See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
The tough get going when the going gets tough — and the weak just scram.
Pope Benedict XVI retired this week after just eight years on the job as leader of the Catholic Church, blaming old age for being the first pontiff to bail on his believers in 600 years. But he leaves behind more questions than answers.
Leaders are entrusted with greatness for one reason alone — to lead. Yet Benedict’s abrupt exit comes at a time when his authority was needed the most in a world contaminated by wars, marauding despots, holy warriors, intolerant political climates, and a mass exodus from the Catholic Church.
His departure conveniently escapes the tornado of controversies swirling the Vatican. Child sex abuses cases are mounting against the clergy. A new Irish report claims women in the 1930s were forced to work without pay at diocesan-run laundries for “crimes” as trivial as not paying a train ticket. Yet another report links Benedict’s resignation to the discovery of gay prelates in the Vatican. And Britain’s Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned this week after being accused of “inappropriate acts” with priests.
The papacy has always been an institution distinguished by contention.
Pope Leo X (1513–1521) was such a spendthrift that German monk Martin Luther fired off a letter to him thundering, “the Church of Rome has become the most lawless den of thieves … so that not even the Antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.” Pope Paul III (1534–1549) kept a Roman mistress who bore him four children. And Pope Julius III (1550–1555) sparked a scandal by appointing his 17-year-old gay lover as a cardinal.
Benedict’s grip on his office has been as tenuous, according to his butler who stood trial last year for leaking papal documents.
Veteran Vatican reporter Paddy Agnew — one of a handful of reporters allowed to cover the trial — told ABC News that the manservant was of the opinion that “the pope is not as informed as he should be, he does not know things that he should know … about things in the world, in the Vatican, in the church.”
Benedict, who visited nearly 30 countries during his tenure, proved as much by shirking from evil, often backtracking or offering an apologist’s lip service.
He gave a lecture in Germany in 2006 — a year that saw close to 14,000 terror attacks by Muslim fanatics, says the State Department — in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who connected Islam to violence. The talk ignited a Muslim frenzy, with effigies of the pontiff burned in the streets, to chants of “death to the pope.”
Benedict responded by saying he was “deeply sorry” about the “unfortunate misunderstanding,” emboldening zealots by surrendering a golden opportunity to condemn their atrocities. Later, he sought refuge in advancing outdated church doctrines, denying Catholics the right to divorce, birth control, abortion, female priests, gay marriage, married clergymen, and stem-cell research.
In the end, the pope became a shell of his spiritual self, failing to practice what he preached.
“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything for certain, and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires,” Benedict pontificated in 2005, a day before becoming the planet’s most famous priest.
What, then, is his His Holiness’ resignation, if not a dereliction of duty, and an embrace of the earthly desires he once condemned?
https://twitter.com/#!/BritShavana
Read Shavana Abruzzo's column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail here at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.