See:
Francis accents unity with halos for superstar popes
For Boston faithful, canonizations are personal, profound
"Pope John Paul II’s aide defends moves" by Nicole Winfield | Associated Press April 26, 2014
VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II’s biographer and longtime spokesman sought Friday to defend his record on sex abuse against evidence that he did not grasp the scale of the scandal until very late in his papacy.
John Paul’s record and his support for the founder of the Legion of Christ religious order, a notorious pedophile, have come under fresh scrutiny in the run-up to the pontiff’s canonization Sunday, the fastest in modern times.
Spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls and official biographer George Weigel pointed to John Paul’s decision in April 2002 — the year the scandal exploded publicly in the United States — to summon US cardinals to Rome as evidence he acted decisively when he learned about the problem.
‘‘I think there was an information gap between the United States and the Holy See in the first months of 2002 so that the pope was not living this crisis in real time as we were in the USA,’’ Weigel told a Vatican press conference. ‘‘Once he became fully informed in April of that year, he acted decisively to deal with these problems.’’
Yet US bishops had been petitioning the Holy See for faster ways to defrock pedophile priests since the late 1980s. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had asked the Vatican legal office for ways to accelerate the process for the universal church in 1988 because he, too, was seeing cases piling up.
Ratzinger, who for a quarter century met regularly with John Paul as his chief doctrine czar, finally wrested control of all abuse cases in 2001, making sure his office reviewed them individually to tell bishops how to proceed.
Navarro-Valls said John Paul found it difficult to accept that priests might abuse children because of the ‘‘purity of his thought.’’ But he said he eventually did accept it.
Navarro-Valls also denied that John Paul had covered up for the Reverend Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ religious order.
The case languished for years as Maciel’s protectors in the Vatican hierarchy blocked the inquiry, which finally opened in 2004 and ended a year after Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. Maciel was convicted and sanctioned in 2006 to a lifetime of penance and prayer.
Defending John Paul, Navarro-Valls noted that the Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor began taking testimony from Maciel’s victims in the United States while John Paul was still alive.
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I wanted to preserve the purity of the print even though I am a bad Catholic (or good one since I don't much bother with it).
