Benedict XVI is now a RATzinger lost in the Vatican sex scandal maze with nowhere to run

The chickens have come home to roost. Benedict XVI is now a RATzinger lost in the Vatican sex scandal maze. With nowhere else to run. Not especially for a nice meal of German sausage and saukrat in his native Germany. All roads lead to Rome the Eternal City and now all pedophile priests lead to Rome, especially to the Holy See Benedict XVI, to the real Cardinal RATzinger most responsible for the cover-up of the John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army in the 20th century http://jp2army.blogspot.com/. And as he runs, another JP2 Pedophile Priests Army earthquake is felt in Germany, that he is personally linked to a pedophile priest when he was Archbishop RATzinger in Germany.

Everywhere Benedict XVI turns in those multimillion dollars art rooms at the Vatican are filled with the John Paul II Pedophile Priests Army mementoes from USA, Ireland, now Germany, Netherlands, Austria, and Australia. The Titanic also had lots of art works, the finest from Europe; it was the Master of the Sea. Likewise, the John Paul II the Great Titanic Ship of the Vatican is the Master of the Sea of Catholics but it is quickly sinking hit by the priest pedophilia iceberg. And so, Benedict XVI and the Vatican are turning to their partner-in-crime, Satan, for urgent help to salvage the Pope and the Vatican. See Who’s responsible & to blame: The Devil or Benedict XVI-Cardinal Ratzinger? Satan as scapegoat for Vatican's chaotic sex scandals http://pope-ratz.blogspot.com/2010/03/whos-responsible-to-blame-devil-or.html

See the Magic of the Mass as Benedict XVI transform Christ's flesh in the host http://stella0maris.blogspot.com/

See What do we Catholics got to lose if Benedict XVI was brought to World Court for his crimes as the Hitler-Pope of pedophile priests? http://pope-ratz.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-do-we-catholics-got-to-lose-if.html

Could Pope Benedict lose his job over German sex scandals?
EUROPE
Irish Central
http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/periscope/could-pope-benedict-lose-his-job-over-german-sex-scandals-87519032.html
by Niall O'Dowd
Could this pope lose his job?

The Associated Press reports on Friday that 'Church Abuse Scandal Now Reaches Pope.'
The New York Times headline this Friday evening says that the church sex scandal on Germany is creeping ever closer to Benedict .

"Church Abuse Scandals in Germany Edges Closer to Pope" it says. Where have we heard this kind of language before? With Nixon and Watergate, Clinton and Lewinsky, and so on.

The German media is digging deep and digging fast to find out what role our current pontiff had in a scandal involving an abusive priest who was allowed back to his ministry and abused again in Germany in 1980.
The pope was archbishop of the diocese at the time.What is clear is that he ordered the priest into therapy and that a subordinate had taken responsibility for later admitting him to the ministry.

The German Catholic church has accepted that the archdiocese made "serious mistakes" in how they handled the issue.

Benedict hardly expected how he handled child abuse to be his possible legacy . In Ireland, the U.S. and now in Germany huge questions are being asked about how this horrific crime was dealt with. In all three cases the answer seems to be very badly.

Could this issue take down the pope, maybe force him to resign early?

That seems a very long shot right now, but the more the drumbeat continues, as happened in Ireland, the more it becomes inevitable that bishops resign.In Ireland's case four have already done so.

But this is the pope,who reigns until he passes from this earth . There is no mechanism to replace him --except,possibly, the power of pubic opinion and damage to the church if this scandal in Germany continues to mushroom as some are predicting it will.


Pope will struggle to survive abuse scandal

VATICAN CITY
Irish Independent
By John Cooney
Saturday March 13 2010

A depressing week for Pope Benedict dramatically escalated last night into an unprecedented papal crisis when he was directly implicated in a cover-up of a German paedophile priest when he was Cardinal Archbishop of Munich 30 years ago.
The latest revelations are so potentially damaging to the reputation of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that speculation was mounting last night that they could severely, perhaps even irreparably, damage his moral authority as Pope Benedict XVI.

It was being speculated that the German Pope could conceivably have to recognise that his position as supreme pontiff could become untenable -- and do what was until now considered impossible, resign from the Petrine throne.

Dismay

Benedict got a first-hand readout of the scope of the scandal yesterday in his native land from the head of the German Bishop's Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who reported that the pontiff had expressed "great dismay and deep shock" over the scandal, but encouraged bishops to continue searching for the truth.

Less than a month after the Pope's summit meeting in Rome with the Irish bishops, at which he ordered them to step united in line behind the papal throne, the abuse issue is no longer "an Irish problem", as one senior Vatican cardinal crassly claimed. Clerical child abuse is now a German problem. It has become a Dutch problem. It is also an Austrian problem.

This Europe-wide dimension, on top of similar scandals and cover-ups in the United States, the Philippines and Mexico, to name but a few, makes it Rome's problem. To paraphrase former US president Harry Truman, the buck stops on the Pope's desk, as the spiritual leader of over one billion Catholics worldwide.

In the Pope's homeland of Germany the number of alleged victims nationwide has soared to 300 since the scandals first broke last month in a Jesuit-run boarding school in Berlin.

The Dutch church has climbed to 350 complaints just a week after the Salesians first admitted they were investigating claims that three pupils in a school were abused in the 1960s. In Austria, the Benedictine arch-abbot of St Peter's in Salzburg has resigned after admitting he abused a 12-year-old boy 40 years ago.

Worse still for Pope Benedict, the public spotlight has zoomed in on his older brother (86), Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, who denies that the issue of sexual abuse came to his notice when he was master of Germany's most illustrious group of choir boys in Regensburg from 1964 until 1994.

A former singer in the choir has alleged it was well known among the boarders that a headmaster of the school, now dead, would summon two or three of the boys from their dormitories to come up to his room, where abuse would take place.

"The issue of sexual abuse never came up but if I had known with what exaggerated brutality he (the former headmaster) had proceeded, then I would have said something," Mgr Georg said on Tuesday.

Questions

Questions are being asked about how the Pope dealt with abusive clergy when he was Cardinal Archbishop of Munich-Freising from 1977 to 1982, before he moved to Rome to head the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

Cardinal Ratzinger's central role in handling abuse cases as 'the Vatican Rotweiller' has come back to haunt him as Pope Benedict, principally his 2001 confidential directive to bishops "on more serious crimes". This gave the Doctrinal Congregation control over how the church handles cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests.

This week Vatican spin-doctors robustly presented this directive as an important advance in making sure priest perverts were brought to justice.

The Vatican spokesman, Fr Frederico Lombardi, stressed it dealt with how canon law treated cases, and insisted this was not a substitute for civil law, which deals with the offence separately.

However, the media has interpreted the directive as a ban on bishops reporting serious accusations to civil authorities. The rub is that a personal letter from Cardinal Ratzinger to bishops accompanying the 2001 document said complaints against paedophile priests were covered by "pontifical secret", to be handled by bishops in strict confidentiality. Thus, the charge of "cover-up" against the Pope.

The Irish bishops at their Wednesday news conference in Maynooth backed the Vatican interpretation and accused the media of misrepresentation of Benedict. The Bishop of Dromore, John McAreavey, said it was clear to the bishops at their Rome summit that the 2001 letter "in no way precluded church authorities from their civil obligations, especially in regard to reporting and cooperating fully with the civil authorities."

The Irish bishops may have made the wrong call. Only hours after the Pope's meeting with Cardinal Zollitsch, the world's attention switched to his involvement in the 'Fr H' cover-up. Benedict is now in the eye of the biggest sex abuse crisis to hit the Vatican. Whether he can survive is doubtful -- if the Catholic Church he rules is also to survive.