by Rex Wockner
International News Briefs
About 50 protesters, including members of the gay group OutRage!, demonstrated outside London's Westminster Cathedral on March 28 demanding that Pope Benedict XVI resign for "covering up child sex abuse by Catholic clergy."
Mainstream media have reported in recent weeks that before he was pope, Benedict may have dealt with pedophiliac priest cases inappropriately.
"In 2001, the pope wrote to all Catholic bishops worldwide, ordering them to maintain 'papal secrecy' about sex abuse by clergy," said OutRage!'s Peter Tatchell. "He threatened to excommunicate anyone who spoke about it. This makes the pope personally responsible for the cover-up."
In 2001, Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor body to the Inquisition, which is charged with rooting out doctrinal errors and heresy and meting out discipline, among other things.
Under Ratzinger's leadership, the congregation excoriated gay sex as "intrinsically disordered," "objectively disordered," "a serious depravity," "against the natural moral law" and "sins gravely contrary to chastity."
In 2003, Ratzinger wrote: "Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity."
