Irish Bishops Summoned to the Vatican

[The Yosemite Bear]

as a bishop he was the one re-assigning the abusers and keeping them away from authorities.

[CarsonPalmer]

as a bishop he was the one re-assigning the abusers and keeping them away from authorities.

Are you sure about this? He was the bishop of his own diocese for just five years, from 1977-1982, and that archdiocese, Munich, hasn't had any major scandals that I'm aware of. After that, he became the Prefect of Catholic Doctrine, and that doesn't intervene directly in where individual priests are assigned. That's the job of a bishop, and the ones who are responsible for that are people like Cardinal Law.

Now, Benedict has been a major figure in the Catholic Church for a long time, and so he has to accept the responsibility and culpability of the Catholic Church as a whole in the abuse scandals, and that responsibility and culpability isn't exactly light. It isn't like he gets to claim to be some paragon of virtue in the whole disgrace; however, as archbishop of Munich, he didn't take any actions that hid any abuser priests, and as Prefect of Doctrine, he wasn't assigning anybody.

Certainly don't take this as me saying that he ought to be off the hook for that disaster/disgrace/whatever you want to call the whole horrible array of actions that were taken by the Catholic Church in the sexual abuse scandal.

[Siege]

as a bishop he was the one re-assigning the abusers and keeping them away from authorities.

He did no such thing. Not as a Bishop, and if you are referring to his duties as a Cardinal, in his function as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Joseph Ratzinger in 2001 penned a motu proprio, "Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela", which established that his Congregation had "exclusive competence" when it came to setting up enquiries into "delicta graviora", or in other words "grave offences". It furthermore established sexual abuse by members of the clergy as such a "grave offence", something it had not explicitly been previously, so depriving local Church leaders the chance to investigate such matters on their own.

The reason for this decree is probably not a cover-up, but rather the opposite. As you already addressed, abusers were frequently reassigned and shielded from prosecution by local dioceses and archdioceses (the Prefect of the CDF does not have the power to reassign local priests or bishops; this is up to the bishop or archbishop running the place). To avoid local dioceses covering up the crimes, the power to run investigations was thus exclusively reserved for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, depriving local bishops and cardinals from another avenue of brushing these sordid affairs under the carpet. (Incidentally the "exclusive competence" only refers to in-house investigations, in case you're wondering. The Vatican isn't trying to prevent people from simply going to the cops.)

Ratzinger further strongly condemned and regretted the abuse scandals in his 2005 Good Friday reflections, lamenting "how much filth there is in the church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him". He was also critical of the way the American dioceses had handled the matter of sexual abuse during his 2008 papal visit to the USA.

A great many people frequently assume that the Vatican has the sort of overwhelming power that they can just shuffle or fire priests on the local level as they see fit; it does not. Such matters are explicitly reserved for local dioceses to determine, primarily because Rome simply doesn't have the manpower to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of local priests (most Congregations and Prelatures in the Vatican are run by a few dozen people tops). If you want to blame someone for the cover-ups surrounding paedophile priests, blame the local cardinals, archbishops and bishops, guys like Cardinal Bernard Law who hushed these sordid affairs.

Were Joseph Ratzinger's /Benedict XVI's actions a matter of too little, too late? Arguably, yes. Does he carry some of the blame for the decades-long mishandling of sexual abuse by members of the clergy? As a long-time high-ranking member of the curia, yes he does. But all things being equal I'd say he's trying to turn the attitude within the RC Church around from pretending the problem doesn't exist to a form of hesitant acceptance at least.