There is a wonderful article in La Stampa today which recounts the personal experience of Gianni Gennari, an ex-priest who has been writing regularly for Avvenire as columnist and editorialist for several years. He was one of those priests who had to wait - impatiently - for the Vatican to act on his request to be dispensed from the clerical state under John Paul II, as Kiesle and his bishop in Oakland did... It turns out that the Wojtyla rule about prudence in granting dispensations was even more drastic than Fr. Fessio described it to be. Unfortunately, the AP will never pick up a story like this...
Ex-priest tells how
'Cardinal Ratzinger intervened
to hasten dispensation for me'
by GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Translated from
April 11, 2010
It wasn't an isolated case that the pedophile priest Stephen Kiesle was not immediately laicized as he requested in the 1980s. The
unwritten rule introduced in the Vatican by John Paul II (who was convinced that Paul VI had granted dispensations too easily to so many priests) was that
all such requests must first be rejected.
In practice, it did not make a difference whether the request was because the priest wanted to get married or for other reasons. The Vatican response was always, in effect, to postpone an answer indefinitely.
In hindsight, of course, this is alarming, because to delay a decision on a convicted pedophile, as Kiesle was when he requested dispensation, was to expose the Church and society to the repetition of a crime.
An illustration of the practice at the time is the story of the theologian Gianni Gennari, longtime columnist of Avvenire, the Italian bishops' newspaper. He was a priest in the diocese of Rome when he asked to be released from the priesthood in order to get married.
He did not get an answer and 18 months after he first sent his request, he was advised by then Vicar for Rome, Cardinal Ugo Poletti, to go directly to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Where the bureaucracy simply shit the door in his face.
Gennari then decided to write Cardinal Ratzinger himself:
"I turn to you to express my dismay," he wrote on February 3, 1984. "I am a priest and a son of God. I have learned that your office told Cardinal Poletti that my request lacked 'the humble willingness' that the new norms consider indispensable in order to evaluate my request.
"I write you not as to an impersonal bureaucracy. I have waited and I continue to await a sign of response from Your eminence. Whether it is positive or negative is secondary. Nor is this a question of notarizing documents and stamping it with an official seal. I write to you from one son of God to another , as one who awaits a clear answer".
To the surprise of everybody, even in the Curia, Cardinal Ratzinger personally obtained John Paul II's intervention in order to change the routine No answer to a surprising Yes.
The Cardinal first replied formally to Gennari about "your letter which I read attentively." He goes on: "As I have had occasion to explain to you in a telephone conversation, the delay in taking a decision on your request for dispensation from your priestly functions, has to do with the procedure followed in this dicastery which needs to examine the petitions, often on several levels".
[This is almost the exact formulation used in the letter about Kiesle.]
The fact that an exceptional intervention was necessary from Cardinal Ratzinger in this matter confirms that when Karol Wojtyla became Pope, all such requests for dispensation were blocked, in effect.
In his letter, Cardinal Ratzinger makes a personal commitment to Gennari which he then carries out. "The dicastery respects the order in which the requests are received in order to avoid any unjust favoritism. But I think I would not be wrong to tell you that your petition may be acted on around Easter."
He asks Gennari for "patience during this additional waiting" and apparently intervened with the Pope - because three days after Easter in 1984, Gennari received his dispensation.
Gennari now says, "The bureaucracy was dominated by a mentality that set aside all requests into a 'warming oven', not to be seen, free from personal considerations".
He thinks that "The letter in Latin about Kiesle was a bureaucratic response merely signed by Ratzinger. The letter to me, in Italian and personal, is a sign of Ratzinger's honest and clarificatory action in my behalf, for which I will always be grateful".
One of the questions I earlier had about which Vatican office has the responsibility for granting dispensations from the priesthood is answered by a 2007 document that Lella found online on the site of the Dehonians (Priests of the Sacred Heart, an order founded by the French priest Leon Dehon, whose beatification is pending because of his apparent record of anti-Semitism).
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wgsyIiTUy30J:www.dehon.it/scj_dehon/cuore/segretari/docum/19_siebenaler.doc+dispensa+celibato+40+anni+et%C3%A0&cd=1&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=it
The document by the order's Procurator-General summarizes how the order is obliged to deal with various Vatican offices.
About the competence for dispensations it says this:
From 1965 to 1990, requests for dispensation were dealt with by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; from 1991 to 2005, by the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of Sacraments; and from 2006, by the Congregation for the Clergy.
During these 40 years, we presented a total of 306 requests - 296 were answered positively; 4 were denied (3 are ex-brothers of ours who no longer wanted the dispensation); another 4 were asked to complete their documentation according to the new norms of 1980, fialed to do so, and have not been heard from; one was shelved because he simply stopped all contact with us. Finally, one case was postponed for decision until 2009, when the applicant will turn 40. [Which is what happened with Kielse.] Obviously, there are so many other ex-SCJ priests at large who never asked for this dispensation.
He notes later that both the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Congregation for the Clergy continued to be guided by
"the procedural norms indicated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on October 14, 1980".
Obviously, there were written instructions regarding dispensation that were already in place by the time Cardinal Ratzinger came to the CDF in February 1982.
I looked it up on the CDF pages in the Vatican site, but although it is listed under the category 'Documenti di Materia sacramentale' -
Lettera ai Vescovi e Superiori Generali riguardante la dispensa dal celibato sacerdotale (Litterae circulares omnibus locorum Ordinariis et Moderatoribus generalibus religionum clericaliumde dispensatione a sacerdotali coelibatu), 14 ottobre 1980
AAS 72 (1980) 1132-1135; DOCUMENTA 40
Communicationes 8 (1981) 21-26; DocCath 77 (1980) 1177-1178 [Gall.]; EV 7, 550-561; LE 4800; Dokumenty, I, 40
the document itself is not online.
If laymen like Lella and myself, who do not do this for a living, can try to find out primary information that can give the proper background and context to events that are being reported, I don't see why any respectable journalist does not do so habitually as a duty to the profession and to their readers!
Thanks to Beatrice
who asked on her site for someone competent to translate the letter signed by Cardinal Ratzinger on the Kiesle case, and was provided one by Yves D. who also appended a glossary of the Latin words used in the letter with their meanings in French! Here is a translation of his French into English....
Having received your letter of September 13 on the subject of the request for dispensation from his priestly duties by the Rev. Stephen Miller Kiesle of said diocese, it is my duty to communicate to you the following:
This dicastery, even if it judges that the reasons given for the requested dispensation are of great importance in this case, is nonetheless of the opinion that it is necessary to consider together what is good for the universal Church and what the petitioner wishes. That is why one cannot ignore the damage which authorizing such a dispensation could provoke among the community of the faithful, particularly if one takes into account the petitioner's young age.
Consequently, this Congregation must place cases like this under more attentive examination, which will necessarily require more time.
Meanwhile, Your Excellency must not omit to provide the petitioner with the paternal care that you are capable of, explaining to him clearly the reason for the dicastery's action, and that in going forward, you will always keep in mind what is good for all.
I take the occasion to express to you my heartfelt esteem. I remain...
Looking at this unbiased translation, my humble opinion is that Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena was right to specify only that it was signed by Cardinal Ratzinger.
As Father Z first hypothesized, and especially in the light of what we know about the Kiesle case, it reads like a form letter - with the date of the request and the priest's name filled in - one that would have been given to Cardinal Ratzinger to sign by a CDF bureaucrat placed in charge of answering requests for dispensations. Requests that we now know from Galeazzi's article were routinely blocked or delayed in accordance with John Paul II's wishes against indiscriminate gratnting of dispensations.
Being one of the many routine letters the Prefect signed regarding dispensations, it is unlikely that the original requests by the bishop and the priest were attached to it, nor even a note saying the priest in question was a convicted pedophile. If this information had been made available at the time the cardinal signed the letter, does anyone doubt that he would not have sent the standard form letter but something with more direct reference to the priest's individual case.
If Cardinal Ratzinger went out of his way as he did to expedite a dispensation for Gennari, who requested it in order to be able to marry, it is unlikely he would not have paid the same personal attention to Kiesle's case if he had personal knowledge of the bckground to the case.
It is unfortunate that the Vatican did not immediately provide its own translation of such a short letter, but also understandable in this way: One might surmise the initial reaction by, say, Fr. Lombardi, or even lawyer Lena - "Oh my God, this letter - even if it was a form letter - could be interpreted to mean Cardinal Ratzinger deliberately delayed granting a dispensation to Kiesle!"
DUH! Did they think no one would be capable of providing an unbiased translation sooner or later? Their first reaction should have been to ask, say Archbishop Amato, who was CDF secretary for a long time, or even the present secretary, Mons. Ladaria, to look into how the CDF routinely answered requests for dispensation in 1985 - and if it was clear that a form letter was used, then that would have been their best way out - provided they gave the necessary context to it, as Father Fessio did.
Of course, it would have meant exposing the hitherto little-known fact that John Paul II deliberately wanted the dispensations halted or slowed down, and probably no one at the Vatican wanted to have to be the one to do that in public - especially since John Paul's decision was a reaction to Paul VI's liberal granting of dispensations! It would have meant a somehwat negative reflection on the two previous Popes, on top of the negative reflection of the bare letter by itself on the current Pope.
This is an issue altogether separate from the pedophilia issue, but once again, it illustrates how Benedict XVI is the scapegoat for questionable Vatican practices that were established before he had anything to do with the Curia, and in the case of the 1980 norms for dispensation, a papal prerogative he could not personally overrule as CDF head even if he wanted to.
Of course, we can then ask why did he not work so that the norms be changed when it had to do with priests who were known or convicted sex offenders. Perhaps because the Kiesle case was a singular exception since most requests for dispensation were by priests simply wanting to marry - and we can be sure that even John Paul II himself never thought about requests for dispensation by convicted sex-offender priests. It was probably for the same reason that the cardinal did not concern himself personally with the files of the petitioner priests, as years later, he would with the files of priests accused of sex offenses.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/04/2010 16:07]