'I'm sorry but it's not my fault.'

It's not really a real apology when you blame someone else, is it? The current Roman Pope has sent a 13 page letter to the Irish Roman church to say, 'Sorry: the Irish church leadership should clean up its act.' Hans Küng, a German priest of Rome and its frequent critic (his right to teach theology has been rescinded), suggests that Ratzinger himself is the one who needs to apologise for a top-down coverup. He also suggests that Rome's insistence that forbidding priests to marry has an unsurprising and strong connection to systematic sexual abuse of decades. The Bible says that forbidding marriage is the teaching of demons; the Reformers critiqued it (as there were known examples of immorality 'hushed up' in their time) and we're supposed to be totally surprised about child sex abuse now? Küng:

Honesty demands that Joseph Ratzinger himself, the man who for decades has been principally responsible for the worldwide cover-up, at last pronounce his own "mea culpa".

Read it here.

[HT: Carl Trueman]