Did the Pope Have a Girlfriend?

In this post I want to discuss two news stories dated within a short time of each other. On February 20, 2016 the British Catholic journal The Tablet published an article and an editorial on a BBC broadcast about a long friendship of John Paul II with a Polish woman. On February 28, 2016, an Oscar was awarded to a documentary film, “Spotlight”, about an investigation by a journalistic team of The Boston Globe about cases of pedophilia by Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. These two cases of course have nothing to do with each other—one a story of at most an indiscretion, the other a story of crimes. But both are in the context of clerical celibacy and that raises some much broader questions about the future of the Roman Catholic Church.