This Pope's No Joke

It's been nice to see the Pope and sections of the Catholic Church coming under sustained attack of late for their criminal role in the cover-up of child abuse. It's been clear from the moment he was elected that Ratzinger was a nasty piece of work and these new revelations have only further confirmed that fact.
Plenty of people with wildly differing agendas have been writing about this scandal, including Matt Taibbi whose pieces in Rolling Stone are usually hilariously bang on the money. However, he's a bit off-kilter and overwrought here, allowing his obvious personal issues with the Catholic Church to get in the way of what should have been one hell of a throw-down.
Jane Kramer over at the New Yorker, however, gets it just right. Informed and knowledgeable about Ratzinger and the church, she presents a litany of damaging evidence and example from Ratzinger's life and work which cumulatively builds to a devastating and damning climax.
One of the pertinent side points she makes concerns Ratzinger's despicable treatment of certain heroic South American priests when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (i.e. the Inquisition):

Under Ratzinger’s watch, the liberation theologians of Central and South America—Christian-communitarian evangelists, and not, as his Pope preferred it, Marxists—were either removed, summoned to Rome and silenced, or, in the case of bishops who had risked their lives to bear witness to the atrocities of their various military regimes, gerrymandered out of existence and their parishes folded into the dioceses of more accommodating and even complicitous priests. 

It's clear that even back then Ratzinger was an expert at punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty. 
Kramer is obviously angry and disgusted by what she is writing about, but her quiet and measured approach allows the rage and contempt to shine through all the more powerfully. Read it and weep.