BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Smoking gun? No.
But damaging - Yes
By Phil Lawler

January 19, 2011


Did an Irish television documentary produce a “smoking gun,” proving that the Vatican had a worldwide policy encouraging bishops to conceal sexual abuse by priests? No.

But did the documentary show damaging evidence that some Vatican officials nourished a culture of secrecy that fed the abuse scandal? Yes.

For nearly 20 years now, I have been calling attention to an odd and perverse attitude within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which encourages prelates to believe that they are serving “the good of the Church” when they sweep serious problems under the rug.

That attitude contributed mightily to the sex-abuse scandal, as I demonstrated in The Faithful Departed. And that attitude, I am sorry to say, could be found within the Vatican as well as in American dioceses.

Today the Vatican press spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, complained that the RTE television report that aired on January 17 had “deeply misunderstood” a 1997 letter from the papal nuncio in Ireland.



The Vatican was not trying to protect abusive priests, he said. Rather, the caution from the Vatican was intended to ensure that the Irish bishops would respect proper canonical procedures, “precisely so that guilty parties not have a basis to appeal.”

Two excellent American commentators have pointed out the many flaws in the Irish documentary: John Allen for the National Catholic Reporter and Jimmy Akin for the National Catholic Register. Ordinarily the Reporter and the Register are on the opposite sides of controversial topics, so when their reports jibe, their agreement carries more than the usual force. What’s more, Allen and Akin make a number of important points.

- The Congregation for Clergy, the ultimate source of the cautions expressed in the “smoking gun” letter, is just one office in the Roman Curia, not the final arbiter of worldwide policies. At the time in question another Vatican office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was also handling sex-abuse complaints, and taking a harder line. There was no single unified Vatican policy until 2001. [???? With due apologies to Mr. Lawler, NO! The CDF's only official involvement at the time was to decide on the laicization of priests in general, which were mostly priests who preferred to be lay husbands, as well as the occasional priest duly disciplined for sex offenses and therefore recommended for laicization by their respective dioceses. The CDF was not given the responsibility for dealing with sex abuses by priests until 2001 - and only to deal with complains directly sent to it, or when its assistance was required by a local diocese, which remained and remains the primary agency responsible for investigating and disciplining an offending priest.]

- The Vatican never told Irish priests to cover up abuse, nor did the 1997 letter suggest that they should disobey the country’s legal requirements for reporting criminal activity. The Vatican’s reservations centered on a proposal to report all accusations of abuse — even those that were unsubstantiated.

- The papal nuncio warned Irish bishops that they must respect the Code of Canon Law, which includes “due process” rights for accused clerics. If those rights were not protected, the accused priests would have grounds for a successful appeal. Thus the Vatican was reminding the Irish hierarchy about the importance of proper legal procedures within the Church.

- An ominous reference to “moral and canonical concerns” about mandatory reporting was a reference to the confessional seal, Father Lombardi said. The papal nuncio was not suggesting any principled objection to reporting other evidence of crimes.

These are all important points, exposing serious flaws in the RTE presentation. Nevertheless, the documentary does furnish evidence that when the Irish bishops sought to make an aggressive disciplinary effort to root out predator-priests, they encountered resistance rather than support from some Vatican officials.

The RTE program includes interviews with Irish bishops, who leave no doubt that when they sat in a meeting with Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos — then the prefect of the Congregation for Clergy — they saw him as an opponent of their plans.

We already know that Cardinal Castrillon applauded efforts to protect abusive priests from prosecution. At the height of the American sex-abuse scandal he told reporters that the problem had been exaggerated by the media; as late as last year he was defending a letter in which he congratulated a French bishop for hiding a priest from prosecution. When Irish bishops report that he opposed their efforts to uproot the scandal, we have every reason to believe them.

Nor was Cardinal Castrillon alone. The Irish documentary also cites the evidence — circumstantial but persuasive — that the former Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was instrumental in protecting the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel, from investigation on sex-abuse charges.

The Secretary of State, who operates in effect as the Vatican's prime minister, exercises enormous control over the Roman Curia. His opposition would be nearly fatal to any plan for institutional reform.

So when diocesan bishops went to Rome, looking for help to expose the deadly corruption within the Church, they sometimes found resistance from powerful Vatican officials. And when they sought help to cover up that corruption, they sometimes found it.

This does not mean that bishops could not find allies in pursuing reform; the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under then-Cardinal Ratzinger, was anxious to help. Still, the deadly inclination to cover up evidence of wrongdoing — the attitude that magnified the impact of the sex-abuse scandal — was evident even within the walls of the Vatican. [No one was ever in any doubt about that, except that names have never been mentioned wityh specific charges before. And even now, all the reporting in the news agencies about teh RTE edocumentary did not mention Cardinal Castrillon nor Cardinal Sodano at all.]

In order to lay this scandal finally to rest, the Church must change those destructive attitudes within the hierarchy. The RTE program reports, accurately, that Pope Benedict XVI has emerged as a powerful force for just such a reform.

But he will be successful only if Church leaders face the problem squarely, and resist the old ingrained temptation to deny the existence of the problem.

[Both Cardinals Sodano and Castrillon are now retired. Isn't it incumbent on Vatican reporters to name any other ranking or influential prelates weho are still in the Roman Curia so that they may defend themselves if they can, and if they can or won't, so that the Holy Father can act accordingly?

However, one would imagine that Benedict XVI was unlikely to be ignorant of who such others persons are, if any, and if there wree, may have already acted to minimize their ability to influence anything that has to do with the proper disposition of sex abuse complaints.

True, he allowed Sodano and Castrillon to keep their positions from John Paul's time until they reached age 80 - but given Benedict's punctiliousness about dealing correctly with the sex abuse scandal, it was unlikely that either cardinal would have sought to do anything relative to the issue after April 19, 2005. Besides, by that time, CAstrillon was no longer heading the Clergy but was working principally as the head of Ecclesia Dei, the Council that was handling liaison with traditionalist groups.]


Andrea Tornielli on his blog Thursday, has presented the best commentary, IMHO, on the 1997 letter, providing the necessary temporal, historical and conceptual context for the letter. He does not simply condemn Cardinal Castrillon, for instance. He sees situation as someone who has been covering the Vatican all this time, not as someone who has simply watched what a biased documentary had to say..


Smoking gun or blank shots?
Translated from

January 20, 2011

If one put together all the alleged 'smoking guns' in the pedophile priest scandal, we would have an armory. The nth 'smoking gun' is a 1997 letter disclosed on the Irish official TV channel TE and quickly picked up by the New York Times [among all the rest of worldwide media, of course! But I would have cited the AP from Dublin, which was first off the starting line, and without the Vatican side provided by the NYT,]

But once more this 'pistol' oversimplifies reality, and above all, the complexity of an episode that is tragic enough.

The letter was written by the Apostolic Nuncio in Ireland, Archbishop Luciano Storero, dated January 31, 1997, addressed to the bishops of Ireland, to whom he communicates the reservations of the Holy See about obligatory reporting to civilian authorities of priests accused of pedophilia. This had been proposed by the bishiops in a document entitled «Child Sexual Abuse. Framework for a Church Response».

The Vatican reservations at the time were based on 'moral and canonical' considerations, namely, that "The results could be very embarassing and damaging for the diocesan authority itself."

Obviously, the conclusion by some commentators was that the Vatican chose to cover up the abuses instead of bringing the guilty to civilian justice.

Vatican press director Fr. Federico Lombardi replied by pointing out that the letter represented the approach taken by the Congregation for the Clergy before 2001, namely, before John Paul II decided to entrust the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger with jurisdiction over such cases. Until that time, they had been exclusively the competence of the diocesan bishops.

What Fr. Lombardi pointed out about the Vatican approach in 1997 was very true - remember that in 1997, the scandal of the US cases had not yet broken out - but it is also true that obviously the approach completely changed subsequently.

But just as it would be wrong to read in the Nuncio's letter that the Vatican did not wish to punish those guilty of such abominable crimes - it was really an appeal to respect the canonical norms then in force - it would be equally simplistic to say that the approach was that of the Congregation for the Clergy alone, with some identifying its then prefect, the Colombian Cardinal Dario Castirllon Hoyos as the villain, as they have done in the past.

That the general approach of the Vatican at the time was different from what it is now is well documented. Years after 1997 - I am referring to 2001 - Cardinal Castrillon, with the approval of John Paul II (whom he consulted to get his approval) and of the Secretariat of State (whom he copy-furnished with his written request for approval). wrote a letter of support and solidarity to French Bishop Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux and Lisuex.

Pican had just been convicted to three months in prison for failing to report to the civilian authorities a serial pedophile priest, Rene Bissey, who was convicted in 2000 for abuses committed against minors in previous years.

Mons. Pican presented 'professional secrecy' (not confessional secrecy) as the reason for his silence, but it was a defense that was not acceptable under French law for abuse cases involving minors. Castrillon had previously written Pican in 2000 to express his support, and wrote him in 2001 to retierate his support after he was convicted [the letetr approved by John Paul II].

The line against obligatory reporting was shared by many in the Curia. Between the end of the 1990s and the start of the new millennium, there was a locked debate on this issue between the Holy See and the US bishops.

In the USA, and in the Anglo-Saxon world, in general, the idea was spreading that civilian authorities should have access to diocesan files in evaluating accusations against abusive priests. It happened in a case where the names of some priests who had been denounced or accused were posted on the Web. In the Holy See, there was concern that this kind of practice would also take hold in the Mediterranean world, and so a study group was formed to study the question.

Among those taking part in the inter-dicastery meetings on the question were Cardinals Castrillon, Giovanni Battista Re (prefect of Bishops) and Cardinal Ratzinger, with his #2 man at the time, now Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

The line that emerged from those sessions was described in a timely and detailed inerview that Bertone gave to the monthly magazine 30 GIORNI in February 2002 - that is, at the time that the new norms for action against pedophile priests were bing framed, after Papa Wojtyla had decided that the former Holy Office would take the lead in investigating and prosecuting these cases within the Church.

In the interview, every word is carefully measured, and it is evident from the authoritativeness of the interviewee that he was expressing the position of the Holy See on the issue. Bertone said then: "The new norms come under a specific juridical order, with guaranteed autonomy, whose application is not limited only to the countries with which the Holy See has a concordat. It does not rule out that in particular cases, there may even be a form of collaboration, an exchange of information between ecclesiastical authorities and public prosecutors.

"But, in my opinion, there is no basis for claiming that a bishop, for example, should be obliged to address the civil magistrates to denounce a priest who has confided that he has committed pedophilia. Of course, civilian society must defend its citzens, but it should also respect the professional secrecy of the clergy, just as professional secrecy is observed in other categories, a respect which, of course, must extend to 'seal of the confessional' which is inviolable."

Bertone was then Cardinal Ratzinger's #2 man and, but before that, he was known as one of the most faithful collaborators of John Paul II who later made him a cardinal. His statements expressed the 'mens' (thinking) of the Holy See, not just of the Congregation for the Clergy.

We must also remember that Cardnal Ratzinger had always shown a special sensitivity in the matter of sexual abuses. As we learned recently, in 1988, he had protested to Cardinal José Rosalio Castillo Lara, president of the Pontifical Commission for the itnerpretation of the Code of Canon Law, some negative consequences of applying the new Code (updated in 9182) when dealing with cases of sexual abuse.

The cardinal requested "providing, in certain cases a more rapid and simplified procedure" to defrock priests who were found guilty of such abuses. [The CDF's involvement at the time had to do with its role in laicizing priests for good reason - at the time, mostly from priests opting for the married life.] Castillo Lara replied that making such changes 'did not appear convenient'.

The general perception of the problem, until the start of the new millennium, was not what it is today. And the turning point was the Motu Proprio of 2001 and the transfer of jurisdiction for sex abuse cases to the CDF, precisely to prevent cover-ups or inadequate responses.

It has required a journey of growing awareness, of gradually adopting the necessary and most appropriate tools. And above all, thanks to Benediot XVI, recognition that something must be done for the victims.

That is why there are new rules now that allow more rapid interventions - to the point that some canon law experts warn against ignoring guarantees for the rights of the accused.

No one can doubt that this Pope has always been in the front lines of fighting against these unpriestly offenses. But neither must one overlook - even as other documents may emerge, which one may describe as blank shots more than smoking guns - what the prevailing thought in the Curia was during clearly defined periods,

The example and the teaching of Benedict XVI in the past year, in the face of everything that has been raised, was neither to under-estimate the phenomenon nor to place the responsibility on the Curia before 2001.

The 1997 letter was far from a 'smoking gun'. Nor is it right to place the onus on Cardinal Castirllon alone and make him the scapegoat in all this - a retrograde operation that is incomprehensible, at a time when Benedict XVI, through his personal decision, is all set to beatify John Paul II.