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"But he has been a bad steward and a failure as a pope. "

I has also came to this conclusion but have since changed. I read an explanation from someone who appeared to be 'in the loop' in an article about the Jesuits. The point made was the Pope has a Darwinian approach and will allow various orders of Priests, Sisters, etc to die (or in effect to allow their policies and practices to kill themselves off). The faithful will survive and the others will perish in the same manner as Communist Russia.

Your theory is interesting and I wish I could buy it. In fact, it may well apply to the Jesuits themselves, since you mention them. It is a dying order. But the idea that the Pope is passively allowing this to happen, doesn't account for his lack of action in other spheres--his bad, even disastrous appointments. He has just appointed Kasper to the cardinalate, for instance, thus making one of the most liberal of bishops papabile. He alone has elevated an incredible number of bad bishops, far in excess of what is usual. It ought to have been clear two decades ago that he had a systemic problem, that the corruption was wider and deeper than he supposed. Catholic laymen knew about it and complained constantly to the Vatican. The Wanderer and the Remnant wrote about these things for decades. And yet it has been business as usual. When the American cardinals went to Rome, no one was asked for his resignation, no one was repremanded. There was a luncheon and some p.r. press conferences. Clearly the call to Rome was an exercise in damage control. Yet Cardinal Law is a man who had gone out of his way to effusively praise in writing a priest he knew had raped a six year old in an effort to foist him on another diocese. He had tolerated this priest's activism on behalf of NAMBLA and allowed him to ruin the lives of countless children. And so with the others. Mahoney has been protecting a slew of abusers--as many as 72 according to LA newspaper reports yesterday. There are bishops and cardinals who hit on seminarians, bishops and cardinals who pick up male prostitutes, etc., etc., and this has been happening for decades all around the globe. Yet no effort is made to clean out the seminaries which produce these perverts.