Finally, it is difficult not to mention here the case concerning the brother of Benedict XVI himself. In Germany, Georg Ratzinger found himself at the centre of a huge scandal of physical and sexual abuse against minors when running the famous boys’ choir at Regensburg Cathedral between 1964 and 1994. And yet, since 2010, the German courts and an internal report by the diocese revealed that over 547 children in that prestigious choir were victims of violence, and 67 of them of sexual abuse and rape. Forty-nine priests and laymen are now suspected of this violence, including nine for sexual assault. In spite of his denials, it is hard to believe that Georg Ratzinger was not aware of that situation. Besides, as we have since learned, the scandal was taken so seriously by the holy see that it was followed at the highest level by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the immediate entourage of the pontiff is said to have defended Georg Ratzinger. (Three cardinals are cited in numerous judicial procedures currently under way in Germany.)
Voices are raised today, even among priests and theologians, to consider that the failure of the Catholic Church on the file of sexual abuse cases affects the very top level of the governance and the ideas of Joseph Ratzinger. Among these, some said to me:
‘This is a man who has devoted his life to denouncing homosexuality. He makes it one of the greatest evils of humanity. At the same time, he has said very little about paedophilia, and was very late in becoming aware of the scale of the problem. He has never really differentiated on the theological level between freely consenting relations between adults and the sexual abuse of minors below the age of 15.’
Another theologian who I met in Latin America told me: ‘Ratzinger’s problem is the scale of value. It has been completely perverted since the outset. He has severely sanctioned the liberation theologians and punished priests who distributed condoms in Africa, but he has found excuses for paedophile priests. He ruled that the Mexican multi-recidivist and paedophile criminal Marcial Maciel was too old to be reduced to layman status.’
Still, for Pope Benedict XVI, the uninterrupted sequence of revelations about sexual abuse in the Church was more than a ‘season in hell’. It struck at the heart of the Ratzinger system and its theology. Whatever the public denials and positions of principle might have been, Benedict was well aware deep inside, I would dare to say from experience, that celibacy, abstinence and the failure to acknowledge the homosexuality of priests were at the heart of the whole scandal. His thought, minutely elaborated at the Vatican for four decades, exploded into pieces. This intellectual failure must have contributed to his resignation.
A German-speaking bishop sums up the situation: ‘What will be left of Joseph Ratzinger’s thought when the balance is truly drawn up? I would say his sexual morality and his positions on the celibacy of priests, abstinence, homosexuality and gay marriage. That is his only true novelty and originality. And yet sexual abuse destroyed all that, once and for all. His prohibitions, his rules, his fantasies, none of that holds any more. Nothing remains today of his sexual morality. And even if no one dares to admit it publicly in the Church, everyone knows that it won’t be possible to put an end to the sexual abuse by priests until celibacy has been abolished, until homosexuality is acknowledged by the Church, allowing priests to be able to denounce abuse, and until women are ordained as priests. All other measures concerning sexual abuse are in vain. Overall, the Ratzingerian perspective needs to be completely overturned. Everyone knows. And everyone who says the opposite is now an accomplice.’
This judgement is stark, but many within the Church share if not these words at least these ideas.
In March 2012, Benedict XVI flew to Mexico and Cuba. His ‘seasons in hell’ flew with him: after a winter marked by new revelations of paedophilia, here was a springtime of scandals. Joseph Ratzinger would discover in Havana a diabolical world whose existence he had not suspected, even in his worst nightmares – a new station of the cross. It was on his return from his trip to Cuba that he took the decision to resign. And here is why.
23
The abdication
When I knock at Jaime Ortega’s door in Cuba, Alejandro, a charming young man, opens up. I tell him I would like to talk to the cardinal. Kind and sympathetic, and trilingual, Alejandro asks me to wait for a moment. He closes the door and leaves me alone on the landing. Two or three minutes pass and the door opens again. Suddenly in front of me: Jaime Ortega y Alamino. He is there, in person: an old gentleman looking me up and down, with a quizzical gaze, dubious and playful at the same time. He is a plump little man, so small that the giant cross on his paunch looks even bigger than it is.
He brings me into his corner offices and apologizes for not answering my earlier requests. ‘My usual assistant, Nelson, is in Spain at the moment. He’s doing a degree. Everything has been a bit disorganized since he went away,’ Ortega explains.
We talk about rain and fine weather – a hurricane has just struck Martinique, and is due to reach Cuba in a few hours. The cardinal is worried about my return journey to France if the planes don’t take off.
Jaime expresses himself in impeccable French. Without warning, he starts addressing me informally, in the Cuban style. And all of a sudden, without ceremony, based on an impression gained over only a few minutes, staring at me, he says: ‘If you like, we could have dinner together tomorrow night.’
Getting to meet the cardinal of Cuba, one of the most famous prelates in Latin America, took infinite patience. I travelled to Havana five times for this investigation, and every time the cardinal was out of the country or unavailable, or else he didn’t reply to my requests.
At the archbishop’s palace I was told that he never received journalists; at reception in the Centro Cultural Father Félix Varela, where he resides discreetly, they swore blind that he didn’t live there; his spokesman, Orlando Márquez, answered my questions because, he warned me, the cardinal wouldn’t have time to see me personally. Luckily, one morning, in the archbishop’s palace, I happened upon a kind contact who showed me the most hidden places of Cuban Catholicism, let me in on some essential secrets and finally gave me the exact address of Cardinal Ortega. ‘Ortega lives there, on the third floor, but no one will tell you, because he wants to be discreet,’ my source tells me.
Like Rouco Varela in Madrid, Tarcisio Bertone and Angelo Sodano in the Vatican, Ortega has requisitioned the top two floors of a kind of magnificent palacio colonial in the Bay of Havana, to turn it into his private residence. The location is superb, in the middle of exotic flowers, palm trees and fig trees ideally situated on Calle Tacón, in the old city, just behind the baroque cathedral and not far from the headquarters of the Cuban episcopate.
Boasting a cloister with a beautiful patio, this urban hacienda was for a long time the headquarters of the Jesuits, then the headquarters of the diocese, before finally becoming the Centro Cultural Félix Varela.
Here, the Cuban Church gives language classes and awards general degrees that are recognized by the Vatican if not by the Cuban government. I spend several days hanging around in the library, which is open to researchers, before discovering, hidden in the right wing, a private lift that goes up to the third floor. I reach a door that says ‘No Pase. Privado’ (No entry. Private), with no other clues. I go in.
The first time Benedict XVI went to Cuba in March 2012, he was aware of sexual abuse in Latin America, but he still under-estimated the extent of it. This pope, who wasn’t very familiar with the Hispanic world, didn’t know that paedophilia had become endemic there, particularly in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. Most importantly, like everyone else, he thought that Cuba had been spared.
Who described the situation in the Cuban Church in detail to the holy father? Was he told on the plane, or when he stepped out in Havana? What I have been assured of by two different Vatican diplomatic sources is that Benedict XVI swiftly started to discover the extent of sexual corruption in the local Church. Three foreign diplomats in Havana have also described this situation in
detail to me, as have several Cuban dissidents who have stayed on the island. Catholics from Little Havana in Miami, the Protestant pastor Tony Ramos (of Cuban origin), as well as journalists from WPLG Local 10, one of the main local television channels, also gave me precious information during several trips to Florida.
If it is generally difficult to investigate sexual matters within the Church, talking about abuse committed by Cuban priests is almost mission impossible. The press is completely controlled; censorship on the island is total; access to the internet is restricted, and it is slow and prohibitively expensive. And yet everything is known in Cuba, as I was gradually going to discover.
‘In the Church here in Cuba, exactly the same thing is happening in terms of sexual abuse as is going on in the United States, Mexico and the Vatican,’ Roberto Veiga warns me. ‘Black masses on Sundays, orgies, cases of paedophilia and prostitution: the Cuban Church is very compromised.’
For a long time Veiga was director of the Catholic journal Espacio Laical. In this capacity, he worked officially and directly for ten years with Cardinal Jaime Ortega, so he knows the Catholic system from the inside. Since then, he has left the Church to join Cuba Posible, a group of dissident intellectuals who have distanced themselves from the Church as well as from the Castro regime. I meet Veiga at the Hotel Plaza, in the company of Ignacio González, my Cuban ‘fixer’. And we talk for a long time about the tense relations between the Church and Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
‘We experienced a regular civil war between the government and the Church during the 1960s,’ Roberto Veiga goes on. ‘The Castro brothers and Che Guevara thought the bishops were in opposition to the regime and they kept on hacking away at Catholicism: a lot of churches were closed; the private schools were nationalized; priests were harassed, kept under surveillance or deported. Jaime Ortega was arrested himself, as he has often said, but strangely, he was sent to the UMAP camps right at the start, when he had just been ordained as a priest.’
The UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) camps of unhappy memory were re-education and forced labour camps, dreamed up by the Castro regime to take everybody who didn’t want to do their regular military service (Servicio Militar Obligatorio). Among them, the vast majority were therefore conscientious objectors, and about 10 per cent were dissidents, political opponents, peasants who had refused the expropriation of their land, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals or Catholic priests. If the Church was mistreated by the Cuban revolutionaries in 1969, it appears that few seminarians and ordinary priests were deported to the UMAP camps, unless they were also conscientious objectors, political dissidents or homosexuals.
In his famous memoirs, the homosexual Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas related how between 1964 and 1969 the Castro regime had opened camps to ‘treat’ homosexuals. Obsessed with virility and prejudices, Fidel Castro saw homosexuality as a petit-bourgeois, capitalist and imperialist phenomenon. So homosexuals had to be ‘re-educated’ and set on the right path. The technique deployed is described at length by Arenas, who was interned in such a camp himself: they projected photographs of naked men to the ‘patients’, who were given electric shocks at the same time. These ‘reparative’ therapies were supposed to correct their sexual orientation little by little.
After being freed from one of these camps, Jaime Ortega, who had been ordained as a priest at the age of 28, began a long and discreet career in the Cuban Church. He wanted to turn that dark page and be forgotten. He had a sense of organization and dialogue, and most importantly he was ready to compromise with the regime in many respects to avoid a return to prison and the marginalization of Catholicism in Cuba. Was it a good strategy?
‘It was the only possible option. Ortega understood that resistance was not the solution, and that only dialogue could work,’ Roberto Veiga stresses.
At the archbishop’s palace in Havana, where I interview him, Mgr Ramón Suárez Polcari, the spokesman for the current archbishop, makes the same analysis. ‘Cardinal Ortega was deeply marked by the difficult experience of the UMAP camps. That was where he opted for dialogue rather than confrontation. The Church was no longer to appear as an opposition party. It was a braver choice than people said; it meant that he had to stay where he was, not go into exile, not give up the Catholic presence in Cuba. That too was a form of resistance.’
On the walls of the palace, a grand residence in yellow and blue in the centre of Havana, I see large portraits of Cardinal Ortega, put up to celebrate the 50 years of his priesthood. In these photographs he can be seen as a child, a young priest, a young bishop and finally an archbishop – a veritable personality cult.
The director of the Centro Cultural Félix Varela, a layman by the name of Andura, also confirms the pertinence of this choice of collaboration with the communist regime: ‘The Cuban Church wasn’t stocked with weapons, as people have said, but it’s true that it was clearly in opposition during the 1960s. Those were dark years for us Catholics. We absolutely had to start up a dialogue again. But that doesn’t mean that we’re a branch of government!’
Spotted by the apostolic nuncio of the new pope John Paul II, Ortega was appointed Bishop of Pinar del Río in 1979, then Archbishop of Havana in 1981. He was 45.
Jaime Ortega then began a meticulous job of rapprochement with the regime, with the aim of achieving the full recognition of the Catholic Church in Cuba. Between 1986 and 1987 he discreetly led negotiations at the highest level of state. They ended in a kind of non-aggression pact: the Church recognized communist power; and the communists recognized Catholicism.
From that date, the Church regained a form of legitimacy in Cuba, a condition of its development. Catechism classes were timidly re-authorized, the episcopate began republishing journals that had been forbidden until then, and appointments of bishops were made prudently, with the appearance of independence, but with subtle government vetoes. Meetings took place, at first informally, then officially, between Fidel Castro and Jaime Ortega. The possibility of a visit from the pope was mooted. For this effective strategy, and for his courage, the Archbishop of Havana was elevated to the status of cardinal by John Paul II in 1994. Despite his having been ordained comparatively late, he became one of the youngest cardinals of the age.
‘Jaime Ortega is a man of great intelligence. He has always had a long-term vision. He has a rare political flair, and he anticipated very early on that the regime would need to establish peaceful relations with the Church. He believes in taking his time,’ Roberto Veiga adds.
Mgr Ramón Suárez Polcari also stresses the cardinal’s talents: ‘Ortega is a man of God. But at the same time he has a great facility of communication. He is also a man of ideas and culture. He is very close to artists, to writers, to dancers …’
Since then, with a great sense of diplomacy, Ortega had organized the trips of three popes to Cuba, including the historic visit of John Paul II in January 1998, followed by that of Benedict XVI in March 2012, and two trips by Francis in 2015 and 2016. He also played an important part in the secret negotiations that enabled the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States (for which he met President Obama in Washington), and was involved in the peace negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas in Havana, before retiring in 2016.
The Brazilian intellectual Frei Betto, who knows Cuba well, and who published a book of interviews with Fidel Castro about religion, sums up the role of the cardinal during a conversation in Rio de Janeiro. ‘I know Ortega well. He is a man of dialogue who brought about a rapprochement between the Church and the Cuban revolution. He played a crucial part in that. I respect him a lot, even though he has always had reservations about liberation theology. He was the one who supervised the trips to Cuba by three popes, and Francis even came twice. And I would say, although I’m joking, that these days it’s easier to find Francis in Havana than in Rome!’
This remarkable career has been pursued at the inevitable cost of compromises with the regime.
‘Or
tega has not had fluid relations with the opposition and with dissidents since the 1980s. His relations are better with the government,’ Roberto Veiga matter-of-factly observes.
At the Vatican, some diplomats share this judgement. One of these is Archbishop François Bacqué, who was for a long time a nuncio in Latin America: ‘He was thought to be a bit too accommodating with the regime,’ Bacqué tells me.
Others in Rome are even more critical: one nuncio wonders if Ortega wasn’t serving ‘two masters at once’: the pope and Fidel. Another diplomat considers that the Cuban Church is not independent of the state, and that Ortega has played a double game: according to this view, he has told the Vatican one thing and the Castro brothers something else. Perhaps. But it seems that Pope Francis, who knows the Cuban political situation well, went on trusting Jaime Ortega.
During another trip to Cuba, on which I was accompanied by the Colombian Emmanuel Neisa, one of my Latin American researchers (changing passports and, several times, lodgings so as not to attract attention), we met many Cuban dissidents in Havana, including Bertha Soler, the spokeswoman for the famous Damas de Blanco, the courageous activist Antonio Rodiles, the artist Gorki and the writer Leonardo Padura (as well as several others whom I can’t name here). Points of view vary, but most of them were highly critical concerning Ortega’s role, even if these dissidents accept that he played a positive part in the liberation of certain political prisoners.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 63
