Attack on Pope was the ‘truth in reverse’

IT’S a great pity that you chose to reprint (April 28) Christopher Hitchens’s ridiculous defamation of Pope Benedict XVI in which he presents a preposterous argument for charging the pontiff with involvement in organised crime.

Clearly, a vindictive secular bigot like Hitchens isn’t going to allow little things like facts derail his stupid publicity stunt but nevertheless his poisonous vitriol should not go unchallenged.

He begins by criticising the then Cardinal Ratzinger for assuming personal responsibility for supervising the investigation into sex abuse cases in 2001, while naturally neglecting to mention that it was precisely because individual dioceses were so slow in handling cases that the investigation process was centralised.