You’re quite right, of course, Mike, that the recent scandals represent a blot on the Catholic Church in the United States, and when the scandals first broke I spent a lot of time blaming the pope. But then I noticed something. Whereas the scandals involved plenty of priests who had attended seminary in the Sixties and Seventies, before John Paul II ascended to the chair of St. Peter, they involved virtually none who had attended seminary during the present pontificate. The scandals, in other words, were closely associated with a mess in the seminaries that the pope had already managed to clean up.
Score another one for JP II.