Throughout his nearly eight-year papacy, and for 25 years before that as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, Pope Benedict XVI steered the Catholic Church away from the liberalizing reforms symbolized by the Vatican II conference of 1962. His strict interpretation of Catholic teachings led to a proportionally greater emphasis on the church’s opposition to birth control, abortion, and homosexuality. Meanwhile, the Vatican asserted tighter authority over church affairs, a reversal of the decentralizing trends of an earlier era.
These shifts in focus sometimes put the Vatican at odds with followers in the West; Benedict, in turn, expressed concern over the loss of faith among many Catholics in Western Europe and the United States. The Vatican’s efforts to rein in certain groups of nuns and other independent-minded religious orders left some Western Catholics feeling alienated. But when called upon to deal with clergy-abuse scandals in the United States and many European countries, Benedict went significantly further than his predecessors in acknowledging the Vatican’s failure to properly handle such allegations. His papacy has been a time of doctrinal clarity amid increasing challenges within the diverse global community of Catholics.
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The Vatican needs to open up the "pedo-files" and surrender to local law enforcement. The Pope knew what he was doing when he consolidated all the information concerning crimes against children in the church. It is still largely up to him as to what to do with it.
While the Vatican does some good things, I don't see how anybody can get behind the institution of the church. The basic tenets of religion are something to be followed but how do you support a religious institution where its leaders live like kings (the Vatican, for example) and hand out directives that discriminate? As they say, "what would Jesus do?" I think he'd be deeply disappointed with how the church conducts its business, with the conspiracy behind the sexual abuse of children being at the top of the list.
The fact that Bernard Law gets to spend every day in comfort within the walls of the Vatican is a disgrace. Any institution that can provide refuge to those who committed, or who aided and abetted, the sexual abuse of children, is not an institution to be followed. Pope Benedict may have done more than his predecessors with this but it was no where near enough.
The Pope left because of scandal, cover-up and shrinking numbers of followers. He also was a bad choice as the new head of the church.
"...a proportionally greater emphasis on the church’s opposition to birth control, abortion, and homosexuality. Meanwhile, the Vatican asserted tighter authority over church affairs, a reversal of the decentralizing trends of an earlier era."
A priest friend of mine once asked the question "where in the world is there no Catholic church." His answer at that time was "Ireland and the United States." He would then explain that "The rest of the world has no idea what the Irish and Americans are doing. It appears to be a cult based on the evils of sex."
I did not know that Ratzinger was an Irish name, but he was certainly striving to make this Irish American "Ideal" a world-wide doctrine - and doing so despite its destruction of the institution.
A follow-up. Note that the retiring pope's new "residence" is the former home of some nuns who were apparently booted in order to make room for the old gent. Apparently there are no monastaries nearby. Then again, in the Vatican's eyes, these nuns were just women and they were in the way.