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.

When Cardinal Law of Boston was in trouble over his handling of priests who abused children, the Peter Principle solution was to move him to a new job in Rome. Pope Benedict, however, can’t exactly do that in his own situation. There is one job, though, that might be a possibly acceptable step up for him from being pope: student teacher in a preschool.

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 [...]