Is the Pope another Nixon?

While some commentators are calling the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal a "Holy Watergate" — others damn the comparisons as "shameful"

Pope Benedict
(Image credit: Wikicommons)

Commentators are drawing parallels between the growing woes of Pope Benedict XVI and the fall of Richard Nixon. Just like Nixon, the Pope has been accused of covering up crimes, has blamed the media, and ignored calls to stand down. Some have even branded this "Watergate with holy water." How valid are these comparisons?

The pope's media attacks certainly echo Nixon: Reducing pervasive sex abuse and pedophilia to "the problem of an overzealous media" is certainly Nixonian, says Jeff Schweitzer in the Huffington Post, The church's "paranoid insularity" causes it to lash out at the press rather than "acknowlege moral failure" at an institutional level, just as in the 1970s White House. "Nixon would be proud."

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