Gay sex rings, 'The Filth' corrupting the Vatican...and why the Pope REALLY quit

• Sickened by moral corrosion in his own shadowy cabal, Benedict can only rid Rome of its malign influence by resigning... a leading Catholic writer's explosive analysis

By JOHN CORNWELL

PUBLISHED: 22:01 GMT, 2 March 2013 | UPDATED: 23:11 GMT, 2 March 2013

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrung his hands above his head in triumph as he emerged as Pope on to the balcony of St Peter’s eight years ago. He had won!

He had longed to be Pope. He has loved being Pope. He expected to die as Pope.    

Two weeks ago he announced in Latin he wasn’t up to it any more. Up to what? He spent most of his time writing and took time off to tinkle on the piano and stroke his cat. 

He’s been waited on hand and foot. He has his handsome secretary Georg Ganswein to do his every bidding. 

There’s been talk of frailty, encroaching dementia, mortal illness. There’s been pious spin about a holy act of ‘humility’.

But one of his predecessors, sprightly Leo XIII, who died 110 years ago, went on until he was 93. Benedict knew from the start, aged 76, that he would grow old in office.   

We’ve heard about the so-called papal ‘resignation’ almost 600 years ago. But there wasn’t one. There were three rival Popes back then, and one of them was a psychopath. 

They were sacked by a council of all the bishops and cardinals to get back to one Pope at a time. Since then, every Pope has died in office.

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 resigned in early February. That report was a final straw. The Filth has been corroding the soul of the Catholic Church for years, and the reason is the power-grabbing ineptitude and secrecy of the Curia – which failed to deal with the perpetrators. Now the Curia itself stands accused of being part of The Filth.     

Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch. He knows this is a mammoth task.

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?

The Curia are usually quickly reappointed. This time it may be different. It involves scores of departments, like the civil service of a middling-sized country. 

It has a Home and  Foreign Office called the Secretariat of State. There’s a department that watches out for heresy – the former Holy Inquisition which under Cardinal Ratzinger dealt with, or failed to deal with, paedophile priests.

FULL STORY: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287074/Gay-sex-rings-The-F...