CONSERVATIVE Catholics rejoiced at the election of Pope Benedict XVI because, as a cardinal, he had famously decried "moral relativism."
Now, however, the pope appears to be backtracking and, worse yet, he is tolerating a scandalous moral relativism by the Vatican secretary of state.
In 1986, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a global letter to bishops denouncing homosexuality as a "moral disorder." The language was harsh, much to the delight of conservatives.
But now that Ratzinger is pope, the church says that homosexual seminarians are to be treated with "respect and delicacy" if they are chaste, according to the newspaper Il Giornale, quoting from a leaked copy of a recently completed Vatican document on homosexuals in the seminary. That's a reasonable position, albeit a retreat from Ratzinger's denouncement of gays in 1986.
Perhaps more troubling for conservatives should be the pope's tolerance of the behavior of the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Six years ago, Sodano persuaded Ratzinger to halt a canon law case seeking the excommunication of a friend of his, an alleged pedophile, Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ order in Mexico.
After Ratzinger became pope last spring, Sodano injected himself into a Vatican investigation of Maciel. Sodano also invited his old friend to a prestigious religious conference in Lucca, Italy. No president or elected prime minster would tolerate his chief diplomat championing a priest with 20 accusations of pedophilia.
Sodano and Maciel became friends in the 1970s, while Sodano served as papal nuncio in Chile and Maciel was cultivating supporters of corrupt Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The allegations against Maciel date from 1976, when two former Legion priests sent the Vatican formal accusations, with names of other young victims from seminaries in Rome and Spain.
The Vatican ignored the charges, even as the number of alleged victims grew. The Legion's response has always been to attack the accusers, portraying Maciel as the victim of a conspiracy by men jealous of his success.
In late 2004, with Pope John Paul II dying, Ratzinger realized that he might become pope and launched an investigation of Maciel. At the time, Ratzinger's office had a backlog of 700 cases of priests whose bishops wanted them defrocked. He knew that the media would seize on the Maciel case as a coverup. As the investigation began, Maciel stepped down from the helm of the Legion, citing his age, 85.
