In a report on the English language news channel Russia Today, Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society suggested that a lack of tolerance to modern social problems — along with repeated child abuse and money laundering allegations, has created an irreversible air of scandal around the Catholic Church and is the main reason the Pope is resigning.
Failure to deal with these issues, as well as other “symptomatic” failures, has forced Pope Benedict’s resignation — not his claims of old age and poor health as the Vatican has reported, Wood argues.
Wood also seemed to suggest that some new allegations of child sexual abuse are on the horizon which might deal a decisive blow to the church.
“I’m certainly aware of two major issues over child abuses that are going to come up and are going to be very, very hard for the Vatican to swallow,” Wood said. “Because it is not like it is the child abuse, bad though that is, is the issue — it is actually that the finger of blame is going to be pointed at the Vatican for having obstructed justice and all the secret files that it won’t release.”
Wood went on to suggest that once more light is shed on the Vatican’s role in the cover up of child sex abuse by priests, it will result in a decisive shift in public opinion of the church, compounded by the fact that the “Vatican has shown no real sign of actually coming to terms with this, of putting its hands up and really atoning for its past sins, and being much more open and dealing more properly with victims and actually getting the people who perpetrated these crimes turned over to the police.”
When questioned why the Vatican hasn’t accepted responsibility for the church’s scandals, Wood said that the Catholic Church has always been an institution that is only concerned with the preservation of its own power and finances, but “with the kind off communications we have today, they can’t get away with that any longer.”
Watch the RT segment in the video below.
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