I am glad someone has written this. I still find it shocking that obviously, no one in the Vatican sought to reach Cardinal Castrillon (after the French magazine made public a letter he wrote back in 2001), out of simple courtesy, to begin with, and to coordinate a media response. Castrillon still lives in Rome since his retirement, and even if he was in Murcia on the day the news broke, there was no reason he could not have been reached by cellphone or text message or e-mail.
Has Cardinal Castrillon
been treated fairly?
by Michael Cook
April 26, 2010
If anyone is reflecting on McCarthyism and moral panics at the moment, it must be Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, of Colombia. From 1996 to 2006 he was the prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy, a most distinguished gentleman.
Back in 2005, when
Time magazine was surveying potential Popes, it wrote:
He has gone deep into Colombian jungles to mediate between leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads, and once showed up at the house of cocaine king Pablo Escobar disguised as a milkman. Revealing himself, Castrillón Hoyos implored Escobar to confess his sins, which, presumably at some considerable length, the vicious gangster did.
Yet now, even Catholic groups shun him as if he had been Escobar himself. The cardinal was supposed to have presided over a Latin Mass at the National Basilica in Washington DC marking the fifth anniversary of the Pope's inauguration. At the last minute the organisers revoked the invitation to preserve "tranquillity and good order".
Why? Because a French newspaper revealed that he had written a letter in 2001 praising the decision of a French bishop to go to jail rather than turn an abusive priest over to the police.
"I rejoice to have a colleague in the episcopate that, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, preferred prison rather than denouncing one of his sons and priests," Castrillón wrote.
That one sentence made him a pariah. Even Vatican officials have distanced themselves. The official Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, told the media almost immediately that Castrillon’s letter offersed "another confirmation of how timely was the unification of the treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors on the part of members of the clergy under the competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith."
Priestly sex abuse is such a scourge for victims and the Church that the inflexible protocols pioneered by Benedict XVI seems clearly the best one. But Cardinal Castrillon’s angle left room for strictness. It is a measure of the stifling McCarthyist atmosphere that has developed in the past two months that
none, none, of the journalists who damned Castrillon quoted his one sentence in context.
[Neither did Fr. Lombardi, which is a pity!]
Here is the paragraph which followed the offending words. The complete letter is available in French at the magazine Golias and in English on Wikipedia:
For the relationship between priests and their bishop is not professional but a sacramental relationship which forges very special bonds of spiritual paternity. The matter was amply taken up again by the last Council, by the 1971 Synod of Bishops and that of 1991.
The bishop has other means of acting, as the Conference of French Bishops recently restated; but a bishop cannot be required to make the denunciation himself. In all civilised legal systems it is acknowledged that close relations have the possibility of not testifying against a direct relative.
“The bishop has other ways of acting”: in other words, Castrillon was not saying that bishops should conceal the crimes of priests, but that they themselves should not hand the offender over to the authorities. He would probably encourage the victim or the victim’s families to report the crime.
Is this a realistic policy? Perhaps experience has showed that it is not, especially with recidivist paedophiles. Perhaps, too, victims are psychologically incapable of denouncing their tormenter. Perhaps some bishops would not be courageous enough to engineer a denunciation by a third party.
But that single sentence should not be used to smear a man courageous and zealous enough to seek the conversion of Colombia’s vilest drug lord.
Quite apart from the personal merits and achievements of Cardinal Castrillon, the least he was owed was a telephone call from someone in the Vatican. The organizers of the DC Mass were more proper, as they obviously discussed with the cardinal - who was back in Rome - that they had no choice but to ask someone else to offer the Mass for the Pope. It was sensible to do so - not as a judgment on the Cardinal's 2001 letter, nor even out of security concerns because of threatened protests against his presence, but simply because the unilateral condemnation his letter received would have distracted completely from the purpose of the Mass, which was to celebrate five years of Benedict XVI.
On the other hand, the cardinal should also have had the good sense to place a call to the Vatican, to Mons. Gaenswein or Mons. Xuereb, just to convey to the Holy Father his side about the letter - before talking to media as he did to say John Paul II approved his letter and that Cardinal Ratzinger was present at a meeting when the letter was discussed and presumably given the green light.
Castrillon showed himself to be gracious last year when he took the blame assigned to him for the Williamson fiasco, while giving his side dispassionately in an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung. He may be a traditionalist but he is able to explain the positions he takes, so he should be given that chance. For instance, he should explain his 2001 letter more fully in an interview with someone like Sandro Magister. One may not agree with his position, which appears not to be arbitrary on his part, but in accordance with how he understands the bishop-priest relationship.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/04/2010 22:34]