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Michael Moynihan, Daily Beast - Benedict’s brief tenure was riven by conflict and controversy. The slow erosion of Catholicism’s influence predated his reign, of course, but he did little to reverse to trend—and he might very well have expedited it. Indeed, if Benedict was the CEO of a powerful international, peddling a product that a significant population of the world couldn’t live without, and presided over a continuing slide in that product’s market share (for lack of a better phrase), he would have been relieved of his duties years ago.
In 2010, the National Catholic Register wrote that the Church’s difficulty retaining members amounted to one of “the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history.” Add to this mix the Vatican’s lumbering response to an unprecedented shift in cultural mores and a spreading inter-Church sexual abuse scandal, which implicated not only dozens of child-rapist priests but countless senior Church figures complicit in covering up their crimes.
The sex abuse scandals weren’t the proximate cause of the Vatican’s waning influence, but it was an accelerant. In Ireland, where the Catholic Church long exerted outsized influence, a massive sexual abuse scandal and cover-up has seen trust in the Vatican—along with church attendance—drop. This trend is mirrored in other places where scandal has dogged the Church.
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