Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI
Out of context: Reply #37
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- ukit0
kingkong, I'm amazed you think there's nothing to implicate the Pope? Really drinking the Catholic kool aid here??
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol…
Signature on letter implicates Pope in abuse cover-up
Pope Benedict XVI was dragged directly into the scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church when a letter with his signature emerged implicating him in the failure to defrock a known paedophile priest.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger resisted pleas from a Californian diocese to defrock a priest with a record of molesting children, putting “the good of the universal Church”, above other considerations, according to the 1985 letter.
The correspondence, obtained by the Associated Press, undermines the repeated insistence from the Holy See that Benedict XVI has had no personal involvement in covering up the sins of paedophiles.
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Forget the pedophile protecting bit, what happened to "Thou shalt not lie?" You expect bullshit PR ass-covering rhetoric from politicians, but the Pope?
http://www.slate.com/id/2247861/…
Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office ... under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)
Not content with shielding its own priests from the law, Ratzinger's office even wrote its own private statute of limitations. The church's jurisdiction, claimed Ratzinger, "begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age" and then lasts for 10 more years. Daniel Shea, the attorney for two victims who sued Ratzinger and a church in Texas, correctly describes that latter stipulation as an obstruction of justice. "You can't investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10, the priest will get away with it."