SAY ANYTHING: Pope doesn't deserve slander

Media misleadingly attributes cover-up of sex scandal to Pope Benedict XVI

Published: Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Updated: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 20:03

This week, a slew of articles have come through the Associated Press accusing Pope Benedict XVI of covering up the pedophilic actions of a Catholic priest.

The alleged cover-up is supposed to have happened in the Diocese of Munich when the current pope was Archbishop there some 30 years ago.

One would hope that such a grave indictment against the world's most prominent religious figure would only be made with sufficient proof or at least some sort of evidence.

However, this is not the case. As far as I have been able to discern, the pope's connection to any kind of sexual misconduct is tangential at best.

While the priest in question was eventually found guilty of sexual abuse, the abuse he was charged with happened after Archbishop Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) left the diocese.

Furthermore, claims that Ratzinger knew about earlier cases of abuses by the same priest and transferred him to a new diocese have been refuted by the Church.

The decision to transfer the priest instead of removing him from ministry was made by an administrative official in the Munich-Freising archdiocese, General Vicar Gerhard Gruber. Gruber has taken full responsibility for that decision and apologized to all other victims of further abuse.

He explained that with over 1,000 priests working in the diocese, Ratzinger could not have handled all matters and had to delegate some decisions.

However, the fact that Pope Benedict may have not even known about the situation has not stopped the global press from smearing his name. An intentionally misleading headline in The Scotsman read, "Pope Benedict comes under fire over sex abuse scandal." He wasn't at all "under fire" until that article was written. Several other divisive articles have been produced that seek to tie the Pope to this scandal without any sort of proof.

To me, these stories seem to be not only intentionally misleading, but directly intended to inspire hostility toward Pope Benedict and the institution he represents.