Roving Eye: Why beatify a paedophile-protecting pope?
So, the prospect of a Saint John Paul looms on the horizon like a gathering storm.
At the beginning of May, the late Pope, John Paul II, was beatified at a ceremony at the Vatican in front of hundreds of thousands of brainwashed Catholics. Beatification, or declaring a person to be “blessed”, is the necessary prelude to full sainthood.
The ceremony was a relic from the Dark Ages. But at least during the Dark Ages people had some excuse for not knowing better. It was left to Keith Porteous Wood, of Britain’s National Secular Society, to make some sense of the Vatican’s mumbo jumbo. He rightly observed:
“This sprint to sainthood is to deflect examinations into John Paul II’s unedifying record on clerical child abuse - and, with it, Pope Benedict’s own role.”
Much of the clerical paedophilia (i.e. catholic priests having sex with kids) occurred while John Paul II was Pope, from 1979-2005, and the Church has been heavily criticised for not doing enough to punish those found responsible.
It is inconceivable that the soon-to-be Saint John Paul was unaware of such clerical child abuse or of attempts to cover it up. Perhaps he should become the Patron Saint of Paedophiles?
And who led the attempted cover up? None other than Pope Benedict, the then Cardinal Ratzinger. For example, in 1985 Ratzinger wrote to the Oakland diocese in California of the need to “consider the good of the Universal Church” before the needs of victims of a notorious paedophile priest.
The Catholic Church has committed many sins. Not least that its anti-contraception stance has brought many unwanted children into the world in already over-populated countries, and the condom element of this has assisted the spread of HIV/Aids.
But the greatest sin of all has been its paedophilia. What can you expect if you require your priests to remain celibate, given that the sexual urge is a natural one present in most human beings? The obvious end result was always going to be depraved sexual activity by a significant percentage of those priests, directed at the most vulnerable i.e. children.
John Paul’s supposed miracle of curing a nun of Parkinson’s Disease was part of the beatification process. If he had been able to perform the miracle of protecting children from the sexual ravages of perverted catholic priests, then that really would have been grounds for sainthood.
