What is Pope Himmler Up to These Days?

My main takeaway on Pope Benedict is that while there wasn’t much a young German boy could do to avoid Hitler Youth membership, he sure never saw any real need to apologize for it or act in any way that might offend his old mentors. He was a terrible pope, a pusher of right-wing revanchist extremism that is the worst of the modern reactionary world. So when we stepped down for Pope Francis, nearly everything got better in terms of the Catholic Church’s positions in the world, unless you are a right-wing extremist yourself, which does sum up much of the American Catholic hierarchy.

Benedict had mostly stayed out the spotlight, but now he feels the need to speak out in only the way he and his awfulness can.

Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching.In the 11-page analysis published today in a German magazine for priests, Klerusblatt, the former Pope also reveals some of the behind-the-scenes struggles between the Vatican and American bishops in handling the crisis and admits that the Vatican was initially overwhelmed in dealing with it.

Wait, what? The hippies forced Catholic priests to rape children?

In the essay, Benedict asserts that the changes in traditional moral standards on sexuality both in society and within the Catholic Church laid the groundwork for the sex abuse crisis.”Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes, “was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”Benedict says that this mentality also affected bishops and Catholic seminaries and caused, “the extensive collapse of the next generation of priests.””There were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicity,” he writes.”In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established,” he writes, “which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.”Benedict cites one bishop who showed seminarians pornographic films, “allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith.”Liberal theologians who questioned the church’s traditional norms on sexuality are also partly to blame, the former Pope says.”There could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good any more than anything fundamentally evil; there could be only relative value judgments,” the former Pope said, characterizing the liberal position on morality.

Is there anything in here Himmler wouldn’t have agreed with?