Suddenly

In an article in the 21 December 2010 San Francisco Chronicle a story on the Vatican's sudden interest in helping clerical child abuse victims included the statement: 


 "This month, the Vatican published a letter from 1988 that it said showed that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican's doctrinal office in charge of handling abuse, had sought ways for swifter punishment for errant priests. At the time, he was unsuccessful."

Interestingly enough, in a Reuters news article on 21 November 2010 there were extensive quotations from His Holiness' new book, including the following: 

 "Suddenly so much filth. It was really almost like the crater of a volcano, out of which suddenly a tremendous cloud of filth came, darkening and soiling everything, so that above all the priesthood suddenly seemed to be a place of shame and every priest was under the suspicion of being one like that too."

Hmmmm. Suddenly, suddenly, suddenly.  Apparently by 2010 the Holy Father had entirely forgot that twenty years earlier he had been in charge of a Vatican office that was supposedly investigating clerical abuse.  So now suddenly suddenly suddenly there is "so much filth".

No, the real purpose of that Vatican office twenty years ago was to continue covering up clerical abuse, just as the church has been doing for centuries.  In this case, though, His Holiness did his job so well that he convinced himself that the abuse hadn't happened....and then twenty years later could describe it as being "suddenly suddenly suddenly" revealed.