If my perception of the drift I am seeing from the faithful side is correct, it wouldn’t seem out of place for Benedict to make a personal statement that he did not knowingly enable any pedophile priest at any point in his career in the church, but that if what is known today was known then, the scrutiny would have been heightened. And that the scrutiny level is very high today. He might add, just to tweak the liberals, that most of this is due to gay priests which he is working hard to purge.
I think he’s made several statements (one very shortly after his election, IIRC) and he’s certainly done a lot to improve procedures. I honestly don’t know what he can do more.
Every time he says anything, the press leaps on it, takes one or two words out of context to use as a headline, and makes the entire statement mean something completely different from what the Pope actually said. The press has found that most people read only the headlines, so a couple of carefully arranged words will be sufficient to do a lot of damage, regardless of what the Pope’s actual statement says.
Yet when he’s silent, they complain that he’s not saying anything. He’s really between a rock and a hard place.
I don’t think they could really get the Pope personally on anything, because he was not Pope and not even in a position to do anything more than he did about these things at the time. But this invocation of “universal jurisdiction” (first used by the Spanish to go after Pinochet, I believe) is very alarming simply from a legal and human rights point of view.