The one day I failed to check out Ignatius Insight - and it turns out that the estimable Father Fessio immediately came out with an article to clear up the AP's obvious misunderstanding - and consequent misrepresentation - of the 1985 letter from Cardinal Ratzinger. It clears up the substance of the letter, laying the approproate context for it, and educates us laymen about the Church's concept of the priesthood as something just as indissoluble as marriage....
Now, how one can get Fr. Fessio's explanation out into the media mainstream is another challenge altogether - and I am not sure it is doable! It just goes to show that once again, AP was sizzling with uncontainable excitement (and gloating) over a 'great scoop' that it simply failed to consult anyone who knew anything at all about canonical proceedings to tell them exactly what the letter meant!
April 9, 2010
Editor's Note: The following piece was written by Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder and editor of Ignatius Press, in response to the breaking story about a 1985 letter written by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to Bishop John S. Cummins of Oakland.
The so-called "stalled pedophile case", blame for which has been laid at the feet of then-Cardinal Ratzinger, had nothing to do with pedophilia and everything to do with strengthening marriage and the priesthood.
Here's what was happening in 1981 when Bishop Cummins of Oakland first wrote the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asking that a priest from his diocese of Oakland, be dispensed from his promise of celibacy.
Well first, what was not happening.
The letter came a week before Cardinal Ratzinger had even assumed his duties as Prefect of that congregation. This is a very important office of the Roman Curia. It handles a variety of cases worldwide, mostly having to do with defending and promoting doctrinal integrity in the Church. There's a lot of work to do, and it takes time for someone to become fully engaged in its activities.
But much more pertinently here: By 1980 the effects of the sexual revolution on marriage and the priesthood had been devastating. In 1965 there had been 59 marriage annulments granted by Rome to American couples. By 2002, there were over 50,000 annulments per year in the U.S. alone. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of priests were asking for dispensation from their promise of celibacy in order to be able to marry.
The Catholic Church holds the marriage vows to be indissoluble. Even an annulment, contrary to a widespread misconception, does not dissolve those vows. It is a declaration that because of some impediment, there never was a valid marriage in the first place.
Priestly ordination is also "indissoluble", in the sense that a validly ordained priest never ceases to be a priest.
And here's the rub. It was literally scandalous in the Church that priests, who had been prepared for eight to ten years for their ordination (which would be permanent, irreversible) and their promise of celibacy (which also has the character of a solemn promise before God), were, in the 1970s, being so easily dispensed from their promise of celibacy.
Married Catholics said to themselves: If a priest, who is so well prepared for his commitment, can so easily be dispensed from it so that he can marry, why can't we be dispensed from our commitment so that we can remarry?
When John Paul II was elevated to the papacy in the Fall of 1978, he immediately changed the policy on priestly dispensations. I don't have the exact dates and numbers at hand, but I remember at the time that many of us were amazed that the hundreds of dispensations per year (and it may have been thousands) under John Paul II's predecessor, Paul VI, suddenly were reduced to almost zero. It was almost impossible to get a dispensation in 1980.
What was John Paul's intent? To restore the integrity of the priesthood and of marriage. These commitments are permanent. A priest may be removed from ministry, but he will not be given a dispensation to marry.
Priests are to be made to take their commitments with utmost seriousness. They will be an example to married couples to take theirs seriously also. When a priest makes a promise of celibacy, it's forever; when a couple make vows of marriage, it's forever.
This is the decisive context of Cardinal Ratzinger's letter to Bishop Cummins.
It is not a smoking gun. It did not mean that Ratzinger was not taking the priest's sins seriously. (He called the accusations "very serious" [gravis momenti].) It meant that he, following the policy of John Paul II, was taking the priesthood and its commitments very seriously.
And again, this entire affair had
nothing to do with preventing further abuse by this priest. That had already been done, or should have been done, by the local bishop.
A final, minor but significant point of translation. The translation being used by the media of an important part of Ratzinger's letter is: "your Excellency must not fail to provide the petitioner with as much paternal care as possible". This has been rightly interpreted by some to mean that Ratzinger was saying that the bishop should keep a watchful eye on the priest. The original Latin makes that even clearer: "paterna...cura sequi" which means "to follow with paternal care". We get the word "persecute" from the Latin "per-sequi". "Sequi" is much stronger then "provide".
There is a completely mistaken first premise underlying all this criticism.The premise is that "defrocking" has anything to do with protecting victims and preventing further abuse.
First, the media needs to know that according to Catholic teaching, Holy Orders is a sacrament which leaves an "indelible mark"; in layman's terms, once ordained a priest, a man is always a priest.
The reason the word "dispensation" is used in the correspondence is that that is what happens technically: the priest is dispensed from his obligation of celibacy. In a sense, this works in the opposite direction from protection: a restraint is being removed.
Further, as if to prove this point, the priest in question continued to abuse children after he was "defrocked" and had married. QED.
Secondly,
nothing at all prevents a bishop from: removing a priest from all ministry; removing his faculties; reporting him to civil authorities. There is no need even to inform Rome about this. The only way (until 2001 or in cases of abuse of Confession) that it need get to Rome is if the priest appeals the bishop's actions.
Thirdly,
why was the CDF involved anyway? That was not the congregation that handles abuse cases, except where abuse of Confession has played a role. I believe the CDF was involved in cases of dispensation from celibacy. (Though you would think that should be under the Congregation for Priests.)
But, again, dispensation has nothing to do with preventing further abuse. It may appease the sense of justice on the part of victims. But at the same time, It normally takes eight to ten years to become a priest. It's not a club one joins. It is a very serious thing to dispense a priest from celibacy, and there needs to be a careful process to protect innocent priests.
Fourthly, there are definitely cased of priests who have been falsely accused. Especially the American media ought to be sensitive to the principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Civil law requires that to be done in a court of law. A bishop can, and in many cases, should take action against a priest before there is any canonical trial.
Finally, let's compare this to the difference between a criminal and a civil trial.
Criminal trials can be expedited, but even then in all but the most grievous cases, a criminal defendant is a free man until convicted. In the case of priests, the "punishment" of removal from ministry can be applied immediately by a bishop even before there is any canonical trial, which is like a civil trial. How long do civil trials take in this country. I know of trials that have dragged out for more than seven years.
If Ratzinger took part in "stall[ing]" a "pedophile case", the worst one can say is that he wanted care taken in a canonical trial. And, let's not forget, this wasn't "punishment" at all from the priest's point of view. He had "asked" to be dispensed.
The American lawyer that the Secretariat of State hired two years ago to look to the Vatican interests in the various suits filed in the United States also gave a statement on the latetr but it is nowhere as unequivocal nor as informative as Father Fessio's explanation. And I don't think AP will use it at all, because the following story online comes from Reuters.
The Italian service of Vatican Radio has also reported on it - but not the English service so far, although it already carries an item about the Holy Father's condolences for the terrible plane crach that took the lives of the President of Poland, his wife and a large number of senior Polish officials earler today.
Let me post the Reuters story first, as I still have to translate the RV item... And have no illusions! Reuters isn't doing the Vatican any favor, since it perpetrates the AP story's wrong assumptions and obviously makes no effort to find out anything on its own!
Pope did not impede
defrocking of priest
By Silvia Aloisi
VATICAN CITY,April 10 (Reuters) – The Vatican Saturday defended Pope Benedict from accusations that, in a previous post as a high Vatican official, he tried to impede the defrocking of a California priest who had sexually abused children.
In a statement, a Vatican lawyer accused the media of a "rush to judgment."
In a 1985 letter, typed in Latin and translated for The Associated Press, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told the bishop of Oakland
he needed more time "to consider the good of the Universal Church" as he reviewed a request to remove the priest. [That is a typical trick of mixing up phrases from the letter with the Reuters writer's own interpretation of it!]
California-based Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena said he could not confirm the authenticity of the letter but indicated that it appeared to be "
a form letter typically sent out initially with respect to laicization cases," when men ask to leave the priesthood. [Father Z was right to supsect it was probably a boilerplate letter - a form letter in which the specifics of the particular case are filled in!]
The letter surfaced as the Vatican fights accusations that the Pope mishandled cases of abuse when he was a bishop in Germany and a Vatican official before his election in 2005.
Lena "denied that the letter reflected then-Cardinal Ratzinger resisting pleas from the bishop to defrock the priest," the statement said.
"There may be some overstep and rush to judgment going on here," Lena said.
"During the entire course of the proceeding the priest remained under the control, authority and care of the local bishop who was responsible to make sure he did no harm, as the canon (Church) law provides. The abuse case wasn't transferred to the Vatican at all," he said.
Ratzinger wrote in the letter that arguments to remove the priest were of "grave significance" but also
worried about what "granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner."
[Exhibit 2!]
According to The Associated Press, which first reported the story Friday, the Rev. Stephen Miller Kiesle was 38 at the time and had been sentenced in 1978 to three years' probation after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a church rectory.
According to a letter from the Diocese of Oakland to Ratzinger in 1981, Kiesle had asked to leave the active ministry and
the diocese asked Ratzinger to agree that he be "relieved of all the obligations of the priesthood, including celibacy." [AP's maliciously tendentious interpretation is that Cardinal Ratzinger rejected this request! As most of us have ;earned from various news reports since this monstrous 'scandal' grew a new head, the local bishop has the primary as well as full responsibility of disciplining an erring priest up to and including relieving him of all priestly functions - which Fr. Fessio confirms.
Paradoxically, that is exactly what the media has been faulting Cardinals Law and Mahony, and all those misbehaving Irish bishops for - that they failed to exercise this authority of discipline on abusive priests! And as Father Fessio has just made clear, the only thing the bishop cannot do is to reduce a priest to lay state even if the priest asks for this - such a dispensation is the prerogative of the Pope alone. ]
The Oakland case;
Rebutting the new charges
Translated from
the Italian service of
April 10, 2010
The drip-drip of 'news' and accusations against the Pope continues in the matter of sex abuses by priests. The latest is from the Associated Press which has built a story on a 1985 letter signed by Cardinal Ratzinger regarding Stephen Kiesle, then a priest in the Diocese of Oakland, who was convicted of molesting children. Sergio Centofanti has the report:
The Holy See attorney in the United States, Jeffrey Lena, has unequivocally rejected the new accusations by the media.
First of all, he said he is unable to confirm the authenticity of the letter, which concerns the reduction to lay state of Fr. Kiesle, about which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was starting to verify the bases for said reduction.
Lena points out that in 1985, the competence over cases of sexual abuse was with the local bishop, not with the CDF which was not given such responsibility until 16 years later, in 2001.
But he said that the letter did not express a rejection of Mons. Cummins's request for Fr. Kiesle to be laicized as the priest himself had requested.
[The letter did ask for more time for the case to be studied, even granting that it involved 'serious circumstances'. In the next sentence, the letter notes 'the priest's young age'. He was 38 at the time, and this clause in the letter only makes sense if we remember what Fr. Fessio said - that 40 is the minimum age at which the Vatican allows formal dispensation from the priesthood.]
In the letter cited by the AP, Cardinal Ratzinger advised the bishop to 'take maximum paternal care' of the erring priest. Lena said this meant, in standard Church terminology, that "the priest was left to the authority and oversight of the bishop who should assure that he would commit no further offenses".
Lena adds that in fact, Kiesle was laicized two years later - "within a short time by the standards of that era".
[More importantly, as Fr. Fessio explains it, it couldn't be done earlier as Kiesle had to turn 40 first. Which does not and should not preclude all other forms of appropriate discipline if the priest has committed a crime or canonical violation.]
Also, Lena points out, "during the interim, the priest committed no other crimes".
Lena's statement is weak and lame, compared to the clarity and specificity of Fessio's explanation. Even if Lena is a hotshot canon lawyer, he is still a layman - he should have consulted a priest conversant with the dispensation process.
Even more important, Fr. Lombardi made s tactical mistake by initially dismissing the letter, followed by a second mistake in Fr. Benedettini's obviously inadequate attempt at explaining the letter away. Advantage, AP!
Thanks to Lella's blog
for pointing to an article in la Stampa today which substantially replciaes the AP story on the Kiesle case but towards the end, it has this unlikely information, which I would consider truly 'news'.
And again, this would not sound so significant to us - or it would have raised more question - if Father Fessio had not previously given us the background for how the Vatican dealt with laicizing priests after the Paul VI years.
Guess who has spoken up
to defend Cardinal Ratzinger
in the Kiesle case!
Excerpted and translated from
Hypothesizing an explanation of Cardinal Ratzinger's letter was Father Thomas Reese, former editor of the weekly Jesuit magazine America, noa theologian at the Woodstock Center in New York:
"When John Paul II became Pope, he gave an order to stop the laicization of young priests that Paul VI had allowed in great numbers, and therefore Ratzinger was simply carrying out orders".
[It would have made more sense if La Stampa had given a context to that bare statemen,t to say that the minimum age of laicization was set at 40, and Kiesle was only 38 at the time of Ratzinger's letter. Two years later, when he turned 40 he was laicized.
And frankly, I am disappointed, to say the least, that no one in the Vatican has come out to come out with the perfectly logical explanation given by Father Fessio, nor for that matter, have any of the reliably pro-Ratzinger Vaticanistas - not Tornielli nor Rodari nor Accattoli. If one of them wrote about it, there's a chance the international news agencies may pick it up and at least mention it...]
NB:
I just found out that AP did not have an exclusive on the Kiesle case after all, as it crowed all day yesterday. Vulture lawyer Jeffrey Anderson provided the New York Times with exactly the same documents, and lead hatchetwoman Laurie Goodstein wrote the story for Page 1 of the Times today. I've posted it for reference in the TOXICWASTE&LOONYBIN.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/04/2010 22:58]