Pope Benedict is hitting all the wrong notes in his trip to the United Kingdom. Ireland, where the Roman Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal has been the most appalling—hundreds of children molested over decades—is a short plane ride from England. And in Ireland, where since the days of St. Patrick, the Catholic Church has been the center of family and community …
Two years ago Pope Benedict XVI—once known as “God’s Rottweiler”—displayed his gentler side on a pilgrimage to America. Television pundits spoke of his soft white hair, his smile, “his great warmth and his sense of humor,” says Thomas Noble, head of the history department at Notre Dame. On the trip Benedict confronted head-on the American church’s sexual-abuse crisis, a catastrophe …
I say this with respect: Pope Benedict XVI has a public-relations problem. You need only remember the 2000 visit of John Paul II to Jerusalem—which earned wall-to-wall cable coverage and produced the unforgettable image of the frail pope praying by the Western Wall—to know it’s true. Pope Benedict, by contrast, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial last week and in …