Out with it and to the point. Benedict XVI is the leader of a criminal organization known as the Catholic Church. How else to classify it’s conduct? The sexual molestation of children by priests has been going on for decades and has been a problem known within the church leadership for exactly as long, all the way up to and including the Pope.

The solution has always been a wink and a nod and a shuttling of the offenders, vestments wiped clean, off to another parish to prey on innocents again. All are complicit in the crime: the predators, their fellow priests who knew and turned away, the bishops and cardinals that gave safe haven to the offenders and indeed several Pontiffs themselves, who knew and did nothing.

Benedict XVI made somewhat of a show in 2008, meeting with a handful of grown victims of abuse in Boston, the epicenter of American Catholicism. His apology was meaningless and the event now seems to be more of an effort to compartmentalize the abuse in America.

The scandal is not confined to the States. In 1980, as Archbishop of Munich, the pope (then Father Joseph Ratzinger) authorized therapy for one Fr. Peter Hullerman, and that completed, immediately allowed him to resume work as a priest. Trouble is, according to psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, Hullerman “desperately has to be kept away from working with children.” The man was a molester.  Rather than be turned over to the authorities, Hullerman was let loose  to prey anew and despite a conviction of sexual molestation in 1986 wasn’t ordered by the church he still ‘served’ to stay away from children until 1998. Hullerman’s case is hardly isolated as hundreds more are coming to light in Germany.

Benedict, like those before him, knew full well cases of sexual predation were not random, but rather endemic to the Catholic church and wherever it’s priests served and he is personally involved in aiding and abetting a known criminal.

The church criminal? If the agents of any other corporation were found to have committed thousands of heinous crimes against children, they’d be lucky to escape with their lives, let alone get lengthy prison stays. But call yourself a holy man, and you’re protected by the collar. Or the miter.