Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, announced on Feb. 11 that he will resign his position as the CEO of the Roman Catholic Church, the first resignation by a pope in 600 years.
The resignation takes effect on Feb. 28 amid raging exposures, lawsuits and criminal charges from around the world that Ratzinger protected countless criminal priests and covered over the church’s rampant, systemic and longstanding practice of child sexual abuse.
Ratzinger’s resignation also comes on the heels of charges of money laundering and corruption in the Vatican Bank, the official Catholic financial institution whose vast wealth is built on the stolen labor, lives, land and resources of African, Indigenous and colonized peoples around the world.
As the head of the Catholic Church, Ratzinger presided over the untold wealth of Vatican City, a small, self-governing city-state located in the middle of Rome, Italy.
The sudden resignation announcement along with Ratzinger’s statement that he will live “hidden from the world” inside the walls of the Vatican, has fueled much speculation that that the pope will soon face criminal charges and is requesting legal immunity from the government of Italy.
According to the website of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State, there is strong conjecture that, “The historically unprecedented resignation of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope this week was compelled by an upcoming action by a European government to issue an arrest warrant against Ratzinger and a public lien against Vatican property and assets by Easter.”
Child sexual abuse and drug money laundering rampant in the Vatican
In 2012, the “Vatileaks” scandal brought to light confidential church documents, including many from the Pope’s office, showing that the Vatican Bank functions as an “off shore” bank with encrypted and secret accounts that accept billions of dollars in deposits with little or no oversight.
On March 7, 2012, the U.S. State Department for the first time named the Vatican as one of 67 nations “of concern” on its list of money-laundering centers—something that must be read with the understanding that the U.S. government with its Wall Street banks is itself the main drug trafficker in the world.
The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that, “Those in the know believe that the real core of the scandal is a power struggle over control of the Vatican's finances.”
For more information on the Vatican Bank and Money Laundering see: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/18/1187776/-The-Vatican-Bank-and-Money-Laundering
Pope resigns as incriminating court documents released
The resignation of Ratzinger coincides with the release of incriminating court documents by a Rhode Island court on February 15.
The court papers were released to the New York Times, The National Catholic Reporter and two other newspapers, which as of the publication of this article have yet to write anything on the content of the documents.
The documents deal with a lawsuit against the estate of a woman who donated her fortune to the Legion of Christ, a Catholic organization led by Father Marcial Maciel.
Maciel, who died in 2008, has been called one of the “most prolific abuser of boys in the modern history of the church.”
According to Americablog, Maciel was a close friend of both Ratzinger and the previous pope, John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtla).
The Legion of Christ, which is based in the U.S. and 19 other countries, recruited boys as young as 10 years old to leave their families and begin to study to become priests, according to ABC News.
According to testimony from 30 victims of the abuse, the young students were brought into Maciel’s room singly or in pairs at night where they were tied up and brutally sexually assaulted.
Maciel was also exposed to have fathered six children, often setting their mothers up in luxury apartments. He lived in expensive condos and owned high-end properties in Mexico and around the world by allegedly pocketing millions of dollars from the Legion.
When the allegations against Maciel surfaced in 2005, then-Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed by Pope John Paul II to investigate these and countless other abuse charges flooding into the Vatican.
ABC News attempted to interview Ratzinger at the time. ABC’s website writes, “when approached by ABC NEWS in Rome [in 20015]…with questions of allegations against Maciel, Ratzinger became visibly upset and actually slapped this reporter's hand.”
According to The National Catholic Reporter, Maciel poured millions of dollars into the coffers of the Vatican hierarchy, buying support for himself.
The Rhode Island case was filed against Maciel by one of his six biological children and is still pending in courts there.
According to the Associated Press, the newly released documents will shed much light on Maciel and who knew what about his activities, something that could prove very damaging to soon-to-be-ex-pope Ratzinger and the Church as a whole.
The case of Maciel is just one example of the hideous assault on children by Catholic clergy in almost every country of the world.
Ratzinger was the head of the church’s department in charge of disciplining priests for 30 years, during which time he consistently protected the crimes of the child rapists.
Inside of the U.S. alone Ratzinger protected outrageous rapists and criminals such as Father Lawrence Murphy in Wisconsin who sexually assaulted 200 deaf boys at a Catholic school and Father Stephan Kiesle, convicted of tying up and sexually assaulting boys.
At the insistence of Ratzinger, Kiesle was kept on as a priest and allowed to continue working with children whom he duly abused.
Then there is the case of Monsignor (a monsignor is a high level priest) Kevin Wallin who just last month was locked up in Connecticut for dealing and using methamphetamine.
Catholic Church: center for child abuse for centuries
These crimes against humanity have been endemic from the inception of this filthy imperialist economic/political corporation that claims to be the representation of Jesus Christ on earth.
According to an article based on Sex, Priests and Secret Codes, The Catholic Church’s 2,000-Year paper Trail of Sexual Abuse, by Thomas P. Doyle, O.P., A.W. Richard Sipe and Patrick J. Wall, III; Volt Press, Los Angeles, CA, © 2006:
“The rape and sodomy of children is woven into the tradition of clerical history. And it has been amply recorded in documents and literature.
“Popes, bishops and priests have known for centuries that sexual abuse of children is a problem. The Church may have legislated against it, but the fact remains that the hierarchy has consistently failed to protect the youngest and most vulnerable members of its flock from sexual abuse by predatory clergy. Roman documents, papal encyclicals and council resolutions down through the ages expose the persistence of violations of celibacy and criminal sexual activity with children and others.”
In 2010 Ratzinger acknowledged and condoned the accepted practice of child sexual abuse throughout the church in a presentation to the cardinals in Rome by saying:
“In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children.
“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than.’ Nothing is good or bad in itself,” Ratzinger concluded.
Catholic Church: leading world colonial-imperialist power
The Catholic Church was the ultimate feudal organization of Europe in the middle ages gaining its power and enormous wealth through centuries of in the trade of African people, the genocide against the Indigenous people and the brutal history of European colonial domination and terror of oppressed peoples around the world.
In 1494 the Church carved up South America and parceled out the land, resources and Indigenous people themselves as favors to Spain and Portugal.
During this same period Catholic missionaries poured into the Americas as the key front of the genocidal assault on the Indigenous people and the theft of their land and resources.
It is well known that the Catholic mission churches that dot the California coast as tourist havens are surrounded by the mass graves of countless bodies of the Indigenous people who were enslaved and brutalized by colonial Catholic priests.
The genocidal church-run “boarding schools” which Indigenous children were forced into throughout North America up until nearly the end of the 20th century were known for their massive murders and rampant sexual assaults on Indigenous children.
In the 1500s, the Catholic Church gave its asiento (permission)to European imperial powers to attack and terrorize various areas of the African coast to capture and enslave African people.
Over the centuries, Catholic popes and clergy, as well as religious orders such as the Jesuits, owned enslaved Africans.
It was not until 1965 that the Church was forced by the worldwide African Liberation Movement to finally condemn the practice of slavery.
For hundreds of years the Catholic Church was a key instigator of colonial violence, including the Spanish inquisition and the military assault on African, Arab, Jewish and Roma people in Spain, known as the “Reconquista.”
The Catholic Church also launched the centuries of “crusades” in a colonial campaign that attacked Muslim people of North Africa and stole their wealth for the benefit of a deeply impoverished and warlike Europe.
In the 1980s, the Polish pope Karol Józef Wojtla, played a pivotal role in bringing down the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies.
Clearly, as we know from the African People’s Socialist Party’s theory of African Internationalism, the Catholic church is a leader of imperialism today, a key player in the building and functioning of parasitic capitalism at the expense of African and oppressed peoples.
Like capitalism itself, the Catholic Church is nothing but a filthy cesspool of hideous crimes against the majority of the people on the planet.
The crisis of the Catholic Church is part of the crisis of imperialism which is being challenged by the rising up of the oppressed and colonized masses around the world throwing off the chains of the bloodsucking imperialist masters who have used the colonized peoples to feed Europe for the past 600 years.
As imperialism’s crisis deepens the imperialist powers are vying for the stolen loot as the crumbling edifice of imperialism and parasitic capitalism is hovering on the brink of collapse.
In the past 20 years or so the Catholic Church has experienced a huge loss of membership inside of Europe following decades of sexual abuse and corruption scandals.
Today the church’s largest following is among the impoverished colonial subjects of South America and Africa who had Catholicism forced upon them as part of colonial domination.
There is much speculation now with the resignation of Ratzinger that the Catholic Church may be forced to choose an African pope to function in much the same way that president Obama functions as the black face of white power for U.S. imperialism.
An African as the public face of the vicious colonial corporation known as the Catholic Church may serve as a last ditch attempt to save this imperialist institution from the fierce determination of the peoples of the world to wrest back their land, resources, culture and self determination from the blood suckers of white power.
Like imperialism and parasitic capitalism, though, its days are numbered as African people organize to liberate Africa and all its resources.
Forward to the self-determination, unification and liberation of Africa and African people everywhere.
Uhuru!
