Is it plausible to say the Pope is completely innocent of wrong doing? How can you back your statement?

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There’s a guy I know who, I think, hates anything that walks. Anyway, he always goes on about religion with statements like Moses was high on mushrooms when he was on Mt. Sinai and made up the ten commandments 🤷. There was also his claim that “virgin” was mistranslated and it actually means young woman. Something tells me you don’t want to know what he had to say about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Anyway, he passionately hates the Pope. I mean, he reallllly hates him. He hates anyone that would even speak to him and he hates Catholics. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t think highly of him. His claims are;

-Benedict XVI passed some “sort of law” that forbade people from reporting sex abuse from priests

-He allowed and ignored sex abuse in the Church

Can someone give me some responses to his claims?
 
Gift_from_God said:
There’s a guy I know who, I think, hates anything that walks. Anyway, he always goes on about religion with statements like Moses was high on mushrooms when he was on Mt. Sinai and made up the ten commandments 🤷. There was also his claim that “virgin” was mistranslated and it actually means young woman. Something tells me you don’t want to know what he had to say about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Anyway, he passionately hates the Pope. I mean, he reallllly hates him. He hates anyone that would even speak to him and he hates Catholics. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t think highly of him. His claims are;

-Benedict XVI passed some “sort of law” that forbade people from reporting sex abuse from priests

-He allowed and ignored sex abuse in the Church

Can someone give me some responses to his claims?
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Why respond at all? It certainly doesn’t sound as though he is looking for an answer to a question(s). He won’t change his opinion based on what someone he doesn’t like tells him. Why subject yourself to his hate? Don’t throw pearls before swine. Answer those who ask actual questions not those whose sole purpose is to seek opportunities to voice their prejudices.
 
Ignore him. He is obviously very immature and just wants attention. If you ignore him, he will eventually go away and find someone who will listen to his garbage.
 
Tell the guy who is making all of these accusations against the Pope to prove his claims or keep his bigoted opinions to himself. Just because the Pope is the Pope doesn’t mean that he is all seeing and all knowing like God. Like everyone else, the Pope has the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and there has been no true evidence of guilt.
 
I think that you are right to seek to have an answer ready to your friends claims. When the church is attacked with an allegation one means of defence is to ask the accuser to provide the evidence (which is usually lacking), but it is even better to be prepared with a defence.

With the sex abuse crisis one should bear in mind first that the Church does have very serious failings to answer for, and that the abuse by several priests was serious and criminal, it did cause grave damage to many people, and several bishops were complicit in not handling it properly. “Cover up” is a reasonable description of their actions.

Still, that does not mean that everything said against the Church is true. In fact, much of it is inaccurate, and malicious. The charges against Pope Benedict himself fall into this category.

Basically, Benedict was, as Cardinal Ratzinger, involved, somewhat, in the handling of abuse cases during the 1980’s to 2001, before, as head of the CDF, he took responsibility for them for the Vatican. There has been no charge that, since 2001, he has not acted responsibly against child abuse (or, AFAIK, no charge that’s even remotely plausible). The “plausible” charges relate to the earlier period, and they are made plausible by misinterpeting two things…
  1. Until then, sex abuse charges were not handled by Rome at all - they were handled by individual bishops and dioceses. This is something the media, and most of the public, have no grasp of - that the Catholic church does not govern everything from Rome. In fact, most day to day government is done by the dioceses, with no intervention from Rome.
So, while some sex abuse cases were coming to light in the 1980’s and 1990’s, while Ratzinger was head of the CDF, they were simply not his responsibility to handle. On the contrary, Church law at the time would have required him to stay out of this as a diocesan affair. In 2001 the Vatican saw that the problem required intervention, and Cardinal Ratzinger took over the role, and was vigilant in addressing it.
  1. The Church laws which required secrecy were to do with violations of priestly orders and the sacraments. This include, for instance, soliciting in the confessional. These are regarded as grave crimes in the Chruch, and were handled at the time by the CDF. In these cases the process was conducted in secret. This however referred only to the church process - the victim was always entitled to treat it as a civil crime, and report it to civil authorities.
Further reading…

Pope Benedict XVI, in Wikipedia

A Response to Christopher Hitchens’ The Great Catholic Coverup (full version with references)
 
It’s fair for him to say that the pope, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did little or nothing to stop the sex abuse, at times openly and negligently allowed predators to stay in their parishes endangering children. That’s well documented. But to claim that he has, during his papacy, been complicit in wrong-doing or not been a champion to fight the sex abuse, that would be inaccurate.
 
gurneyhalleck1 said:
It’s fair for him to say that the pope, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did little or nothing to stop the sex abuse, at times openly and negligently allowed predators to stay in their parishes endangering children. That’s well documented. But to claim that he has, during his papacy, been complicit in wrong-doing or not been a champion to fight the sex abuse, that would be inaccurate.
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That is a completely ignorant claim which means that you rely on less than scholarly sources for your information on current affairs.

If you had done a little bit of research yourself you might know this.

I do not understand why people actually think they can parrot the same rubbish they hear from the media who will and do blow everything out of proportion, lie often about people to sell headlines and have no concept of doing anything to protect someones good name which is an obligation imposed by charity.

God Bless

Br. Paul
 
Invincible ignorance. You can’t change that but you can ignore him. You can also pray for him – he needs a lot of prayer.
 
Gift_from_God said:
There’s a guy I know who, I think, hates anything that walks. Anyway, he always goes on about religion with statements like Moses was high on mushrooms when he was on Mt. Sinai and made up the ten commandments 🤷. There was also his claim that “virgin” was mistranslated and it actually means young woman. Something tells me you don’t want to know what he had to say about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Anyway, he passionately hates the Pope. I mean, he reallllly hates him. He hates anyone that would even speak to him and he hates Catholics. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t think highly of him. His claims are;

-Benedict XVI passed some “sort of law” that forbade people from reporting sex abuse from priests

-He allowed and ignored sex abuse in the Church

Can someone give me some responses to his claims?
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If you want to get to the bottom of it, find out about his relationship with his father.
 
gurneyhalleck1 said:
It’s fair for him to say that the pope, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did little or nothing to stop the sex abuse, at times openly and negligently allowed predators to stay in their parishes endangering children. That’s well documented. But to claim that he has, during his papacy, been complicit in wrong-doing or not been a champion to fight the sex abuse, that would be inaccurate.
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A document, please?
 
gurneyhalleck1 said:
It’s fair for him to say that the pope, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, did little or nothing to stop the sex abuse, at times openly and negligently allowed predators to stay in their parishes endangering children. That’s well documented.
Click to expand...
Well then, if it’s “well documented” perhaps you will share these documents and prove your accusations. Thus far, there is only opinion and ignorant people’s claims, but unless and until it can be proven, Cardinal Ratzinger and thus Pope Benedict XVI remains innocent.
 
Ask this person to provide factual evidence of what he claims. Not someone’s opinion (written or otherwise), but actual documents that show such a “law” or rule was ever written or uttered by the Pope as either a Cardinal or as the Pope.

As to his hatred of Catholic’s, I would suspect that he is a baptized Catholic, and that he suffered some form of abuse or poor treatment as a child or as a young adult.

Yes, many cases of child sexual abuse were covered up, but I truly believe that the vast majority of those cases were due to ignorance and to the belief that those abusers could be reformed by prayer and “treatment”.

I strongly suspect that part of the reason for this is that, especially in the Latin Rite of the Church, the Priests, Bishop’s, religious and others in positions of authority are cut off from society, and from normal human relationships. They live insular lives, with limited contact with laity (and what they have is colored by the gulf between them and most lay people).

We tend to put our Priests and religious up on pedestals. That is a HUGE mistake.

Jesus chose mature men as his Apostles. Each of them had a wife, each of them had children and each of them had a trade or occupation. For whatever reason, the Church has chosen to move away from that example, and to only select men that are already “different than others”, to keep them isolated from the world, and to totally and completely deny the example that Jesus showed us.

We should not have Priests that are cut off from the world. Instead, our Priests and Bishop’s should live and work among their people, should have their own families and should truly be integral parts of their communities. If we did it that way, I suspect that the number of Ordained Priests and Deacons would multiply exponentially, and that the Church would be much more dynamic and muxh stronger than it currently is.
 
The_Old_Medic said:
Ask this person to provide factual evidence of what he claims.
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Do you mind if I ask YOU for some?
The_Old_Medic said:
Jesus chose mature men as his Apostles. Each of them had a wife, each of them had children and each of them had a trade or occupation.
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Do you have any accounts of James and John’s wives and children? Are there any accounts of the hot and steamy sex lives of the Apostles AFTER they were called by Christ? Did Paul misquote something here? bible.cc/1_corinthians/9-14.htm
The_Old_Medic said:
If we did it that way, I suspect that the number of Ordained Priests and Deacons would multiply exponentially, and that the Church would be much more dynamic and muxh stronger than it currently is.
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The way they do it in Protestant churches? And Eastern Rite Catholic churches? Is there factual evidence of how they “multiply exponentially”, or are “much more dynamic and muxh stronger”?
 
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