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A criminal matter, not a spiritual one
...In 2001, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in his then capacity as Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (what used to be called the Inquisition), wrote a letter clarifying and reinforcing the infamous Crimen Sollicitationis, which made it an excommunicable offence to breathe a word of child rape allegations outside the church. Under Ratzinger's leadership, rape victims like this one were bullied into silence, called liars, and accused of being simply out to fleece the church for money. The Ryan and Murphy Reports are clear: the Roman Catholic Church consistently put its own reputation, its own status, its own survival, before concern for the children it had flogged and starved and raped, and then tried to prevent investigators finding out that it had done so.

It is hard to conceive anything more heinous than this. And yet, unbelievably, the Roman Catholic Church continues at every turn to demonstrate that it simply has no concept of the extent of its own corruption. For sure, we have had the apologies, and pretty half-hearted affairs they have been too, for the most part. The Pope's recent letter to Irish Catholics was shockingly complacent: it describes the 'problem of child sexual abuse' as "disturbing". And why is it "disturbing"? Because it "has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings". Not, you notice, because it inflicted agony on young bodies, not because it caused lasting psychological damage to impressionable minds, and not because it constituted cynical and brutal exploitation of the young and vulnerable on the part of the perpetrators. No, indeed: let's get our priorities right: it is disturbing because it has led to a loss of respect for the Church...

...And the world watches in appalled disbelief as senior Vatican figure after senior Vatican figure continues to make matters worse and even worse, and yet worse still. The Vatican's Chief Exorcist (Can there really be more than one? Can there really even be one, in 2010?) has claimed that the devil is targeting the Vatican. And why would the devil do this? Why, because this Pope is so marvelous, of course, that he's got the devil running scared. Yes, THIS Pope, the one who confirmed and reinforced the terms of the Vatican secrecy order ensuring that the child-rapists would never face justice; the one who was warned -- twice -- in his official capacity as head of the department dealing with such allegations, about the U.S. priest who was abusing deaf children, and who chose to ignore it both times, leaving him free to go on inflicting indescribable pain and humiliation and misery on vulnerable young boys; the one whose overriding preoccupation has been to keep the lid on the scandal, to stop people finding out, and who continues to do his utmost to play it down and pretend it has all been dealt with to everyone's satisfaction; the one who claims that the answer is not prosecution but prayer!

THIS Pope is so holy, so saintly, that the devil himself feels threatened by his righteousness and has therefore launched an all-out attack on him through the good offices of investigative journalists. Who, after all, could possibly accuse the Pope of being at the heart of a massive cover-up of child rape on a breathtaking scale, unless they were being prompted by the devil himself? Except that the child rapes really happened. And the institutional cover-up really happened. And it is Ratzinger's signature on the document that confirmed secrecy as official Vatican policy. Not only is there a smoking gun, but it has the Pope's grubby fingerprints all over it. What hope is there for justice, for morality, when every act of depravity committed by the Roman Catholic Church is passed off as the work of an enraged and threatened devil, and therefore as further evidence of the Church's sanctity?...