Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies at 95

[CumbrianLefty]

Atlas when a trans person exists: GROOMER!

Atlas when someone covers up actual child sex abuse: wow, what a great person

But he didn't. https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/faulted-benedict-turned-vatican-sex-abuse-96039221

He tried to fix it. But lacked the willpower and political charm to push through more extensive changes, which Pope Francis has been able to do.

My understanding is that his record is a lot more mixed than that.

Well, yes it is and that is not really surprising is it. But he still did more than his predecessor for sure, even though JP2 continues to be given much more of a free pass by many.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He was pretty consistent on the issue from at least the middle 1980s onwards, understanding it to be a grievous systemic issue that needed to be dealt with seriously.* Whether he was effective at pursuing this is a different question, though is not a moral one: we do have to separate the two. From a liberal and non-Catholic point of view, Benedict came across as a much more obvious villain than John Paul (right down to his love of the pomp and high ceremony of the Church), and from a Catholic point of view the latter is generally held in sentimental high-esteem for entirely unrelated reasons, all of which does rather encourage the tendency to pin the blame for the very serious failings of the latter over this issue on the former.

_{*The interesting question from a biographical perspective is whether this was linked to the errors he made previously. I would tend to suggest that it might be (particularly given how he responded to further attention on those errors early last year), but I doubt we'll ever know either way.}

[Lechasseur]

RIP