“To my mind the really big reason not to rush to judgement on the sainthood issue is that JPII presided over decades of priestly sex abuse of children and did nothing about it.”
So says you.
Pope John Paul II was elected to the papacy in late 1978. Child molestation by priests in the United States peaked in 1980 or 1981. Abuse had declined by 90% by the early 1990s.
It is true that the scope of prior abuse didn't become public to the last few years of his pontificate, but it's very, very clear that someone in the Church took the problem in the United States very seriously and began to turn the problem around very early in Pope John Paul's pontificate.
Who knows? Perhaps the pope even had something to do with it.
We don't really know what happened behind the scenes to cause the dramatic decline in priestly sex abuse starting early in Pope John Paul's pontificate. We cannot say that he did nothing about this problem. We really don't know.
There isn't really any evidence to support your assertion, and what evidence we have suggests that perhaps the late pontiff WAS doing something about the problem.
sitetest
You say that child abuse "peaked" in the early 80s, but tell that to my nephew who was abused after that. How can we explain the fact that Mahoney and Law were allowed to stay on as long as they did? There was a priest under Mahoney's jurisdiction named Oliver O'Grady (excellent documentary out about him called Deliver Us From Evil, by the way) who abused and abused and raped and then abused some more even as he was shuttled from place to place. Why didn't JPII or Cardinal Ratzinger have Mahoney's hide taked to the door of the Sistine Chapel?
I think it's way too easy to let either JPII or Benedict XVI off the hook without a very detailed explanation to the faithful of what exactly happened and why. Given all the cover ups in the past we really must assume they're guilty until proven innocent. Surely the burden of proof has shifted in regard to the Catholic hierarchy on this issue.
And what do they intend to do about it in the future? The fact that a large majority of our American Catholic clergy are gay (often openly so) and/or are suffering some other type of basic personality flaw remains unaddressed. What precisely did JPII do to close the seminary doors to homosexuals and psychological deficients? What is Benedict XVI doing about that? Requiring that all new ordinations be married - which I would heartily support - is rejected out of hand. Great, then what's the plan to keep out the gays and weirdos?
And if you don't believe that's true you need to spend more time at a typical parish in Wisconsin, where I'm from.
I see no action aimed at ridding the clergy of the dross. And to my mind it does no good to say it's happening "behind the scenes." Until we actually see the plan and its execution out in the open then, given all the circling of the wagons by our clergy in the past, we have to assume that nothing is being done.
Meantime, I urge all of my fellow Catholics to take extreme care in any contact your children have with the clergy. I would never, ever let my kids be alone with a priest. It's sad, but our first duty as parents is to our kids and their physical and spiritual health. Our Catholic clergy is overwhelmingly gay. We need to deal with that tragic fact and not to confuse our loyalty to the Bride of Christ with fealty to the sickos and fools who all too often - and with many notable exceptions - administer the organization here in America.