Benedict didn’t stay in the background. Instead, he published a letter that is incoherent, inaccurate, and at times truly bizarre. In his letter, he wrote that the news of the February conference had compelled him to action. “I compiled some notes by which I might contribute one or two remarks to assist in this difficult hour,” he wrote.[...]
In his letter, Benedict said the crisis started in the second half of the 1980s. This is not true. He himself, as prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, handled abuse cases sent to the Vatican dated before then. He also managed an investigation into the Legionaries of Christ and its charismatic Mexican founder, the Reverend Marcial Maciel Dellogado, who was later found to have molested seminarians and fathered several children well before the ’80s. (He left the Legionaries out of the letter.) [...]
Why did Benedict even publish this thing? Benedict’s longtime personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, told The New York Times that the pope had published his reflections of his own accord. The letter appeared in several archconservative outlets that have been critical of Francis and that also published a bombshell letter last summer in which an archbishop said the Vatican was full of “gay lobbies.”
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