I’m sure that wherever he is now, John Lennon is smiling wryly at the Vatican’s inadvertent efforts to make his flippant prediction come true.

The still unfolding horrors of pedophile priests and Church coverups now includes the Pope himself, for at least the period in which Cardinal Ratzinger was the head of the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But we’ve seen this story before.

The Vatican, today. The pope’s spokesman has launched a vigorous counter-attack against a report linking Benedict XVI to a sex abuse cover-up while he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981. Father Federico Lombardi appeared to suggest in an interview on Vatican Radio that the pope, who also has strong links to the city [...]