The jig is up, Ratzo. You’re busted. The lawyers are compiling their briefs as we speak. You haven’t got so much as a toenail to stand on. The pretty gold baubles and the sumptuous embroideries are going to be turned into cash to pay the damages. You’re not going to have the fund to go swanning around the globe telling us all what to do.

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police… The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that the church in Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations, and determine punishments, in house rather than hand that power to civil authorities.

Those pesky US lawsuits will be rolling in thick and fast now, dude, and they’ll win, on account of how your organization was stupid enough and smug enough to give written instructions to obstruct justice.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter should demonstrate, once and for all, that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.

Making Ratzinger’s ridiculous whited sepulchre nonsense about how distressed and off his feed he was even more ridiculous than it already was. “Oh I’m tho upthet that you did what we ordered you to do, oh how can I bear it, oh oh oh the agony.”

Joelle Casteix, a director of U.S. advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described the letter as “the smoking gun we’ve been looking for.” Casteix said it was certain to be cited by victims’ lawyers seeking to pin responsibility directly on the Vatican rather than local dioceses. She said investigators long have sought such a document showing Vatican pressure on a group of bishops “thwarting any kind of justice for victims.” “We now have evidence that the Vatican deliberately intervened to order bishops not to turn pedophile priests over to law enforcement,” she said. “And for civil lawsuits, this letter shows what victims have been saying for dozens and dozens of years: What happened to them involved a concerted cover-up that went all the way to the top.”

I suppose the Vatican could always say it’s a Jewish forgery.