A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current topics that may be of interest.

This past week, Pope Benedict XVI named Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput to succeed Cardinal Justin Rigali as head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. While this is an in-house decision of the Roman Catholic church, it will have major implications far beyond Philly, and reaches deeply into the broader political discussions in the US and beyond. Chaput is a leading conservative voice on church and state, and a strong defender of the church in general, and he’s stepping into the biggest church vs. state battle going on right now outside of Ireland.

Naming Chaput to head up the Philadelphia Archdiocese put one of Benedict’s most articulate and powerful voices front and center in those battles, and also changes the secular political calculus for 2012 in Pennsylvania and beyond.

On Monday evening, Irish television station RTE One revealed the existence of a 1997 Vatican letter to the Bishops of Ireland, forcing them to back down from mandating that bishops report abusive priests to the secular authorities. The letter came with a threat attached, that if the bishops took action against a priest and the priest appealed to Rome, Rome would back the priest and the bishop would end up with a black eye.

The saddest part of the whole thing? This threat worked.

Pope Benedict XVI just had a sexy new revelation from his God: Condoms are allowed during sex to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Of course, it’s still a sin to use them as birth control, but it’s a greater sin to pass HIV/AIDS.

Last week I wrote about three big scandals that no doubt gave Pope Benedict nightmares. Now, with a big story in the NYT, the nightmares continue, as bishops and canon lawyers — speaking on the record — call out the failures of then-Cardinal Ratzinger to deal appropriately with allegations of priestly child abuse when that was part of his office’s responsibility.

It’s been a bad week for Pope Benedict. From Italy to Belgium to Washington DC, courts everywhere seem to be taking a hard look at some of the activities of the Catholic church, and they’re not liking what they’re seeing. Worst of all, from Benedict’s point of view, is that the events of the last eight days are but a foretaste of the weeks to come.

The Blues Brothers’ “Mission from God” now has official Vatican approval.

The revelation that Catholic Church sex scandal cables were sent to Wikileaks sort of makes you wonder why the State Department is discussing what the Vatican thinks about its pedophile priests, doesn’t it? Unless of course our government is tapping the Pope to keep tracks on the Church’s pedophiles…

There are predators, and then there are enablers.

It doesn’t matter if we are talking about child sexual abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests, deceptive Wall Street bankers, or DOJ-sanctioned torture. The game being played right now is the same, in all three venues: avoid accountability.

In dealing with the current crisis in the Roman Catholic church of child abuse by its priests, the symptom the church is confronting is the abuse, but the underlying disease is a love of power. So long as Benedict addresses only the symptom and not the disease, real healing cannot occur. He called for “decisive action” and “complete honesty and transparency” in his letter to Ireland. A good place to start might be for more bishops to offer their resignations, and for Benedict to start accepting them.