Why the pope quit (maybe)

If this is true, the pope quit his job to escape justice. Wouldn't surprise me.

Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, has scheduled a meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano for Saturday, February 23 to discuss securing protection and immunity from prosecution from the Italian government, according to Italian media sources.

Ratzinger’s meeting follows upon the apparent receipt by the Vatican of a diplomatic note from an undisclosed European government on February 4, stating its intention to issue an arrest warrant for Ratzinger, who resigned from his pontificate less than a week later.

Ratzinger orchestrated the hiding of rapist priests, thus sheltering them from justice. He is the person most responsible for the pedophilia scandal. The man belongs in prison. What a fitting end that would be for this pope.

On the other hand, I found this on Ed Brayton's blog and he suggests we take this news with a grain of salt. He thinks it might be one of those citizen's-arrest type things. But we can still hope it's real.

More on the German Catholic church dust-up

I posted recently about the collapse of an independent investigation into child sex abuse in Germany's Roman Catholic church. Although the church promised transparency to investigators, it tried to block their efforts and censor the final report. As a result, the investigation was called off.

There's an article about this at SpiegelOnline. What I found interesting were the various opinions espoused by media. It didn't seem to matter whether the media outlet was liberal or conservative. They all rued the breakdown of the investigation and many said the Roman Catholic church remains unwilling to take a candid look at the pedophilia scandal.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Problems with a system can only rarely be recognized and remedied from the inside. And the sexual violence in the Catholic Church also has intrinsic systemic causes. It is driven by a perception that an institution, pure on its own, has been tainted by perpetrators and only has to be purified again. That it is fueled by the loneliness and overwork of many priests. The problem will remain unresolved as long as the overriding question is: 'How are we perceived?'"

"This view from the outside cannot purify the church. On the contrary, it will only strengthen the awareness of its own problems. But only when the church recognizes these problems will it turn from its own reflection to focusing on the victims, who have been largely ignored in this whole fight. And then to the people, in order to make the church credible again for their sake."

Sounds accurate to me. And that's not the left-most opinion. It's time for the church to face its ills -- and change. It will still be an organization based on utter nonsense, but perhaps fewer priests will rape kids.

But they're mad at Obama over birth control

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Robert Van Handel was a 15-year-old seminarian at St. Anthony's, a prestigious Franciscan boarding school, when, he said, a priest slipped into the infirmary where he was recovering from a fever and began to molest him. The priest told him it would help draw the fever out. 

That's what the church needs -- something to draw the fever out.