Lead Us Not Into Temptation

Hey everybody, the Pope is here! In his first papal visit, Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the U.S. today, and to his credit, after he met our Pinhead President, he still decided to stay. He also said that he was "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sex abuse scandal that has run through the American church. He had no official comment as yet on who has the firmer handshake, Pinhead or his wife.
But back to less savory details: The U.S. church has paid out two billion dollars in abuse costs since 1950, most of that in just the last six years. Who would have imagined that abuse would cost so much. Remember when abuse was free? The Pope pledged that pedophiles would not be priests in the Catholic Church."I do not wish to talk at this moment about homosexuality, but about pedophilia, which is another thing," he said. "We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry. It is more important to have good priests than many priests. We will do everything possible to heal this wound."
Ah yes, the wound. Please feel free at this point to break into small groups to discuss the meaning and significance of "this wound." The lives of the children who had their lives destroyed? The trust in clergy? The public image of the Catholic Church itself? To be fair, the priests who have been found guilty of these crimes and their subsequent cover up are not found exclusively on these shores. "Holy men" in Canada, Europe, and Latin America have been tried and convicted. Still, it's here in the United States that most of the "wounding" has taken place. There were six hundred and ninety-one new accusations in 2007 alone, according to an annual report from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
As head of the Vatican agency that enforces adherence to Catholic doctrine, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the Pope) was heavily involved in gaining Vatican approval for the reforms U.S. bishops proposed for the American church. The bishops have since released several reports analyzing the scandal and have pledged that all credibly accused priests will be pulled from public ministry. Not removed from the ministry, mind you, just removed from public ministry. They get to keep their jobs, they just get moved to more discrete location.
Come to think of it, maybe Pinhead and the Pope have more in common than I realized.