Benedict is guilty, guilty, guilty!

…of laicizing two priests after lengthy canonical trials right in the middle of pushing to streamline a complex Vatican bureaucracy so as to facilitate more speedy outcomes. Per Fr. Z:

•Again, the abuse took place decades ago.
•He was suspended.
•There was a canonical trial.It was referred to Rome, the CDF, because it concerned a case of the confessional.
•It was determined that he should be dismissed from the clerical state.
•The priest appealed.
•The appeal process was drawn out for several years because the laws and canonical process of these clerical cases was being overhauled.
•Card. Ratzinger was the one who led the charge for the changes to streamline the process.
•When the new procedures went into effect, the Holy See moved swiftly to dismiss him from the clerical state.
•Once again this is a case of lawyers for victims who gave the documents (obviously incomplete) to the Associated Press.

Clearly, he should resign or be arrested and tried in Britain.

The frustrating thing for me about the press’s recent vendetta against Benedict is that their insistence on battening on anything and everything as grounds for demanding his resignation and, if all goes well, his murder is that in defending Benedict against all the over-the-top hostility, it makes it very difficult to find the “middle ground” of common sense in the reforms that really do need to happen (including, if you ask me, a number of episcopal resignations). These MSM people seem to have no actual interest in the good of the Church or even in the good of victims who are not usefully Catholic. The only real focus appears to be self-congratulatory moralism and a thirst for Benedict’s blood. So this week we are instructed that Benedict, who labored to fix a broken bureaucracy is guilty, guilty, guilty of… not being able to work miracles as he tried to laicize a couple of bad priests. Never mind that the priests were *not* reshuffled, nor that Benedict had no jurisdiction over them, nor that he never tried to hide their crimes, nor that he labored to laicize them in a crappy system he was trying to fix.

The net result of the press’ vendetta against Benedict is going to be twofold. First, it will poison against him and the Church the great mass of know-nothings who get all their info from TV and water cooler talk. He will go down in history as that Pope Who was a Nazi Pervert or Something Like That among the sort of people who get all their information about the Church from E! and the Da Vinci Code. Meanwhile, it will harden Catholics who care about the Church from believing anything the MSM says–even when, like blind pigs, they find an actual truffle of news about a real pervert or real episcopal malfeasance.

Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate each other. – C.S. Lewis