The above-linked article does a fair job of treating a subject that is normally not given any objective coverage
The first reason is that, of course, that the Catholic Church is the one common enemy of a wide range of otherwise diametrically opposed groups. Leftists, Fascists, radical feminists, official "Catholics" who despite their sympathies with the former three groups remain inside the Church as fifth columns, atheists, and the hard-core Protestants/Fundamentalists all hold that one dislike in common.
The second reason is that the Curia of the Vatican is shrouded in a secrecy that is a carryover from the Medieval era. This was useful to the Church in the days when it needed all the help it could to prevent a full takeover by secular powers and a transformation into an Orthodox Church-style assignment into a status secondary to the emperor. The complexity of the world of modern finance and the decline in morality of the post WWII era was a dangerous combination with such a method of government.
Pope John Paul II was correctly noted for having failed to purge the Curia of its cliques, corruption, and overly ambitious and power hungry bureaucrats. He tended to rely on his personal piety, mixed with his natural charisma, to reach out to the youth and developed a strong base of devout members. He was certainly a great Pope, but an opportunity was missed.
When Joseph Ratzinger was elevated to the Chair of Peter, I had great hopes that he would be the one to do the job. He was brilliant, kind, and extremely pious. It was he who ran the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, the modern version of the inquisition. He had his hands full in his pre-papal days rooting out high-ranking church officials who wanted to do to the Church what John Shelby Spong did to the Episcopalians in the US. I pegged him as the man that would make it happen.
Maybe he ran into the difficulty of being the man at the top that is a challenge for a brilliant, natural right-hand man type. Maybe he was too old to fight against the entrenched power brokers of the Curia. I should not, though, engage in guesswork. He was a good man and a good Pope and, as the article notes, he may well have pulled a trick play out of the playbook that will pave the way for a new Pope who will clean house.
"Resignation isn’t in Benedict’s vocabulary.
The real reason he has quit is far more spectacular.
It is to save the Catholic Church from ignominy: he has voluntarily delivered himself up as a sacrificial lamb to purge the Church of what he calls ‘The Filth’. And it must have taken courage.
Here is the remarkable thing you are seldom told about a papal death or resignation: every one of the senior office-holders in the Vatican – those at the highest level of its internal bureaucracy, called the Curia – loses his job.
A report Benedict himself commissioned into the state of the Curia landed on his desk in January. It revealed that ‘The Filth’ – or more specifically, the paedophile priest scandal – had entered the bureaucracy........
He is too old, and too implicated, to clean it up himself. He has resigned to make way for a younger, more dynamic successor, untainted by scandal – and a similarly recast Curia.
Benedict was not prepared to wait for his own death to sweep out the gang who run the place.
In one extraordinary gesture, by resigning, he gets rid of the lot of them. But what then?"
I sincerely hope that the next Pope drops the hammer on the filth, both the immoral and the corrupt. It is the only way that the Church can again assume a leadership role. She cannot stay on the sidelines as Fundamentalists engage in false teachings to lure Catholics away, Leftists try to turn the Church into an arm of the Socialists, Christians in the Middle and Near East are being persecuted with a vengeance, and the morality of the Christian world is collapsing in the face of a relentless campaign of hedonism.
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