EMBATTLED 83-year-old Pope Benedict XVI will today visit the troubled Maltese church under a massive cloud -- and no, it is not volcanic ash from Iceland that the papal pilot will need to avoid. The two-day visit comes days ahead of the fifth anniversary of former cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's election as Pontiff.
Next Monday's anniversary will be a benchmark reminder of his promise as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the former Roman Inquisition, to cleanse the Catholic Church of the "filth" of priestly paedophilia.
What was planned as a triumphal trip by the German Pontiff to the most conservative Catholic country in Europe, where divorce and abortion are banned, will confront him with the extent of that "filth".
Even in Malta there will be no respite for the church's "Doctrinal Enforcer" from the cover-ups which represent the biggest threat since the 16th century to the credibility of the universal Catholic Church.
The visit comes after weeks of battening down the hatches of St Peter's Basilica as a result of an avalanche of Vatican-ordered cover-ups around Europe, notably in his native Germany.
Malta is the model Catholic island, such as Ireland prided itself on being until as late as the 1990s, when paedophile Brendan Smyth stalked north and south in monastic garb.
But if Benedict thought he might enjoy a restful 26 hours on the Maltese Mediterranean island, he will have been rudely deprived of breathing space yesterday when his former Tubingen colleague and arch-critic, Swiss theologian Fr Hans Kung, published a searing indictment of him.
The charge sheet is that as doctrinal head from 1981-2005, and as Pope since April 2005, Benedict engineered a worldwide cover-up of clerical child sex abuse in the Catholic Church and made worse everything that is wrong in the church.
"With good reason, therefore, many people have expected a personal mea culpa on the part of the former prefect and current Pope," Kung wrote in an open letter to the world's bishops.
"Instead, the Pope passed up the opportunity afforded by Holy Week: on Easter Sunday, he had his innocence proclaimed, urbi et orbi, by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Angelo Sodano."
Kung's stature as the "Unofficial Leader of His Holiness's Loyal Opposition" for four decades, will have an enormous impact on Catholic public opinion.
It may even influence some of the less timid bishops to give voice to the widespread impatience about church reform in their localities.
Here in Ireland, as elsewhere, only a few apologists of papal power have given credence to the attacks on the media by senior curial cardinals.
Ordinary Catholics have winced in disbelief at the defences uttered by the Pope's prime minister, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, that paedophilia was linked to homosexuality rather than clerical celibacy.
In the trattoria of Rome, the beer gardens of Munich and the bars of Manhattan, glasses are raised in mocking toasts to the curial cardinals dubbed "Benny's Clowns".
Nor has the Pope himself replied to evidence of at least 30 known cover-ups by Rome.
His one utterance on Thursday to the Pontifical Biblical Commission was to say: "Now, under the attacks of the world that speaks to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace."
Commenting on this, Mark Serrano, a spokesman for SNAP, the Survivors (American) Network of those Abused by Priests, spoke volumes when he said: "Sadly, once again, the globe's most powerful religious figure will win headlines for uttering a couple of sentences, when he should in fact be taking dramatic steps to safeguard kids.
"When the Pope can't bring himself to utter the words 'paedophile priest' or 'child-sex crimes' or 'cover ups' or 'complicit bishops', it's hard to have faith that he is able to honestly and effectively deal with this growing crisis."
HOWEVER, Kung damns Benedict's five pontifical years as lost opportunities on a wider range of issues: rapprochement with the Protestant churches, reconciliation with the Jews, dialogue with Muslims, reconciliation with the colonised indigenous peoples of Latin America, allowing Africans the use of birth control to fight overpopulation and HIV, and making peace with modern science by clearly affirming the theory of evolution and accepting stem-cell research.
Kung's conclusion, as has been mine for some weeks, is that the Catholic Church urgently needs a Third Vatican Council to sort out the "filth" that is smothering Pope Benedict's pontificate.
It is up to the world's bishops to demand a new council. Do we have any bidders among the Irish bishops?
Surely the volcano for reform is not burnt out?
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