Saturday, April 02, 2005

Inconvenient fact

De mortius and all that, I suppose, but the fact is, as Christopher Hitchens notes, that one of the late Pope's legacies was permitting Archbishop Bernard Law to escape the legal justice system in Massachusetts by giving him a sinecure job in the Vatican. Otherwise, Archbishop Law "would have [had] to face trial for his appalling collusion in the child-rape racket that his diocese had been running. The man had knowingly reassigned dangerous and sadistic criminals to positions where they would be able to exploit the defenseless. He had withheld evidence and made himself an accomplice, before and after the fact, in the one offense that people of all faiths and of none have most united in condemning.... And it has been conclusively established that the Vatican itself - including his holiness - was a part of the coverup and obstruction of justice that allowed the child-rape scandal to continue for so long."