Keeping the record straight on Benedict and the crisis By John L Allen Jr
Keeping the record straight on Benedict and the crisis By John L Allen Jr Created
Mar 26, 2010
Intense scrutiny is being devoted these days to Pope Benedict
XVI's history on the sex abuse crisis. Revelations from Germany have put his five
years as a diocesan bishop under a spotlight, and a piece on Thursday in The New York
Times, on the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy of Milwaukee, also called into question
his Vatican years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Despite
complaints in some quarters that all this is about wounding the pope and/or the church,
raising these questions is entirely legitimate. Anyone involved in church leadership
at the most senior levels for as long as Benedict XVI inevitably bears some responsibility
for the present mess. My newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, today called editorially
for full disclosure [1] about the pope's record, and it now seems abundantly clear
that only such transparency can resolve the hard questions facing Benedict.
Yet
as always, the first casualty of any crisis is perspective. There are at least three
aspects of Benedict's record on the sexual abuse crisis which are being misconstrued,
or at least sloppily characterized, in today's discussion. Bringing clarity to these
points is not a matter of excusing the pope, but rather of trying to understand accurately
how we got where we are.
The following, therefore, are three footnotes to understanding
Benedict's record on the sexual abuse crisis.
1. Not the 'Point Man'
First,
some media reports have suggested that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger presided over
the Vatican office with responsibility for the sex abuse crisis for almost a quarter-century,
from 1981 until his election to the papacy in April 2005, and therefore that he's
responsible for whatever the Vatican did or didn't do during that entire stretch of
time. That's not correct.
In truth, Ratzinger did not have any direct responsibility
for managing the overall Vatican response to the crisis until 2001, four years before
he became pope.
Bishops were not required to send cases of priests accused
of sexual abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until 2001, when
they were directed to do so by Pope John Paul II's motu proprio titled Sacramentorum
sanctitatis tutela. Prior to that, most cases involving sex abuse never got to Rome.
In the rare instance when a bishop wanted to laicize an abuser priest against his
will, the canonical process involved would be handled by one of the Vatican courts,
not by Ratzinger's office.
Prior to 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith got involved only in the exceedingly rare instances when the sex abuse
occurred in the context of the confessional, since a canonical tribunal within the
congregation handled cases involving abuse of the sacrament of penance. That, for
example, is how the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries
of Christ, ended up in the congregation, and it's also why officials in the Milwaukee
archdiocese directed the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy there.
One certainly can
question how Ratzinger's office handled those exceptional cases, and the record seems
painfully slow and ambivalent in comparison with how similar accusations would be
dealt with today. Moreover, Ratzinger was a senior Vatican official from 1981 forward,
and therefore he shares in the corporate failure in Rome to appreciate the magnitude
of the crisis until terribly late in the game.
To suggest, however, that Ratzinger
was the Vatican's "point man" on sex abuse for almost twenty-five years, and to fault
him for the mishandling of every case that arose between 1981 and 2001, is misleading.
Prior to 2001, Ratzinger had nothing personally to do with the vast majority of sex
abuse cases, even the small percentage which wound up in Rome.
2. The 2001
letter
In some reporting and commentary, a May 2001 letter from Ratzinger to
the bishops of the world, titled De delictis gravioribus, is being touted as a "smoking
gun" proving that Ratzinger attempted to thwart reporting priestly sex abuse to the
police or other civil authorities by ordering the bishops to keep it secret.
That
letter indicates that certain grave crimes, including the sexual abuse of a minor,
are to be referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that they
are "subject to the pontifical secret." The Vatican insists, however, that this secrecy
applied only to the church's internal disciplinary procedures, and was not intended
to prevent anyone from also reporting these cases to the police or other civil authorities.
Technically they're correct, since nowhere in the 2001 letter is there any prohibition
on reporting sex abuse to police or civil prosecutors.
In reality, few bishops
needed a legal edict from Rome ordering them not to talk publicly about sexual abuse.
That was simply the culture of the church at the time, which makes the hunt for a
"smoking gun" something of a red herring right out of the gate. Fixing a culture --
one in which the Vatican, to be sure, was as complicit as anyone else, but one which
was widespread and deeply rooted well beyond Rome -- is never as simply as abrogating
one law and issuing another.
That aside, here's the key point about Ratzinger's
2001 letter: Far from being seen as part of the problem, at the time it was widely
hailed as a watershed moment towards a solution. It marked recognition in Rome, really
for the first time, of how serious the problem of sex abuse really is, and it committed
the Vatican to getting directly involved. Prior to that 2001 motu proprio and Ratzinger's
letter, it wasn't clear that anyone in Rome acknowledged responsibility for managing
the crisis; from that moment forward, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
would play the lead role.
Beginning in 2001, Ratzinger was forced to review
all the files on every priest credibly accused of sexual abuse anywhere in the world,
giving him a sense of the contours of the problem that virtually no one else in the
Catholic church can claim. In a recent article, I outlined the "conversion experience"
Ratzinger and his staff went through after 2001. Beforehand, he came off as just another
Roman cardinal in denial; after his experience of reviewing the files, he began to
talk openly about the "filth" in the church, and his staff became far more energetic
about prosecuting abusers.
For those who have followed the church's response
to the crisis, Ratzinger's 2001 letter is therefore seen as a long overdue assumption
of responsibility by the Vatican, and the beginning of a far more aggressive response.
Whether that response is sufficient is, of course, a matter for fair debate, but to
construe Ratzinger's 2001 letter as no more than the last gasp of old attempts at
denial and cover-up misreads the record.
3. Canonical Trials
Ratzinger's
top deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on sex abuse cases, Maltese
Monsignor Charles Scicluna, recently gave an interview to an Italian Catholic paper
in which he said that of the more than 3,000 cases eventually referred to Rome, only
20 percent were subjected to a full canonical trial. In some reporting, including
the Thursday piece in The New York Times, this figure has been cited as evidence of
Vatican "inaction."
Once again, however, those who have followed the story
closely have almost exactly the opposite impression.
Back in June 2002, when
the American bishops first proposed a set of new canonical norms to Rome, the heart
of which was the "one strike and you're out" policy, they initially wanted to avoid
canonical trials altogether. Instead, they wanted to rely on a bishop's administrative
power to permanently remove a priest from ministry. That's because their experience
of Roman tribunals over the years was that they were often slow, cumbersome, and the
outcome was rarely certain.
Most famously, bishops and experts would point
to the case of Fr. Anthony Cipolla in Pittsburgh, during the time that Donald Wuerl,
now the Archbishop of Washington, was the local bishop. Wuerl had removed Cipolla
from ministry in 1988 following allegations of sexual abuse. Cipolla appealed to Rome,
where the Apostolic Signatura, in effect the Vatican's supreme court, ordered him
reinstated. Wuerl then took the case to Rome himself, and eventually prevailed. The
experience left many American bishops, however, with the impression that lengthy canonical
trials were not the way to handle these cases.
When the new American norms
reached Rome, they ran into opposition precisely on the grounds that everyone deserves
their day in court -- another instance, in the eyes of critics, of the Vatican being
more concerned about the rights of abuser priests than victims. A special commission
of American bishops and senior Vatican officials brokered a compromise, in which the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would sort through the cases one-by-one
and decide which ones would be sent back for full trials.
The fear at the time
was that the congregation would insist on trials in almost every case, thereby dragging
out the administration of justice, and closure for the victims, almost indefinitely.
In the end, however, only 20 percent were sent back for trials, while for the bulk
of the cases, 60 percent, bishops were authorized to take immediate administrative
action, because the proof was held to be overwhelming.
The fact that only 20
percent of the cases were subjected to full canonical trial has been hailed as a belated
grasp in Rome of the need for swift and sure justice, and a victory for the more aggressive
American approach to the crisis. It should be noted, too, that bypassing trials has
been roundly criticized by some canon lawyers and Vatican officials as a betrayal
of the due process safeguards in church law.
Hence to describe that 20 percent
figure as a sign of "inaction" cannot help but seem, to anyone who's been paying attention,
rather ironic. In truth, handling 60 percent of the cases through the stroke of a
bishop's pen has, up to now, more often been cited as evidence of exaggerated and
draconian action by Ratzinger and his deputies.
Obviously, none of this is
to suggest that Benedict's handling of the crisis -- in Munich, at the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, or as pope -- is somehow exemplary. An accounting needs
to be offered if this pope, and the church he leads, hopes to move forward. For that
analysis to be constructive, however, as opposed to fueling polarization and confusion,
it's important to keep the record straight.