His inaction against the Church's 'lavender mafia' was his biggest failing. But in many other ways he was a holy man well worth emulating.
During John Paul II’s reign the number of pedophilia cases dropped by about 99%, including by more than 90% before the mainstream media ever picked up the news in the early 1990s and 98% before the issue was launched into prominence at the start of this decade. (There were serious grumblings in the MSM in the early 1990s, but these died down when the MSM realized that the lavendar mafia, specifically Cardinal Bernadin, was behind the pedophilia.)
John Paul’s strategy focused on preventing abuse rather than punishing the guilty, but this was a strategy chosen for several reasons beyond mere fecklessness:
1. The homosexuals and their allies controlled a huge portion of the American Episcopacy; if a schism occurred, Rome would be utterly powerless to prevent abuse. The threat of schism can be shown by the disobedience to “Humane Vitae,” proclaiming the Church’s opposition to birth control, and the nearly unanimous ignoring of Pope John XXIII’s prohibition against ordaining even chase homosexuals.
2. The Vatican is structurally poorly suited to investigating abuses. Futher, mere suspicion of poor management is no basis for the removal of a bishop, who has his own apostolic authority. Case in point: Cardinal Law was found to have done such an egregiously poor job dealing with abuse cases that he had to be removed from his diocese, but even he is still a bishop under canon law.
3. Once the lawyers were in a feeding frenzy, the Church’s hands were further tied by the legitimate need to avoid lawsuits. It’s really to pontificate (if you’ll pardon the expression) that the Church shouldn’t protect itself against lawsuits, but the people who would be most hurt by wholesale bankuptcies of dioceses would be the millions of financial aid recipients, Catholic school children, catechumen, orphans, hospital patients and seminarians whom the church serves. As it was, the Church was successfully able to limit financial losses to it’s own “wealth”: diocesan facilities, etc.
This is not to say that Rome might have been able to deal out stronger punishments, but there was a legitimate issue of balancing the desire for earthly justice with maintaining the ability to halt the abuses.
Keep in mind, you’re dealing with people who firmly believe that whatever punishment they fail at, God makes up for. The unpunished abusers are roasting in Hell.