The Scapegoating of Benedict XVI (Update)

UPDATE: The New York Times has received well-deserved criticism for its July 1 article, “Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal” (Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger).

The 1922 document that the NYT uses against Ratzinger and which is repeated in the 1962 document, Crimen Sollicitationis

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/crimenlatinfull.pdf

was not about child abuse but about solicitation in the confessional -- something always known to be the CDF’s business, and conscientiously assumed by Ratzinger when it came his way. Ratzinger has rightly been criticized for his reactionary policies and his needlessly repressive and polarizing role toward liberation theology, theological research in general, and current thinking on issues of sexuality and reproduction. But this is not an excuse for liberals to subscribe uncritically to baseless rumors. So far he seems to be guiltless of all the charges made against him in connection with the abuse scandal. He has done the best he could, and it is not clear what exactly he should do to satisfy his critics, who seem to disagree fiercely among themselves; see:

 http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=8980

It is true that there is a brief reference to abuse of pre-adolescent children in the last paragraph of the 1922 document (penultimate paragraph of the 1962 document). This is equiparated with bestiality and homosexuality under the heading: THE WORST CRIME. The final paragraphs have a tacked-on air:

CRIMEN PESSIMUM

71. The term crimen pessimum [“the foulest crime”] is here understood to mean any external obscene act, gravely sinful, perpetrated or attempted by a cleric in any way whatsoever with a person of his own sex.

72. Everything laid down up to this point concerning the crime of solicitation is also valid, with the change only of those things which the nature of the matter necessarily requires, for the crimen pessimum, should some cleric (God forbid) happen to be accused of it before the local Ordinary, except that the obligation of denunciation [imposed] by the positive law of the Church [does not apply] unless perhaps it was joined with the crime of solicitation in sacramental confession. In determining penalties against delinquents of this type, in addition to what has been stated above, Canon 2359, §2 is also to be taken into consideration.

73. Equated with the crimen pessimum, with regard to penal effects, is any external obscene act, gravely sinful, perpetrated or attempted by a cleric in any way with pre-adolescent children [impuberes] of either sex or with brute animals (bestialitas).

74. Against clerics guilty of these crimes, if they are exempt religious – and unless the crime of solicitation takes place at the same time – Religious Superiors also can proceed, according to the sacred Canons and their proper Constitutions, either administratively or judicially. However, they must always communicate a sentence rendered, or an administrative decision in those cases which are more grave, to the Supreme Congregation of the Holy Office. The Superiors of a non-exempt religious can proceed only administratively. In the case where the guilty party has been expelled from religious life, the expulsion has no effect until it has been approved by the Holy Office. [This paragraph seems to have been added in 1962.]

These paragraphs are a very weak basis on which to hang Pope Ratzinger, since clearly no one took any notice of them, confining their attention to the chief topic of the document, the crime of solicitation. Fr Doyle comments on the 1922 text: “c.Three other sexual crimes committed by clerics were also to be investigated and prosecuted according to the norms of the instruction: same sex relations, sexual abuse of minors and bestiality.” The inclusion of homosexuality and the confinement of the reference to sex with minors to three words (“impuberibus cuiusque sexus”) ensured that this part of the document would remain a dead letter. Are those who make so much of it now going to be logically consistent and call for the CDF to prosecute same sex relations involving clerics in the same style as they call for pedophile offenses to be prosecuted?

A Commonweal editor greets the story as “damning”:

 http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=8956

Mark Silk reports the NYT story as follows: “The Times’ revelation that the supposedly new regime put in place by Ratzinger in 2001 was in fact little more than a reassertion of norms set forth in a document quietly promulgated in 1922 and reiterated in 1962 is highly significant. It is now evident that the CDF all along had responsibility for all sexual abuse cases.” http://www.spiritual-politics.org/2010/07/nyts_non-hatchet_job_on_pope.html

This is quite uncritical. The alleged “revelation” is none at all. There is little evidence that the alleged “norms” ever had the status of effective law. A law that is not received in practice loses its validity, so that its “reassertion” really amounts to a new law.

Some sharp criticism of the NYT piece can be found from mostly conservative posters:

http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/contra-nytimes

http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/07/the-nyts-weak-hatchet-job-on-benedict.html

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/07/02/how-do-you-spell-tendentious/

Sister Helena O’Donoghue has some excellent remarks in The Furrow, July-August, 2010:

“Integrity requires that we seek the whole truth and that takes time, analysis and patience. Issues in understanding child abuse like trauma, memory, addiction, naivety as well as deliberate wrongdoing and manipulation need examination. Sometimes these are labelled as excuses, but we ignore them at the peril of reducing humanity to a suspicion-led existence. The whole truth is always more than simple facts.”396

“Is the dimension of research missing from media commentary, and even from our State Inquiry system, resulting inevitably in thin, simplistic and sweeping findings on what was right and wrong in a past that is another country?”397

“Angela Merkel in Germany indicated recently she would only consider an investigation into child abuse if it applied to the whole society... Today the tilt is towards the 'court of public opinion', uninformed and volatile, led by high emotion, and by-passing the processes of natural justice... One injustice is not remedied by another and prejudice begets witch hunters. The call for further Church-only investigations has the whiff of inquisition about it”.397

“Is 'protecting the institution' automatically a crime? Plants, animals, and humans, all exist in systems. Humans cannot live without families, communities, groups... It is natural and subconscious that we protect them. This is not to deny need for reform. The key systems (family, Church, State) and their institutions hold us together socially, and each system still carries some patterns acceptable at another time but obsolete or objectionable today. Changing mindsets and culture is a gradual process and is the work of decades, if not of generations.”

..”398

“Righteousness cries out to 'name and shame' the culprit, and to make a public exhibition of the wrongdoer... The naming and shaming route strips people of their dignity, and undermines one's own claim to be treated with dignity”.399

ORIGINAL POSTING:

The New York Times has a rather snooty piece defending its recent batch of stories that try to connect Pope Ratzinger personally with cases of child abuse. The defense reminds me curiously of the defensive statements from bishops that the New York Times would ridicule. The only difference is that journalists are more impervious in their stance of moral superiority than any bishop. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/opinion/25pubed.html

The original article by Laurie Goodstein begins by breathlessly informing us that “Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy was an American priest accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys over 25 years. Several lawsuits have been filed against the church for failure to act in the matter. According to church files top Vatican officials – including the future Pope Benedict XVI – did not defrock Father Murphy even though they were warned repeatedly by several American bishops.”

Chronology is not clarified, and then only for the benefit of the careful reader, until the 6th and last paragraph. Students of journalism are told to get the essence of their story out in the first paragraph, which is what most readers will read. The article left most readers with the impression that Benedict XVI had knowingly and deliberately failed to prevent a priest from molesting 200 boys (a speculative figure by the way), whereas a correct account would be that he may have been behind Cardinal Bertone’s refusal to have a canonical trial of the priest when he was dying 22 years later. But that would not make such a hot story. The BBC reported this in the same misleading way.

I am disappointed that so many progressive Catholics have jumped on a cheap media bandwagon, Hans Küng in particular.

I think it would have cleared the air if in his letter to the Irish Bishops the Pope had added the phrase, “I, too, have made mistakes.” But it should be noted that the Vatican does not admit any failures of the Pope before 2001 for the simple reason that Vatican critics have not proven any such failures. Those who spoke freely of “smoking guns” two weeks ago are now speaking of “indiators” — the characteristic step back when a rash accusation fails to stick. Küng’s rash declaration has been dismantled by many critics, and has not been seriously defended.

The Restorationist project of John Paul II and Benedict XVI is now dying, and “when a god dies, it dies by many deaths.” But if we contribute to the scapegoating dynamics of an angry mob, we are not nurturing the possibility that the period of collapse will be followed by one of renovation. We may soon find that the rage we have encouraged is turned upon ourselves.

Note that in intervening to get Cardinal Groer punished, Ratzinger seems to have stepped out of his own role in a quite unorthodox way. This does suggest that his anger about “filth” goes back a long way. Also, though I am highly critical of the document banning gay seminarians, it should be noted that it was one of the first acts of the pontificate, pushed through I am told by Benedict himself (not by Cardinal Grocholewski); it was a drastic and very unpopular step intended to abort one dimension of the abuse scandals; and the roots of that action on Benedict’s part must also go back a long way.

See http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/12/vatican_instruc.html

 http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/11/gay-seminarians-again.html

There is a painful irony here: those who acclaim Benedict as a purger of the church are often enthusiasts for that anti-gay-seminarian document, but they do not mention it for fear of spoiling their case. Those who denounce Ratzinger as a do-nothing are often also fierce opponents of his documents on homosexuality but they do not mention it for fear of spoiling their present polemical case. So, amazingly, the document has not been mentioned at all in the present controversy!

The rage against pedophilia follows ritual prescriptions that have been deconstructed by artists such as Thomas Mann and Benjamin Britten (Peter Grimes), psychoanalysts, and literary critics such as James Kincaid, but to which well-meaning progressive Catholics have subscribed in an uncritical and destructive way. There is now a fusion between this largely irrational hatred of the pedophile, as constructed in a panic-stricken imagination, and the irrational urge to “get” an equally demonized papal father-figure.

Childishly, progressive Catholics are even demonizing those who defend the Pope from false accusations, as if they were traitors to a glorious cause. The drumbeat of emotive ideological mutual brainwashing is actually weakening liberal Catholicism and eating away further the hope that when the ground is cleared for a renewal of the Church there will be mature and humane and rational people to provide new vision.

Comments

[Dom Bellino]

Very thoughtful and helpful analysis, at least helpful to me. Wonderful web site, Father O'Leary.

[Rat-biter]

## My readiness to make allowances for the present Pope, took a blow when I found this on this website:

"http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/03/senator-david-norris-to-the-clergy-learn-to-respect-human-beings.html

...This is among the reasons that I have said publicly that in the case of the then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict the XVI, I will not accept moral instruction from any person who wore a swastika on his armband while people like myself were being put into the ovens at Auschwitz. It is continually asserted by Vatican spin doctors that membership of the Hitler Youth was compulsory. This is not so. I know this not only from my own German acquaintances but have also confirmed it within the last year by contacting the German Embassy. Indeed the Pope himself made clear, in one of his rare references to this period of his life, that the reason he joined the Hitler Youth was so as not to be educationally disadvantaged in his studies for the priesthood. This is perhaps understandable and is certainly a practical approach but it is scarcely at the highest level of morality."

## If that is true, this Pope is not a fit person to lecture the rest of the world on morality. It is the Church that he rules that has ruined the lives of the weakest members in the Church, and until he stops enabling paedophiles and episcopal pimps, he has nothing to say that is worth listening to. Unless he has forgotten the (dogmatic) teaching of Vatican I, summarised here:

http://www.romancatholicteachings.com/catholic_religion/papacy.html

"This brings us to the word 'immediate', which is used to describe the Pope's authority, and means that the authority of the Pope over every person in the Church is direct. It touches each member without the need to go through any intermediate officer of the Church....."

and found here:

http://www.ewtn.com/library/COUNCILS/V1.HTM

9. So, then, if anyone says that the Roman Pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the Churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.

## If those abused were members of the CC, then the Pope was by that very fact responsible, that is, answerable, for them. Answerable to God, even if no man can call him to account.

If he has the authority those quotations describe, it is an empty subterfuge for his apologists to try to ignore the teaching quoted, for with authority comes a concomitant responsibility - Christians cannot have without the other, without adopting a completely amoral position that is alien to the obedience-in-authority of Christ. The Pope cannot have what that Council claims for him, if he is not also prepared to be responsible committed to his care. Those who say he has not responsible, deny the teaching of Vatican I in so doing.

As the poster immediately above says,this is a very good site.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

I can't blame the young Ratzinger for being in Hitler-Jugend, for in his shoes I'd have done the same thing. But he could have made a statement about it, praising those who chose persecution instead, instead of suggesting that he had no choice in the matter (or allowing his PR agents to put that spin on it). Yes, ultramontanism is the real danger, and historian Massimo Faggioli has just warned that the present crisis is likely to increase further the ultramontane concentration of power in papal hands: http://www.europaquotidiano.it/gw/producer/dettaglio.aspx?id_doc=118106

[Spirit of Vatican II]

The reaction so far, says Faggioli, is to center in the papacy the powers of repression and control, at the expense of the rest of the church and above all the bishops, who face a drip-drip of resignations comparable to the purges of collaborationist bishops after World War II. The role of bishops was fatally weakened by Vatican I and the effort of Vatican II to restore balance has failed. The winners of the postconciliar crisis are an invasively present mediatized papacy and the new Catholic movements, while the losers are the bishops, ever weaker, squeezed between a Roman Curia anxious to present itself as the advocate of "zero tolerance" (including against bishops) and a public opinion who sees them as the villains of the abuse scandal. The US legal action against the Pope ironically accords with the ultramontane "doping" of the church by the popes for the last 30 years. The Curia's protection of the Pope masks the deep causes of the crisis. Face with Kung's call for a Council the Curia have spiritualized the issue accusing Kung et al. of believing in "ecclesiastical engineering."

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Paul Mees defends Benedict rather well and makes mincemeat of his fatuous critics who keep beating the same emotive drum.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/04/23/here%E2%80%99s-a-crazy-idea-what-if-the-pope-is-innocent/

But the real issue is the one signaled by Faggioli, and the Pope-fixation of contemporary Catholics makes it unlikely we'll see any widespead intelligent awareness of that.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Spanish theologians call for the Pope to resign: http://www.golias.fr/spip.php?article3976

[evagrius]

I'd like your opinion on this essay;

http://www.williamcmills.com/resources_crackingclericalcaste.pdf

I think it points to the real origin of the crisis.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Evagrius, I thought the five points he recommends at the end of the essay are still too clericalist! I did not find the essay particularly illuminating, because most of the priests I know do not fit the paradigm he describes; but then I have long put myself at a distance from clerical enclaves and my priest friends are unusually critical and creative people.

I suppose clericalism was rife in the glory days of Pius XII and perhaps among some naive priests who tried to relive those days under John Paul II. Otherwise the priesthood seems to me a very broken-down caste, une caste mourante et qui cherche a mourir... Perhaps the Greek Orthodox Church still has an unbroken clerical caste of the sort described.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Bilgrimage has come out with a quite balanced piece, taking as text a thought-provoking utterance of Fr Vincent Twomey: http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2010/04/catholic-abuse-crisis-argument-and.html

[Spirit of Vatican II]

There is a grim irony in the way that those who are loudest in calling for censorship and penalizing freedom of opinion then find themselves with nothing to say when their moment comes. I saw one or two blogs die in his way: a cabal of censors create an intimidating environment, then when they are left on their own they have nothing to say and the blog ceases to have discussions.　Ratzinger was the great suppressor of freedom of opnion and freedom of speech in the Church opnion and freedom of speech in the Church (both of which are human rights according to the Universal Declaration); now he has to speak to the church's difficulties and he does not know what to say. He is struck dumb. A grimly ironic nemesis.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2010/04/crucifying_the_pope_1.html