The Pope Needs to Resign

This weekend, I opened my Huffington Post app on my iPod Touch, only to find a headline about how Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican ignored over 200 Deaf boys who were being sexually abused at a school here in Wisconsin. The HuffPost headline linked to a much longer exposé in the New York Times.

As I took in the first few paragraphs, I gasped and became nauseous. I was speechless. How could such a horrific thing happen here, in Wisconsin? How could it happen to people like me – deaf and hearing impaired students? How could one of our priests betray the trust and FAITH of hundreds of his students?

I was heartened that my current bishop, Bishop Fliss, and the former Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee had tried to seek justice for “Father” Murphy’s victims. (Referring to him as “father” just gives me the creeps.)

Still, it appears the buck stops with then-Cardinal Jospeh Ratzinger. When Bishop Fliss tried to hold disciplinary hearings for Murphy, they were shut down by Ratzinger’s deputy after Murphy wrote to the future Pope, pleading his case. Murphy lived out the rest of his life here in the Northwoids, free to work with children and abuse whomever he chooses.

The Pope needs to resign. I don’t care if it has never been done before. The Vatican lawyers can re-write canonical law. Rules are meant to be broken, er, re-written. Since the scandal broke last week, the Vatican has chalked it up to rumors and a “smear campaign” designed to make the Pope look bad.

No, no and a Big, Fat NO.

This isn’t a little sex scandal, like, say, spending $2000 at a strip club. Sex abuse, child molestation and pedophelia by our priests is one of the gravest sins I can possibly imagine. This should have been dealt with decades ago. The perpetrators should have been rooted out and hunted down like dogs. Instead, the Church hierarchy has continued to cover this up and deny, deny, deny.

Apparently, Pope Benedict XVI is the worst of all of them. If he, the head of the Church, refuses to acknowledge his culpability in this horrific crime against hundreds of children, how can we as a Church clean this mess up? How can we as a Church survive?