| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 32.561
Post: 14.647 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
|
'Zero tolerance' and what it really means
The watchword of a church without mercy
for all that it continually vaunts it
February 15, 2019
There are two types of sinners for whom, in the preaching of Pope Francis, there has never been a shred of mercy: the corrupt, and those guilty of the sexual abuse of minors. [Only two? Magister forgets all those Catholics he derides as rigid, Pharisees, neo-Pelagian whachamacallits and the whole lexicon of Bergoglio insults launched from the pulpit of Casa Santa Marta. Or maybe, given his vitriolic contempt for them, he considers them all 'corrupt' so that would place them in one of Magister's two categories.]]
Against these latter the watchword is “zero tolerance.” Francis, during the press conference on the way back from the journey to Chile and Peru, identified Benedict XVI as the first to adopt this formula. But in reality it does not appear in any document or discourse of Papa Ratzinger, nor in the 2002 “Dallas Charter” of the bishops of the United States.
Instead, it is continually proposed by the current pope as his pole star in the effort to combat abuse, most recently in the “letter to the people of God” of last August 20 [his two-week delayed but rather perfunctory and ‘blah’ reaction to the Pennyslvania Grand Jury Report.]
“Zero tolerance” - as explained at the February 12, 2015 consistory by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, whom Francis had named to head a new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors - implies “the binding obligation that no member of the clergy who has abused a child will be allowed to continue in the ministry.”
In practice, this means that someone who committed even one offense of this kind, perhaps decades ago, would be excluded forever from the exercise of the ministry, on a par with a serial abuser. And this even before the accusation would be confirmed by a regular canonical process.
The relentless pressure of public opinion against the Catholic Church on the issue of clerical sex abuses explains this recourse to “zero tolerance.” The summit between the pope and the presidents of the whole world’s episcopal conferences, scheduled at the Vatican from February 21 to 24, will be the latest of many episodes in this public opinion siege. But this does not justify - in the judgment of many experts - the Church’s surrender to procedures that violate the fundamental rights of the accused, including those who may be found guilty after due process.
Since 2001, exclusive jurisdiction over crimes of pedophilia has been assigned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This implies that when a bishop finds himself presented with a complaint for clerical sex abuse, after a quick initial verification of the reliability of the accusation, he must pass the case on to Rome.
Since then, several thousand cases have accumulated at the Vatican. But as reported by Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna, for many years a promoter of justice [akin to a prosecutor in the civilian justice system] at the CDF, only two out of ten cases go through a genuine canonical process that may be judicial but more often administrative. All the other cases are resolved by extrajudicial means.
One sensational case of extrajudicial procedure concerned, for example, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel. The CDF simply questioned the authors of the accusations [and also sought factual corroboration of the charges, starting with Maciel's double life as a priest and family man]. After which, with the explicit approval of Pope Benedict XVI, on May 19, 2006, it released a statement to “exhort the father to lead a discreet life of prayer and penance, giving up any public ministry.”
Another sensational case of hasty resolution concerned the sexual violence against minors imputed to the Peruvian Luis Figari, founder of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno, archbishop of Huancayo and vice-president of the episcopal conference of Peru, described what happened with the Figari case in the latest issue of Il Regno [biweekly magazine of the Dehonians in Italy]:
The pope said that Figari received a heavy verdict, but we were not informed of the sentence. When we went to Rome and asked to talk about it, no one responded to us. And when they delivered to us a statement to make public about the case, we thought it would talk about the sentence, but it did not.
[It’s hard to understand such blanket secrecy about cases that have been ‘adjudicated’ in some way. The public – especially the community where the guilty priest committed his crimes – has a right to know: what were the accusations, when did the offenses take place, who were the victims, what kind of investigation was conducted, what if anything did the accused say in his defense, the final verdict on him and the corresponding penalty(ies) imposed. No one expects the CDF to release any details of the crimes imputed to the priest, but to at least indicate the nature, scope and magnitude of these offenses. The public gets to know all that routinely about persons accused in civilian courts. Why should the Church be exempt from such basic obligatory reporting?]
Getting to the present day, the anticipated reduction of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the lay state would also be the result not of a judicial process but only of an administrative one, in which the judge is also the prosecutor and decrees the fate of the guilty.
It is as if the phenomenon of clerical sex abuses is now perceived in the Church as a permanent state of emergency, the obligatory reaction to which is a body of rules also of an emergency nature, as inflexible as possible.
The United States is the country in which this intransigency is at its peak, especially since the increasingly infamous “Dallas Charter” of 2002 [behind which was the Macchiavellian mind and hand of one Theodore McCarrick].
During those years it was Cardinal Avery Dulles, a theologian of undisputed authoritativeness, who denounced the very high cost, in terms of the violation of the most basic rights, of the puritanical intolerance to which the Church in the United States was yielding. He did so in a crystal-clear article for the June 21, 2004 issue of the magazine America.
> Rights of Accused Priests: Toward a Revision of the Dallas Charter and the Essential Norms
Dulles begins by pointing out that in 2000, the bishops of the United States had criticized - in a document entitled “Responsibility and Rehabilitation” - the judicial system of the country as being too rigid and vindictive, without prospects for a future readmission of the condemned into society.
But with the “Dallas Charter”, he said, the bishops adopted a line of conduct that they had rightly condemned in the civil justice system. In particular, the cardinal showed how
- for someone accused of sexual abuse the presumption of guilt replaced the presumption of innocence;
- the sanctions strike equally at the perpetrator of a single act of abuse and the serial abuser, without any proportion between the fault and the penalty;
- the sanctions introduced in 2002 were applied, retroactively, to the actions of decades before, in substantially different contexts;
- the abolition of the statute of limitations engulfed the CDF with cases that were very difficult to verify because they took place so long ago;
- the reduction of the abuser to the lay state was a de facto exoneration of the Church from providing for his recovery and from monitoring his behavior toward potential victims;
- the reduction of an ordained minister to the lay state raised some theological issues, given the indelible imprint conferred by the sacrament of orders;
- outlawing the guilty ruled out any sort of future conversion and reintegration into the ecclesial institution.
In short - Cardinal Dulles concluded - in the name of “zero tolerance” everything seemed to have been set up so that the parable of the prodigal son does not apply to someone who had committed sexual abuse – even if he sincerely repents and wishes to turn his life around.
Since the “Dallas Charter” ,17 years have gone by, but the “dubia” raised at the time by Cardinal Dulles remain more relevant than ever. And at the summit of February 21-24, we will see to what extent the hierarchy of the Church will be capable of translating them into positive actions, in defense of victims but also in fairness to the the accused. [That’s assuming anyone will ever bring up Cardinal Dulles’s dubia. Who would, in a summit organized by four of Bergoglio's most ideologically driven paladins?]
It cannot be said too often that the Church’s current credibility is at stake in how this summit will handle the topic of clerical sex abuse which, it appears from the title given to the summit, will be secondary to the ‘protection of minors’ which is the real theme.
[I don’t think there can be any serious objections to many reasonable measures already being done and/or are being proposed to protect minors from priestly predators- but as the pope and his organizers know, the real issue is to confront the presence in the Church of enough homosexual and homosexualist priests and bishops who will resist any intrusion in their ‘disordered’ lives so they can continue wreaking their havoc on the church, directly or indirectly.]
But in addressing the crisis, the Church hierarchy cannot separate justice and forgiveness, because only by this means will it be able to remove it, and thereby make visible - as Benedict XVI said in a memorable discourse in Freiburg on September 25, 2011 - the first and true “skandalon” of the Christian faith, that of the Crucified and Risen One.
In his historic Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland in March 2010, Benedict XVI addressed this to the priest-offenders – as far away from anti-Christian zero tolerance as his successor sees it, because it emphasizes both justice and mercy.
7. To priests and religious who have abused children
You betrayed the trust that was placed in you by innocent young people and their parents, and you must answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals. You have forfeited the esteem of the people of Ireland and brought shame and dishonour upon your confreres. Those of you who are priests violated the sanctity of the sacrament of Holy Orders in which Christ makes himself present in us and in our actions. Together with the immense harm done to victims, great damage has been done to the Church and to the public perception of the priesthood and religious life.
I urge you to examine your conscience, take responsibility for the sins you have committed, and humbly express your sorrow. Sincere repentance opens the door to God’s forgiveness and the grace of true amendment. By offering prayers and penances for those you have wronged, you should seek to atone personally for your actions.
Christ’s redeeming sacrifice has the power to forgive even the gravest of sins, and to bring forth good from even the most terrible evil. At the same time, God’s justice summons us to give an account of our actions and to conceal nothing. Openly acknowledge your guilt, submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God’s mercy.
 |