The pope against the pope: Benedict XVI criticizes Francisco's strategy against pedophilia and triggers a crisis – 13/04/2019

Vatican correspondent

Pope against pope. The 18-page document signed by the distinguished pontiff Benedict XVI, Former German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to "help in these difficult times", raised a controversy of extraordinary dimensions in the Church. A dull crisis, because neither protagonist accepts their existence, which makes it even more complex.

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Six hundred years ago, two living Popes did not have to live together and over the last six years they managed to put the difficult trance in harmony. The "Church Notes and Sexual Abuse" that was aired Thursday around the world at the will of Benedict XVI ended the experiment. From his first statement, which attributes the responsibility for the abuse of pedophile priests to the moral collapse engendered by the revolution of customs, especially badual, of the 60s, according to him as a consequence of the "conciliar climate" that followed the historical Council Vatican II, to which Ratzinger participated and of which he is a profound, almost obsessive critic.

Pope Benedict lives in a small convent in the Vatican Gardens and will turn 92 on Tuesday. Pope Francis will surely visit him.

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This indecent climate that persisted in the following years has reached according to Benedict XVI in vast proportions and "the absence of God" in the public sphere of secularized society. The 68's revolution was beaten for total badual freedom, "a freedom that no longer had any standards". It is in this area that pedophilia in the Church was fired, and the general environment "was diagnosed as authorized and appropriate".

These concepts are sufficient, and there are many more in the document, to show that The badysis of the pope emeritus clashes head-on with the conclusions of the meeting that the Pope at the command, the Argentine Jorge Bergoglio, convened with the presidents of the episcopal conferences of the world to address measures to combat the scourge of abuse committed by thousands of pedophile priests in the Church and the guarantees they have received from bishops and other superiors.

"This text put the balance in the Vatican in crisis", title Sunday Corriere della Sera of Milan, the main Italian newspaper, which Thursday gave the scoop of the document of Benedict XVI in double page and gave him the title of the first page.

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"Two parties use the document to establish a logic of responsibility", adds an auxiliary title

The article is signed by publisher Mbadimo Franco, who presented the scoop of the full document and now acknowledges that the discussions that broke out immediately "may break the balance that both popes have created with their personal relationship ".

The situation is dramatic because the growing number of pedophile priests in the Church has become a reality. the greatest crisis of the last decades and in a swamp for the pontificate of Francisco, that his future is playing off his ability to master the phenomenon.

The division between Francis and the leaders of the Vatican and the episcopal bademblies that are loyal to him, along with the nostalgic conservatives who feel represented by Joseph Ratzinger, can create new fractures, in addition to the one already produced with the 18-page corsair document. The lawsuit is made public at Easter by the German Klerusblatt and several conservative newspapers and magazines in the United States, where the ultra-conservative conspiracy that wants to dismantle Jorge Bergoglio's pontificate, accusing him of being "is focused" heretical "and to protect homobadual priests.

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This organized show, which, with a suspicious synchrony, published Ratzinger's paper, suggests a precise guide. The Dean of the Vaticanists (and former deputy editor of the Vatican newspaper The Osservatore Romano), Respected moderator Gian Franco Svidercoschi, says that Benedict XVI's precarious state of health raises a question. "Was Ratzinger really the material author of the long document?" If the answer is positive: "Why did he do it?"

The pope emeritus wrote that he had requested permission to publish it to Pope Francis and the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. He had it. Denying it would not have prevented the publication "by other means" and would have crucified Francisco as "censor" of the emeritus pope.

Svidercoschi, who is very familiar with Cardinal Ratzinger, says that the authorization "does not mitigate the seriousness of a gesture that, produced after the meeting on pedophilia in the Vatican, will inevitably be interpreted as a criticism. Vatican summit conclusions, if not as a direct attack on Francisco ".

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Svidercoschi emphasizes that in the document "there is not a single new idea, no proposal concerning the tragedy that affects the Catholic community".

The historical scourge of pedophilia

The Church suffers in its structure from the scourge of pederasty of ecclesiastics against children and minors since the first centuries and extensive documentation proves it. Even in some distant councils, such as that of Elvira, the subject has been examined. Asserting that the bleeding wound of pedophile priests goes back to the "culture of transgression" and the 68 revolution is "catastrophically irresponsible," as claimed by the American Catholic historian Christopher Bellito.

American theology professor Brian Flanagan said that Ratzinger's ideas on pedophilia in the church "constitute a shamefully misguided explanation of systematic child abuse and concealment."

Professor Bellito added that Benedict XVI's essay is "catastrophically irresponsible" as it intervenes in the efforts of his successor, Pope Francis "to take the Church out of the crisis".

In his "help to overcome this difficult moment", Benedict XVI recounts his personal experiences of what he saw in the streets of his native Bavaria in the early 1960s, with explicit bad movies in theaters, posters with naked couples and things like that. , which also led to the collapse of the moral theology of the time and "Church Laws That Unprecisely Protected the Accused" of Pedophilia.

"During the 1980s and 1990s, the priests' right to a defense was so broad that it rendered a verdict of guilt almost impossible," he wrote. When he was elected in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger reformed these laws to facilitate the expulsion of the priesthood from child molesters and cast about 800 priests from the Church.

But during the long period during which the guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy and Catholic discipline as prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith (the old Inquisition) was the most important collaborator of John Paul II, he witnessed an era when the coverage of bishops and religious leaders, protected in turn by the Vatican and the Polish pope himself, was fully operational.

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In the United States, National Catholic Report writer and journalist Michael Winters recalled that "the crisis has a double painful record: the fact of abuse and media coverage". Nowhere in the document are mentioned bishops and superiors who have covered the guilty "with what they call in the same Vatican omerta, mafia silence.

Several US magistrates wanted to question Ratzinger on the Vatican's attitude regarding the coverage of the priests and bishops investigated. We know that John Paul II was against denunciations because he argued that Communists attacked Poland and the universal Church using the cunning of degenerate priests. Thus the most legendary pedophile, Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the powerful Mexican Order of the Legionaries of Christ, perpetrated badual deprivations with children and minors, lived with women with whom he had several children and was accused of diverting funds from the order. It was only at the end of his life that he was sanctioned, but was never expelled from the Church, where he is remembered as "the most horrible of the aggressors".

Michael Winters also recalls the case of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who in 2002 had to flee to the Vatican not to be jailed for protecting dozens of pedophile priests. And the Vatican of the Polish pope and Ratzinger welcomed him, named him archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the pontifical basilicas of Rome, and granted him especially the Vatican nationality, which equals to impunity.

Winters evokes several stories from this era and after showing his disappointment for a man of religion whom he admired, he points out: "It is a deplorable text, which will ultimately damage the reputation of the artist." former pontiff. "

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