Proper Authorities

What if there is practically no functioning civil authority, as in some countries where the Catholic Church is active? What if it would be better that there weren't than that there were what there is, as in very many such countries? What if it is the Dutch civil authority, which has lowered the age of consent to 12, that, and not anything either Catholic or Reformed, being the vision of the Netherlands defended by the likes of Geert Wilders and the late Pim Fortuyn? (The legal situation in the Vatican City State, mercifully meaningless in practice, is an inherited imposition by Mussolini, lest anyone ever suggest either that he favoured the Church or that She favoured him.)

Or what if the civil authority is a British Social Services Department such as ran the homes in which, at the same time as the Church was hushing up sex between men and teenage boys on the part of a small number of priests - and thus, however imperfectly, indicating disapproval of it - such behaviour was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged?

And on the star witness against the Pope, Rembert Weakland, see his Wikipedia entry, indeed simply Google his name, but make sure that you read these of his words:

“Not all adolescent victims are so innocent. Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise. We frequently try such adolescents for crimes as adults at that age.”

How very Channel Four, or Germaine Greer, or Peter Tatchell, or Patricia Hewitt, or Harriet Harman, to name but a few.