From the June / July 2010 edition of First Things:
Cardinal Sodano has to go. The dean of the College of Cardinals, he has been found too often on the edges of scandal. Never quite charged, never quite blamed, he has had his name in too long a series of depositions and court records and news accounts—an ongoing embarrassment to the Church he serves. The Vatican has been responding in a disorganized way to the frenzy of recent press stories about often thirty-year-old abuse cases. What it should do is put its own house in order, moving out the unhelpful remnants of the bureaucracy that allowed those scandals to fester for so long.
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...The deeper point is the lack of consequences— visible consequences—for failures and missteps and wrong associations in the Vatican. The real problem is that heads haven’t rolled, penalties haven’t been exacted, for Fr. Maciel’s deceptions.
For many years, Cardinal Sodano received money and benefits for his projects from the Legion of Christ, and in 1998 he halted investigations into sexual abuse by the Legion’s founder. That apparent quid pro quo ought to have a price.
It ought to have a price precisely because the scandal of Fr. Maciel is so deadly. The child-abuse cases were a corruption in the Church. What Fr. Maciel attempted is a corruption of the Church...
