The remainder of Benedict’s papacy was consumed by the sex-abuse crisis and by his inability or unwillingness to grapple with it. For many Catholics, especially in Germany, the disclosures tying him personally to the cover-up of abuse cases had shattered his credibility. He was reminded constantly of the Vatican’s historic failure to protect children from pedophiles. In 2010, the Dutch hierarchy announced that a decade-long investigation had determined that as many as twenty thousand Dutch children had been abused by priests and other church workers since the 1940s. The following month, a Dutch newspaper revealed that ten boys were castrated in the 1950s on orders from Dutch bishops, either to “cure” their homosexuality or as punishment for accusing clergymen of molesting them. The castrations were carried out in church-affiliated psychiatric hospitals.
With no end to the crisis in sight, Benedict appeared increasingly frantic to find others to blame, including the devil. In a widely mocked speech in 2010 the pope said Satan was ultimately responsible for “the abuse of the little ones.”
The final undoing of his papacy began in March 2012, when he made a three-day pilgrimage to Mexico. The trip was plagued by constant reminders of the scandals of Father Maciel. Days ahead of the pope’s arrival, a Mexican magazine published excerpts of a new book by one of Maciel’s victims, a former Legion priest who said he could document how Benedict had ignored evidence of Maciel’s pedophilia. Benedict, who regularly met with victims of priestly sex abuse in his travels, refused to do so in Mexico.
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