Pope Emeritus Benedict's Article

I confess that I haven't read all 6000 or so words of his article.  Maybe I will. Later.  Meanwhile, here is a good article from the America Magazine site which briefly summarizes it.
I am not going to dismiss it as the ramblings of an old guy who is losing it.  Is seems pretty coherent, and deserves to be taken seriously.  But here's the thing: he isn't pope anymore.  I don't feel obligated to give it more weight than similar articles by clergy or lay theologians; such as the letter several months ago by Archbishop Carlo Vigano.  In fact the article by Pope Emeritus Benedict (hereafter referred to as P.E.B.) makes several of the same points that Vigano did.  I feel that both missed the point about the Church's sexual abuse scandals in significant ways.


P.E.B. blames the abuse in part on the sexual revolution, and poorly reasoned interpretations of post Vatican II theology. He even attaches a date to the sexual revolution, the 1960s, after which things went badly awry. However, the sexual revolution actually had its roots in the Enlightenment, and things were going awry at least that long ago, and very likely before that.  I have said before that our archdiocese had records of abuse cases going back 200 years (these were legacy records; the diocese of Omaha, as it would have been called in early days, has not existed that long). Which points to another problem in the way abuse was handled by the church in the distant past. Clergy who got in trouble were often sent to remote places, where it was "out of sight, out of mind".
As far as the surmise by P.E.B. that faulty interpretation of sketchy VII theology was at the root of abuse by clergy, I don't think it holds water.  I doubt seriously that any thought of theology was in the minds of the abusers.
Lest it seem that I am overly negative about the article, there are good thoughts to be taken away from it:
"A paramount task, which must result from the moral upheavals of our time, is that we ourselves once again begin to live by God and unto him."
And, "The church is like a fishing net that catches both good and bad fish, like a field where good grain and bad weeds grow, he wrote. "The field is still God's field and the net is God's fishing net. And at all times, there are not only the weeds and the evil fish, but also the crops of God and the good fish."
There is also an article by Joshua McElwee on the NCR site.  In it theologians express the concern that P.E.B. isn't staying in his lane, and is interfering with the efforts of Pope Francis to address the crisis.  I feel (perhaps wrongly) that the concern is misplaced.  Francis finally understands the crisis in terms of what roles clerical entitlement, denial, and blame shifting have played in the scandals, even if P.E.B. does not. The church is moving on, even if too slowly.
What is not clear is why P.E.B. decided to express his thoughts on the matter now.  Maybe at 92 (on April 16) he thought it was now or never.