Just when I thought I'd heard it all- in a reply to another post,

[hedgehog]

MindandSoul asked in regards to John Paul II:

Makes me wonder exactly WHAT he had to done to deserve that much self-flagelation!

I think I may have found out:

John Paul ‘ignored abuse of 2,000 boys’
Bojan Pancevski in Vienna and John Follain in Rome - UK Times - 4/4/10

When John Paul II died five years ago the crowd that packed St Peter’s Square for his funeral clamoured “Santo subito (Saint now)!” in a spontaneous tribute to the charisma of the Polish pontiff.
As the faithful marked the anniversary of John Paul’s death on Good Friday, however, he was being drawn into the scandal over child abuse in the Catholic church that has confronted his successor, Benedict XVI, with the worst crisis of his reign.

Allegations that the late pontiff blocked an inquiry into a paedophile cardinal, promoted senior church figures despite accusations that they had molested boys and covered up innumerable cases of abuse during his 26-year papacy have cast a cloud over his path to sainthood.

The most serious claims related to Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, an Austrian friend of John Paul’s who abused an estimated 2,000 boys over decades but never faced any sanction from Rome. (This is a totally mind numbing figure and indicative of just how perverted this clerical culture of silence really is.)


I can't find a link to the original article, just this:

http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/