Of all the forms of crime that cast a shadow over the history of the Roman church, the one that is causing it the greatest discredit and dishonor is ecclesial pederasty. Cardinal Josep Ratzinger knew this, for decades the person in charge of monitoring the purity of that religion as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “So much dirt in our Church!” he told the cardinals who arrived in Rome in 2005 to bury John Paul II. That speech earned him the pontificate. Ratzinger was renamed Benedict XVI and, for seven years, 10 months and 17 days, he tried to clean a house that gave off a stench from too many pipes.
The first thing he did was to end the theory that dirty clothes are washed at home. John Paul II thought that airing sexual abuse discredited the Church and even that the avalanche of cases that arose in the United States were revenge by President George W. Bush for having condemned the Iraq war by the Vatican. Even worse for Ratzinger himself: the now pope emeritus also held the same theory at the University of Murcia, where he went in 2002 to preside over a Christology congress. “It is obvious that the information in the press is not guided by the pure desire to transmit the truth, but by a joy of snubbing the Church and discrediting it as much as possible.”
Be that as it may, Benedict XVI proclaimed the principle of “zero tolerance”. The failure. Surrounded by wolves (so the official Vatican newspaper said), he retired in 2013, not without leaving some devastating messages against the prelates that embittered his pontificate. The loudest was remembering how, among the seven German popes that the Catholic Church has had, the last, Hadrian VI, entered Rome shouting at the cardinals “You are all rascals!” He had been elected while he was absent, attending in Spain the powers of the deceased Cardinal Cisneros, that is, regent in the absence of Emperor Carlos I and the position of Inquisitor General. Benedict XVI recalled three years ago the motto of his energetic predecessor: “In Rome cancer began, here it must be removed” (Benedict XVI. A life. Messenger Publisher. Pages 406 and 407). But this past week, the emeritus has been left without ground under his feet when it became known that he himself covered up cases of pederasty in the Munich archdiocese when he was its archbishop, between 1977 and 1981.
The Spanish case
Benedict XVI also wanted to stop the desire for wealth of the Catholic hierarchy and the outrages of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), known as the Vatican Bank. He failed too, with a crash. Now Francis is trying it, sitting on the bench, accused of corruption, one of his collaborators, Cardinal Becciu. The Argentine pope preaches a church that smells of sheep and poor for the poor. The Spanish bishops who are accountable for his management these weeks before the different ministries Papals have received the message: transparency in cases of pedophile and ethical exemplarity in economic matters. The extravagant visit of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to the leader of the Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Omella, must be interpreted in this light. The meeting was held in the luxurious Casa de la Iglesia in Madrid. Regardless of protocols, the known information reveals what was already known: that the tens of thousands of registrations carried out by the prelates, under the protection of a Franco law and an Aznar decree, have been nonsense. Legal, yes, of course: it could not be otherwise. But deeply immoral. The Rajoy government perceived it, albeit late, which removed such a privilege from them when the scandal threatened to reach the Conservative Executive itself. How the process must have been and what the desire for property that many bishops are already the largest owners of earthly goods in their respective territories.
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