(CNSNews.com) - Liberal talk show host Bill Maher apologized Friday night on his HBO show "Real Time with Bill Maher" for calling the pope a Nazi.

Maher acknowledged that as Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI was forced to join a German youth organization, from which he fled in the first place.

"So, on that score, you know what, my Catholic friends, I will never make the 'pope is a Nazi' joke again. Because, you're technically right, OK, and also because it distracts from the main point," said Maher during his show Friday.

Touching on the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, Maher said if a CEO were in charge of an institution that housed molesters, he would be fired.

"And the main point I was making was that if the pope, instead of a religious figure, was the CEO of a chain of nationwide day care centers who had thousands of employees who had been caught molesting children and then covering it up, he would have been in jail," he added.

While the Catholic League accepted Maher's apology, his comparison of the pope to a CEO in charge of molesters was ridiculous, the group said.

"We accept Maher's apology for accusing the pope of being a Nazi. Too bad he didn't stop there. For him to suggest that Pope Benedict XVI was in charge of policing molesters, and failed in doing so, is patently absurd," said Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

"As Pope John Paul II's right-hand man, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's principal job was to make sure that theologians were faithfully presenting the teachings of the Catholic Church. He was, to some extent, the Church's Academic Dean, someone who was charged with enforcing academic standards," said Donohue.

"He was not the Church's Dean of Students, i.e., he was not discharged with enforcing codes of conduct. Indeed, it wasn't until after the scandal hit the newspapers in 2002 that he was put in charge of dealing with predatory priests, and by all accounts did so effectively," he added.

Donohue said it would have been impossible for anyone to know what was going on worldwide at any particular time.

"Maher has to understand that no one person, including the pope, could possibly be held accountable for the behavior of its employees in a global institution. There are priests from Boston to Bosnia, and it is simply preposterous for any one person to know exactly what is going on everywhere at any given time," Donohue said.

Instead, he said, Maher's criticism of the Catholic Church following the sex abuse scandal should have been confined to those who directly oversaw operations at those particular churches: the bishops.

"Maher would have been better advised to focus on those bishops who proved to be enablers-it is the bishop's job to know what is going on in his diocese, not the pope's," he said. "The larger issue remains. It would be great if Maher gave up his Catholic-bashing obsession once and for all."

See Earlier Story:
Maher to Apologize for Calling Pope a 'Nazi' (April 17, 2008)

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