Is Ratzinger A Pedophile Himself?

If you were Satan, where would you hide?

If the successful gut fighter in the most richly brocaded gown in the Vatican has a yen for young boys, like so many of the corrupt men who work for him, there hasn't been any evidence provided yet. The Vicar of Christ has a startlingly un-Christ-like record both when it comes to protecting young children against his predatory employees, most of whom feel that free sexual access to children is an entitlement or at least a long established perk of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and when it comes to the universal messages of love and acceptance at the heart of Jesus' message. Ratzinger is a political animal and a far right extremist who clawed his way to the top of his company. He doesn't give a shit about young children or mundane issues like serial rapists in his employ. He cares about keeping the Roman Catholic Church a vehicle for a kind of conservatism that Jesus railed against and abhorred.

We've often found that the loudest and most homophobic voices in the political arena against the LGBT community belong to twisted and deranged closet cases. Currently two of the most anti-gay members of Congress, screaming fanatics Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and Trent Franks (R-AZ), are both self-loathing closet cases, not unlike notorious Republican predators Jim West (R-WA), Larry Craig (R-ID), David Dreier (R-CA), Mark Foley (R-FL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and the countless other frightened and delusional right-wing hate-mongers and hypocrites, as former Congressman and American Conservative Union founder Robert Bauman explains in great detail in his book, The Gentleman From Maryland: The Conscience Of A Gay Conservative, written after he was caught having sex with an underage boy in a public toilet and kicked to the curb by his wife, family and right-wing collaborators inside Congress and out. Makes for a good read. Ratzinger ought to make it required reading for all his employees.

In 1972 Stephen Kiesle was ordained a Catholic priest in Oakland, California. Like so many lay conservatives-- the devout Catholic Robert Bauman being just one of many examples-- he started sneaking around and looking for ways to take advantage of young boys. Priests have an in-built advantage over young boys they can get into their clutches, and Kielse embarked on a perfectly normal-- normal within the Roman Catholic Church-- career of raping the underage sons of his parishioners. Just six years after being ordained, he was arrested for "molesting" two boys he had gotten his hands on at his church. He was charged with tying them up and getting to "know" them in a way the Bible-- not to mention the laws of California-- say older men are not to do with children. He pled "no contest" to a lesser charge and was sentenced to three years probation, and his record was expunged, because conservative society is as eager to protect these predators as is the conservative church.

In 1981 John Cummins, the Bishop of Oakland, a rare prelate who buys into the Jesus thing and takes it seriously, started petitioning the Vatican to defrock Kiesle, whom he saw as a danger to children. Ratzinger, who had been shielding predator priests all over the world for his whole career, stalled and drew out the process for years. As the months turned to years, Cummins repeatedly wrote to Ratzinger and then traveled to Rome to get him off his ass. Ratzinger's office used every bureaucratic trick in the book-- "the dog must have ate the file; can you recreate everything and resubmit it?"-- to avoid defrocking Kiesle, who admitted he needed to stop being a priest. Ratzinger refused to move for years, and eventually Kiesle took a job as a youth minister in Pinole, just north of Oakland. Where else but the Catholic Church would a convicted child molester be given a job as a youth minister?

By the end of 1985 Ratzinger made it clear that his concern was scandal for the already scandalized Church. He didn't care about how many boys and girls Kiesle would rape going forward, only that if he was defrocked it would be a tacit admission that priests should be removed for raping children, a slippery slope that could leave the Roman Catholic Church with a few dozen priests and a whole lot of nuns. Cummins eventually impressed on Ratzinger that it would be a much worse scandal if Kiesle wasn't defrocked, and he got caught molesting more children, which, of course, he was busy doing. Again, Ratzinger didn't give a rat's ass about the children being raped but the idea that the serial predator could get the church into trouble-- with the media and donors, no doubt-- piqued his interested and he finally agreed to defrock Kiesle in 1987.

In 2002 Kielse was charged with molesting 13 children, but thanks to Ratzinger-- and the conservative Supreme Court-- the statute of limitations invalidates 11 of the cases. In 2004 Kiesle pled "no contest" to molesting a girl and was sentenced to six years in prison, the year before Ratzinger maneuvered himself into the papacy and changed his name to Benedict. Kiesle got out on parole, violated parole and went back to prison, but is now out of prison living in a Walnut Creek senior citizens' community as a registered sex offender. Ratzinger (aka- Benedict) has never been punished and is still running around in richly brocaded gowns, protecting predator priests from the authorities.

Yesterday's L.A. Times reported the official Vatican line on the Kiesle case, which, of course, puts all the blame for the scandal on... Cummins. Who else? (Well, Jews, apparently.)

The Vatican insisted Saturday that Pope Benedict XVI had done nothing wrong when, earlier in his career, he hesitated to defrock a California priest who had admitted to molesting two boys.

A Vatican lawyer said that it was the local bishop, John Cummins of Oakland, who bore primary responsibility for protecting children from the abusive priest, Stephen Kiesle, and that the pope, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had acted appropriately when he declined to take immediate action.

"It's the job of the bishop to discipline the priest," said the lawyer, Jeffrey S. Lena of Berkeley, in an e-mail to The Times. "The pope is not a five star general ordering his troops around. That is simply an incorrect idea about the allocation of authority as between the pope and his fellow bishops."

Did you give your offering in Church today?