Rottweiler Ratzinger claimed that the sexual abuse allegations against Catholic clergy were part of a "planned campaign" that was "intentional [and] manipulated" to discredit the church. Whose campaign he didn’t say, but his short list probably included the pro-choice and gay rights lobbies.
On April 19, 2005, in an arcane rite of “transubstantiation” known only to the College of Cardinals, the rabid Rottweiler Ratzinger became, with a puff of white smoke, the kindly, thoughtful Pope Benedict XVI, the 265th Bishop of Rome and leader of one billion Catholics worldwide.
During Benedict’s million-dollar-a-day junket to the United States, a trip that the Vatican admits is a P.R. opportunity to change a German Rottweiler into an American Golden Retriever, the mystery of pedophile priests was cleared up . . . sort of.
According to Benedict, it is America’s “increasingly secular and materialistic culture” that caused priests to fondle and rape children. Keep in mind that the “materialistic” remark is coming from a guy who has been seen sporting a pair of custom-cobbled red shoes, Gucci sunglasses, ceremonial gowns by Gamarelli, and listening to an iPod Nano while tens of millions of Catholics worldwide struggle to feed their families, much less put shoes on their feet or sunglasses on their faces.
One can also suppose that the bishops who knew of the abuse and did nothing other than transfer the pedophiles to other parishes, where they continued to molest children, were suffering from the same demonic secular possession as the priests.
According to a 2002 study conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons in the United States have been accused of sexual abuse of children since 1950, leaving an estimated 13,000 victims and over 2 billion dollars in lawsuits—money that could have been spent feeding and clothing and “sunglassing” tens of millions of destitute, but tithing, Catholics.
A “penitent” Benedict said that he was “deeply ashamed” of the pedophile priests who scandalized the Catholic Church in the U.S. He said, "It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the Church in general and for me personally that this could happen.” He did not dwell on the suffering of the 13,000 victims, one of whom described what happened to her as an “abuse of her soul.”
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