I remember reading the Wisconsin story in the run-up to Easter, noting that the headline indicted Ratzinger. The time-line didn't agree with the headline, though—as a story about Ratzinger it was a non-story. About Weakland, maybe; but even that would be a little thin. The Munich story appeared at the same time—I saw that a couple days later—and again, the time-line was odd. The Munich bishop deserved a thrashing, but the outcome had nothing to to with Ratzinger.
The stories were scheduled for the usual Easter news slot for attacking orthodoxy, but the Irish story could still have had legs: it was big enough and dramatic enough. Why try to use such weak material to attack Benedict?
Two or three simultaneous stories focused on one individual. Simultaneity itself is trivial to arrange that close to Easter (or Christmas): newspapers seem to reserve non-breaking stories until an appropriate season. Give them a story a month in advance, and they'll write it up and sit on it until Holy Week. Giving them the story much before that and you run the risk of having somebody on staff actually read it and wonder about the headline.
So, who's toes were being trodden on? You'd think it might have something to do with the US bishop's opposition to the Reid/Pelosi health-care chaos-o-tron, but why would one of the stories originate in Germany? And if local politics were the issue you'd expect the focus to be on the local “pestilent priests.”
But from the beginning of his current tenure Benedict has been the target of an amazing animus. I can't tell if this is personal, or something he represents (that John Paul II didn't??), or if this is driven by some behind-the-scenes politics in the Vatican. Right now I'd pick one of “unreasoning personal hatred” (like that for Palin), or “Vatican politics.” Maybe both?
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I'd like to offer three main reasons for the upswing in Papal hatred, if I may. The first is going to sound silly, but he looks like Palpatine. In a world driven by online media, primarily images, a scary, sunken, leering visage is going to leave more of an impression than any Papal policies.
Second, he has made an effort to drive the Church back from the teetering edge of "radical" John Paul II. Remember one of his first acts, making new and frivolous deadly sins? Not endearing to anyone.
Lastly, there's been knowledge of Catholic impropriety for years, although there's been an upswing correlating to the media-centric world of today. But this is the first time that a Pope has been found to have, on paper, even the slightest connection with the pedophilia, and I think many people, horrified by years of alleged molestation cover-ups, are trying to make it into the long-awaited Watergate of Vatican wrongdoing. It's not enough, but it's something.
Dunno about whether JPII was all that radical. But I do remember Benedict's being attacked from day one, and wondering why. (He succeeded in getting out of the mandatory Hitler Youth program: I drew the opposite conclusion from the media images.)
Image is an issue, and maybe part of it is that Benedict seems to be more of a scholar than a pastor, while JPII was more of a pastor; and that he therefore seemed to the reporters to be friendlier.
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