There's been a lot of buzz about Pope Benedict and the Vatican after the Pope announced his impending resignation from the Papacy earlier this month. It didn't make much sense to me, since it's the first time in over 600 years that a pope abdicated his position. Then an explosive story from Italy's La Repubblica claimed that the Pope left office because of a secret gay cabal that existed within the church after he read a 300-page dossier compiled by three cardinals -- and commissioned by Pope Benedict himself.

Pope Benedict XVI is a little more than two weeks away from beginning his retirement at the Castel Gandolfo, but his final days as head of the Catholic church don't look like they're going to be quiet ones. Unsourced reports coming out of Italy suggest that the pope decided to call it quits not because of his old age, but instead to avoid the fallout that could come from a secret 300-page dossier compiled by three cardinals he tapped to look into last year's leak of confidential papers stolen from his desk.

Those papers, widely known as the "VatiLeaks," raised questions of financial impropriety and corruption at the Vatican. The investigation that followed, however, may prove even more uncomfortable for church officials.
The secret dossier allegedly details a wide range of infighting among various factions in the Vatican's governing body, known as the Curia. But the headline-ready takeaway from today's report from La Repubblica concerns the existence of one faction in particular, a network of gay church officials.

Just in case that weren't enough to pique international interest, the Italian newspaper also reports that said officials had been blackmailed by outsiders. According to the report, the pope got his first look at the dossier—"two folders hard-bound in red" with the header "pontifical secret"—on Dec. 17, and decided that same day to retire.

In response to this report, the Vatican had some tough words rebuking that claim:

The Vatican on Saturday accused the Italian media of spreading "false and damaging" reports in what it condemned as a deplorable attempt to influence cardinals who will meet in a secret conclave next month to elect a new pope.

Since Pope Benedict announced his resignation on February 11, Italian newspapers have been full of rumors about conspiracies, secret reports and lobbies in the Vatican that they say pushed the pope to abdicate."It is deplorable that, as we draw closer to the time of the beginning of the conclave ... that there be a widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories that cause serious damage to persons and institutions," a Vatican statement said.

Shame, shame, shame on you, Pope Benedict, for allowing so many children to be destroyed by sexual deviant priests. If you're so sure La Repubblica's report is bogus then release your dossier from the investigation you ordered:

A potentially explosive report into embarrassing leaks from the Vatican will be seen by only two people — Pope Benedict XVI and the man who succeeds him.

Italian newspapers have already angered the Vatican by suggesting that the report found evidence of corruption, blackmail and a gay sex ring, and that it triggered Benedict’s decision earlier this month to give up the papacy.

The Vatican said in a statement Monday that Benedict, who commissioned the report on leaks from three cardinals, is the only person who knows its contents and will make them available only to the next pope.

What's to hide, Vatican?

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The Catholic Church has been rocked as more and more allegations of sexual abuse of minors come out. The response of the Catholic Church hierarchy has been nothing short of horrifying: protecting the abusers, paying off the victims for their silence, and moving the abusers to different diocese and a whole new set of victims.

So it would behoove all Catholic spokespeople and Catholic publications to have a heightened sensitivity about the issues surrounding the sexual abuse of minors.

Enter Father Benedict Groeschel, director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. In an interview (since taken down) with the National Catholic Register, Father Groeschel expressed sympathy for convicted sexual predator Jerry Sandusky and said that often, it's the youngster that is the 'seducer'. No, really:

Renew America's Matt C. Abbott grabbed the interview before it was taken down:

[Interviewer]: Part of your work here at Trinity has been working with priests involved in abuse, no?

[Father Groeschel]: A little bit, yes; but you know, in those cases, they have to leave. And some of them profoundly — profoundly — penitential, horrified. People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that's not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.

[Interviewer]: Why would that be?

[Father Greoschel] [sic]: Well, it's not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn't have his own — and they won't be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that. It's an understandable thing, and you know where you find it, among other clergy or important people; you look at teachers, attorneys, judges, social workers.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Father Groeschel really ought not be in a position of 'spiritual development' nor giving interviews, because that's one humongous hole he just dug for himself.

You can watch the entire movie here.

There must be something very wrong at the Vatican. The Pope's new scapegoat for the Church's sex abuse scandal is the 1970s.

Belfast Telegraph:

Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict's claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn't considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s. In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered “normal” by society. “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than' and a ‘worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached “an unimaginable dimension” which brought “humiliation” on the Church...read on

I watched this gut wrenching documentary last night called Deliver Us From Evil, about a serial pedo-rapist that the Catholic Church enabled for three decades. I cried along with Mr. Jyono, who thought Father O'Grady was a friend to his family only to find out after O'Grady was arrested in another county that he had raped his daughter for seven years. Clearly the Church covered it up, as video testimony shows, and instead of dealing with the problem, sent him out of town so he could hunt for new victims. It would be as if the Attorney General of California, after arresting Ted Bundy for being a serial killer, decided to give him a bus ticket to Iowa and told him to just stay away from girls -- while the AG then offered support with prayers to Bundy and maybe even a pension plan if kept quiet. What would Ted do?

I've been covering the child abuse cases that have been revealed in recent times along with finding out the Vatican and their hierarchy, instead of acting like the moral authority they claim to be, covered up the hundreds of abusers and actually allowed them to destroy future families for decades. And so much ofthis happened under Cardinal Raztinger's (Pope Benedict XVI) watch.

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, an outspoken auxiliary bishop emeritus from Sydney, Australia, who attended the secret meeting in 2000, said that despite numerous warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up to the abuse problems than many local bishops did.

Digby writes:

I'm fairly sure that pedophilia was considered an absolute evil in the 1970s. It was just covered up --- mostly because of institutions like the Church which made even the thought of sex so shameful that even innocent victims of abuse were afraid to admit it. But whatever "context" he's thinking of, in normal society sexual exploitation of children wasn't part of it except on society's fringe (just as it is today among certain fundamentalist sects.)
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There are many examples of our leadership and elite institutions and leadership failing, but I think this one is the best example. When even the Church that has made human sexuality a purely procreative necessity within sanctioned marriage is making excuses for pedophilia among its priests because of "the times" then it's fairly clear that any institution can be thoroughly corrupted to its very core. It tends to create just a little mistrust among the people.

You can see why blowhard Catholic sex-abuse apologists like Bill Donohue are around. To him, these child molesters weren't even pedophiles. They make plenty of cash off of doing their best to beat back any criticism directed at the Church.

Hi all, I'm happy to be starting here today. You may know me from OpenLeft.com, where I mainly cover LGBT issues and organize netroots pro-equality action, but I also write about the Obama administration and broader progressive issues. I've also been managing the Prop 8 Trial Tracker/NOM Tour Tracker blog, a project of Courage Campaign Institute, to help cover National Organization for Marriage and their "Summer for Marriage" tour, along with their current California tour to urge Latino/a voters to support Carly Fiorina for Senate. Looking forward to writing about our crop of Blue America candidates and other elections this cycle.

For my first post I want to focus on Russ Feingold and his opponent, Ron Johnson. Last night was our weekly "Glee" night with me and 10 friends, which we turned into a special "Russ Feingold Brings Me Glee" night, and raised a couple hundred for our friend from Wisconsin (the campaign even set up a special Glee URL for our 'raiser- www.russfeingold.org/glee- frankly, one of the 10 best URLs I've seen all year).

Many of us spoke about why we're supporting Russ- for me, it's because he was one of just 14 Senators to oppose the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the first few to come out in support of marriage equality, and the only to oppose the PATRIOT Act. It's one of the better examples I can name of feeling good about working on an election to support someone because they're strongly progressive instead of doing so just to keep a wingnut out of office.

Then I stopped by TPM and found this blockbuster piece today:

Johnson Testified To Protect Catholic Church From Sex Abuse Lawsuits

As a member of the finance council for the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay until he resigned to run for Senate this year, Ron Johnson served alongside a bishop named Robert Morneau who, as a Church leader, had been made aware over two decades ago of the abusive tendencies of Rev. John Feeney.

Rev. Feeney was convicted in 2003, before Johnson joined the council, for sexually assaulting two brothers in the late 1970s. But according to documents obtained by the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the Church sought to cover up his crimes, which one reverend called "sexually very inappropriate."

Seven years later, Johnson testified before the Wisconsin State Senate against legislation to eliminate the statute of limitations for such crimes, making it easier for victims of sexual abuse to seek damages from the Church or any other culpable institution.

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