1115.org

(1)
This Ratzi fellow makes a funny kind of pope.

The most sensitive issue he needs to address on his current U.S. visit is the clergy abuse scandal. He started off on the wrong foot when first his handpicked number two man, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and then he himself focused on the Church’s suffering rather than the suffering of the victims. (What does “the church’s suffering” even mean? Even George-and-Laura had the sense to claim that they personally suffer more than anyone else from the Iraq war, instead of going “No one suffers more than your government does.” When you come off badly in a George-and-Laura comparison, you’re not having a good day, your holiness.)

Yesterday, if you believe AP’s headline writers, His Eminence acknowledged that the clergy abuse scandal was handled badly: “Pope says clergy abuse scandal sometimes ‘badly handled’”

But his actual remarks don’t exactly conform to what that might suggest. It wasn’t a graceful and healing (if belated) mea culpa on behalf of the Church. Addressing a gathering of bishops, he told them they had handled it badly. And he suggested — as AFP’s headline writer put it — “Church abuse society’s fault - Pope“:

Pope Benedict XVI today berated US bishops for their poor handling of the child sex scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church, but also laid blame on the breakdown of values in US society.

Pope Benedict told a gathering of bishops they had “sometimes very badly handled” the decades-old problem of pedophile priests.

I must confess I don’t follow this pope-dope very closely. So I’m not very sure whether he has ever explained to us whose fault 9/11 was. Wouldn’t hurt to ask, though, would it?

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His Infallibility also made some other interesting statements.

Describing clerics who sexually abuse children as “gravely immoral”, the octogenarian Pope warned that the scourge of pedophilia “is found not only in your dioceses but in every sector of society”.

No, surely not! Surely not in the upper echelons of the Vatican? Is this man wracked by guilt, and trying desperately to confess something?

Then there was also:

“It calls for a determined, collective response,” he said, but did not outline any firm action that the Vatican intended to take to purge the church of pedophile priests.
[…]
Instead, he suggested as a remedy an urgent reassessment of “the values underpinning society”.

Way to go, pope-man. You’re awesome!