The Dish

It was well-known in Arizona two decades ago that Father Michael Teta was a rapist of teen boys. Teta was first suspended from his duties in 1990 because he was credibly accused of such crimes. But it took seven more years to successfully convict him in a canonical court of sexual molestation, in part because of the arcane legal expertise necessary to conduct such a trial. During that time, the rapist was paid living expenses, legal fees and health insurance by the church.

And that's how Ratzinger is connected to this case. Since Teta had used the sacrament of confession to abuse minors, the prevailing legal authority was Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, which was first directly involved in the case in 1992. The trial had to follow the CDF's rigorous Instructio to ensure justice for the priest. After the 1997 conviction, the priest nonetheless appealed the verdict to Ratzinger's office. In documents uncovered today by the Arizona Daily Star, the Arizona archbishop at the time, Manuel Moreno, wrote to Ratzinger pleading for speed in ending a case that had already gone on so long:

"I make this plea to you to assist me in every way you can to expedite this case, because the accused was a priest in whom I had great confidence at one time, but who, unfortunately, worked among our former seminarians, and, terrible to say, evidently corrupted many of them."

According to the Star,

The church's canonical court in 1997 found "there is almost a satanic quality in (Teta's) mode of acting toward young men and boys." The court found that Teta's "insidious 'rape' of so many young men in his capacity as a priest" warranted his immediate removal from the priesthood.

And yet despite Moreno's personal appeal, it took Ratzinger's CDF another seven years to defrock this priest. He was still being paid the equivalent of administrative leave until 2004 – fourteen years after his "insidious rapes" were first reported. During those fourteen years, parishioners paid the priest about $1,400 a month. The diocese also paid for Teta's canon lawyer.

Until now, the entire blame for the slowness of the process has rested on the late Moreno's shoulders, who was seen as a poor advocate for the victims of the abuse. But with the Star's publication of internal correspondence, it's clear now that he was simply struggling to get a conviction under the CDF's arcane legal rules, which give every benefit of the doubt to the accused priest, and care not a whit about the victims of abuse. The lawyer for the victims now blames the Vatican, not Moreno, for the delay:

Cadigan has represented more than 35 local church abuse victims in civil cases, including two men who said they were assaulted in the confessional by Teta as children and, combined, received about $2 million from the diocese. The two men were not witnesses in Teta's canonical proceedings.

"I spent years claiming that (Moreno) was the evil one allowing the abuse to occur, but after reviewing the documents from the Vatican, it's clear that he did what he could within the confines of an incompetent system," Cadigan said.

In a second case, that of Father Trupia, another sex abuser, it was Moreno who had to fight tooth and nail to prevent Ratzinger's CDF from allowing him to resign in good standing, once the CDF took over the case in 2001:

In 1997, the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy told Moreno to let Trupia resign in good standing, but Moreno appealed.

"As the bishop of the diocese, I cannot take the chance of his working among our people unless I am sure of his suitability," Moreno wrote to a high Vatican official in 1997.

Said Cadigan: "Bishop Moreno tried desperately, within the confines of the Vatican, to get rid of Trupia but they wanted to let him go with good recommendations. Bishop Moreno stated very clearly that (Trupia) was a sexual predator, but the Vatican cared more about saving face and keeping it quiet than protecting children."

Attorney Kim Williamson, Cadigan's co-counsel, said it was still three years until Trupia was defrocked, and only after an Arizona Daily Star article revealed Trupia was living in Maryland and still receiving monthly checks from the Diocese of Tucson.

The current Pope cannot be a solution to this problem until he has faced his direct responsibility as a cause of this problem.

This is not going away.

(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI waves as he leaves after celebrating the mass in memory of John Paul II on the 5th anniversary of his death in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on March 29, 2010.The Holy father, under increasing fire for the Roman Catholic Church's handling of paedophile priests, urged Christians Sunday not to be intimidated by idle 'chatter'. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images.)

“This nightclub story is absolutely awful, but the RNC just came off of a meeting in Hawaii, and that was even worse. I don’t think there are conservatives who are going to turn on the RNC just because of this story. I think it’s the nail in the coffin," – Eric Odom, a Tea Party activist and the chairman of Liberty First PAC.

Clay Shirky has a long and fascinating post on complex business models that outlive their purpose and ultimately doom the institutions that birthed them. On internet economics:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

In Austria:

Earlier this week it was revealed that an Austrian abuse phoneline had received 566 separate abuse claims since its launch in January. Local reports said a quarter related to sexual abuse, another quarter involved physical abuse and the remaining number required further investigation.

Last weekend, amid growing public disquiet over the ability of the church to investigate its own priests, Schönborn announced an independent commission to examine historic cases.

There are fears that the scandal in Austria could lead to a record number of defections that would exceed the 2009 figure, when 53,000 people left the church.

Ryan Avent reads it:

[W]hile this is, on the whole, a positive report, it is not a report that significantly changes the image of the American labour market. Current trends—toward a long, slow, and painful return to normal—remain as they were before.

Andrew Samwick is more positive:

I say that this report is good enough for now because this is what the labor market looks like when it starts to bottom out and slowly recover — overall job growth turns small and positive, cyclically sensitive sectors like temporary help services grow more rapidly than most, and it is tough to make progress against the unemployment rate because the number of job seekers may go up in tandem with total employment.  I was at CEA in 2003-4 as the labor market went through the bottom of its last cycle, and I am having a little deja vu.

Andrew Sprung does a meep meep parade: strong job growth in March, China coming round on Iran and its currency, a new nuclear pact with Russia, passage of healthcare reform … Well, he can take a moment, can't he?

Take it away, Glenn Greenwald:

Is it even remotely conceivable that this stable of access-desperate reporters would write negatively about the White House or the President, or conversely, refuse to do their bidding?  Look at what Ryan Lizza writes to get the answer.  They're all vying for the lucrative position of unofficial royal court spokesman (which Bob Woodward occupied in the prior administration).  How can one possibly purport to be a "watchdog" over the very political officials on whom one's livelihood and hope for riches depend? 

Michele Bachmann is cutting one off to spite the other:

[S]ome on the right are raising concerns that the partial [census] boycott could hurt their own cause. Since governments at all levels base their funding decisions and political redistricting on population, fueling the fire against the census could rob heavily conservative districts and suburbs of needed funds and services.

Three Republican congressmen on the census committee — North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry, Georgia’s Lynn Westmoreland and Florida’s John Mica — approached Bachmann privately and asked her to stop the boycott. Roll Call reports that they went public with their concerns because Bachmann “appeared unfazed by their request.”

Freddie DeBoer praises Gawker's modest goals but resists its new media triumphalism::

Look, a pretty accurate gloss on Gawker would be "Brooklynite whites who would rather work for Conde Nast or The New York Times talking shit about Conde Nast and The New York Times." That's no insult; I live in Rhode Island, I write navel-gazers about post-structuralism that nobody reads and I own a Jeep that is missing its back window. This is the Internet; there's no need to stand on false pretenses.

And Alex Pareene is super-awesome. In the end, writers matter, whatever the Internet suits believe.