Informant38

their shared values of human rights
and the importance of fighting extremism:

We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry," Benedict told reporters on his flight. The Church will screen candidates for the priesthood, he said, "so that only really sound persons can be admitted."

Several victims of the pedophile priest scandal denounced Benedict's comments as insincere during a news conference in Boston, where the scandal erupted in 2002.
"He should be ashamed that he is not meeting with survivors and talking with us," said Robert Costello, founder of A Matter of Truth, a Boston-based organization for victims of sexual abuse by priests.
[...]
In New York, Benedict will also stop at a synagogue to wish the Jewish community a happy Passover.
[end article]

Pullella/Reuters/yahoo 15.Apr.08
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The man whose job is to be an intermediary between God and the human race acts as if the corruption is local and immediate. An "outbreak" that will be met by "screening".
As though God in His Infinite Wisdom has been taken by surprise, or at least hadn't seen the importance of communicating this problem to the Vatican before it "broke" in the media.
It should be remembered that the reason the stories began to surface in the first place is the neurotic disgust that kept the taboo on any public speech about sexual matters was broken, by, if you want to pin a specific date on it, the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent activist demands for gay rights by some brave folks with little support but each other and their own anger. Things that can't be talked about don't get on the news.
The former Cardinal Ratzinger isn't a sort of chaste and politely asexual Elton John, an entertainment figure with unusual costumes - for years he's been a consistent and loudly official voice against the truly Christian activists of so-called Liberation Theology, speaking especially against those on the front lines in Latin America.
An interesting aspect of linking "Catholic priest" with "pedophile" is the complete negation of that other manifestation of Catholic clergy, the nuns and priests killed by death squads in the still continuing struggle for justice down there in the jungly south. Not as exciting to the neo-puritans that dominate the US hive mind now as sex with children. Dead nuns and priests and peasants, men women and children, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile - killed by men whose spiritual heirs Ratzinger/Benedict will be dining with on his visit to the US. But that's not nearly as important as pedophile priests.
The papacy, and Ratzinger/Benedict, are explored at greater length here, here:

A lot of what seems pressing now will look like a temporary phase later on. A transition. And that's where the morality smears into utility. That's how men like Ratzinger and Lustinger and Negroponte and Cheney can be the men they are and still look in the mirror.
It shifts, and fades, and becomes something else.
America, the whole thing, North and South, as it is now was founded by treachery and murder no different except in its larger scale from the so-called "savagery" of its original inhabitants, yet at some point any good that happens on either of those continents has to come from that - in spite of it, yes, but from it, out of it.
So Ratzinger serves something he believes is higher than flawed humanity, and redemptive of his compromising. The ends, sanctifying the means.
That isn't as alien to Christianity as it first seems. The elevation of a crime to the primal radiance of redemptive sacrifice is the mystery at the center of Christian faith. The murder, or the unjustified execution of Jesus, is turned into the one act that will redeem the lost souls of the human race. So the means, the suffering and death of the holiest human being that ever lived - the intentional criminal torture and killing of that perfect being - is transformed into a necessity, something that had to happen so that the rest of us could gain eternal life. The ends absolutely justifying the means - so thoroughly justifying them that the dynamic of it is invisible in the midst of all the blood and glory.

And contrasted with PZMyers' atheistical anti-something or other, here.
A few words about my father and the Catholic Church, here.
the image is Velasquez' Innocent X, linking to Francis Bacon's Study After Velasquez, one of his many popes. Innocent X had a role in Irish affairs at the time of the Irish Confederacy. Francis Bacon was, besides being a genius painter, homosexual.