Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  The suspicion that Summorum Pontificum and the pope’s other liturgical interventions represented a dramatic papal ‘opening to the Right’ seemed confirmed by Benedict’s tenacious attempts at reconciliation with the schismatic Society of St Pius X, the breakaway group founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The Lefebvrists rejected not only the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, but also its teaching on ecumenism, religious freedom and Episcopal collegiality. Benedict, while insisting that they must accept the fundamental teaching of the Council, offered the group the privileged status of a ‘personal prelature’, which would have ensured them a large measure of autonomy under their own bishops. In pursuit of this goal, in 2009 the pope unilaterally lifted the excommunication under which the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X had lain since their ordinations by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988. Within days it emerged that one of them, Richard Williamson, had given an interview on Swedish television in which he denied the existence of the Nazi extermination camps and had challenged the concept of anti-Semitism. The Vatican, with a major public relations disaster on its hands, could only say in extenuation that neither the pope nor his advisers had yet mastered the use of the internet, and so had known nothing of Williamson’s views. Those views proved too great an embarrassment even for the Society of St Pius X, and Williamson was subsequently expelled. By the end of Benedict’s pontificate negotiations with the Lefebvrists had in any case stalled on their intransigent rejection of the Council. But the ill-advised lifting of the excommunication seemed to many not merely yet another papal banana-skin, an alarming indication not only of Vatican insensitivity and incompetence, but of the pope’s own liturgical and doctrinal sympathies. The whole incident certainly appeared to be a major set-back for relations between Catholics and Jews, already under strain because of Benedict’s restoration of Good Friday prayers for the conversion of the Jews in the revived Latin liturgy.

  Benedict’s apparent propensity to pursue his own agenda against the tide of Episcopal opinion was manifested once again in January 2011 with the announcement of the establishment of the ‘Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham’ as a refuge for dissident Anglicans. Under the terms of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, issued on the eve of Guy Fawkes day 2009, Benedict had offered Anglican bishops, priests and congregations, alienated from their own church by developments such as the ordination of women, corporate entry into full communion with the Catholic Church, while preserving elements of ‘Anglican patrimon’ in their liturgy and church order. The Ordinariate was placed, not, as might have been expected, under the jurisdiction of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, whose Prefect was not in fact consulted about its establishment, but under that of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and its prefect Cardinal Levada. Belief that significant numbers of Anglican congregations were eager to enter Catholic communion may have originated from Levada’s encounters with well-funded and high-profile dissident Episcopal congregations in the United States and Australia. Extravagant and, as it turned out, unfounded claims by the Australian Primate of the ‘Traditional Anglican Communion’, Archbishop John Hepworth (a twice-married former Catholic priest), that he would bring 300,000 former Anglicans with him, also played a part. A Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter was established for former American Episcopalians in January 2012, and the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady the Southern Cross for dissident Australian Anglicans, in June 2012.

  The English Ordinariate got off to a predictably shaky start: if anyone had expected a landslide, they were to be disappointed. Three serving and two retired Anglican bishops entered the Ordinariate, together with about seventy priests and between 600 and 900 laity. The new body included some admirable people, but the bare statistics invited jokes about tribes that were all chiefs and no indians. Piquantly, a ‘Customary’ or breviary produced for the use of the Ordinariate drew much of its material from the Book of Common Prayer, to the discomfiture of many of the incoming clergy, almost all of whom as Anglicans had preferred the Roman Rite. The English Roman Catholic bishops had been bypassed in the negotiations, and most were at best lukewarm about this unwelcome Papal venture: the Ordinariate found itself struggling financially. And ecumenically, its establishment was a disaster. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, probably the most Catholic-minded Anglican Primate since the reformation, had built warm relationships with both John Paul II and Pope Benedict. But he was informed of plans for the Ordinariate less than two weeks before the public announcements, and his exclusion from this secretive process was widely seen as a personal rebuff, and the Ordinariate itself as a Vatican retreat from forty years of ecumenical engagement with the wider Anglican communion. Once again, an idiosyncratic papal project had ostensibly been pursued without consultation or regard to the views of the local episcopate.

  VII CRISIS AND RESIGNATION

  Undoubtedly the largest shadow over Benedict’s pontificate was the mounting crisis over clerical sexual abuse, and over episcopal and Vatican handling of offending priests and religious. It was a problem Benedict inherited from his predecessor. Until 2001, jurisdiction over cases of clerical sexual abuse was divided. Most were dealt with by local bishops without reference to Rome (during the decade 1975 to 1985 no clerical abuse cases whatever were referred to Rome): sexual solicitation by priests in the confessional fell under the jurisdiction of the CDF, while other forms of clerical deviance fell under the remit of the Congregation for the Clergy. Ecclesiastical attitudes to paedophilia and its perpetrators were often naïve and badly informed, church law on the subject antiquated, and the church authorities appeared preoccupied by the ‘reform’ of the guilty, and the avoidance of scandal. Victims of abuse were routinely sworn to secrecy, and perpetrators often redeployed away from the scene of their offences. Press coverage of spectacular cases like that of the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Gröer, and a wave of revelations about historic cases of paedophile abuse in the United States and Ireland, made it imperative that the Church reform its handling of such cases. In 2002 the Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law, resigned after it became clear that he had failed to remove abusive clergy from pastoral ministry, and over the next ten years there were to be a stream of other high-profile casualties, like Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles, peremptorily removed by the Vatican in 2011 for similar failures. Ratzinger himself at first seems to have shared the widespread naivete and instinct for silence about such cases: pleas from local hierarchies in America and Ireland to dismiss abusers from the priesthood were not well received. But he seemed to become increasingly disturbed by the growing flood of horrifying dossiers coming across his desk, and frustrated by the competing jurisdictions and red tape which hampered a coherent policy in dealing with them. In 2001 he persuaded John Paul II to place all cases of clerical sexual abuse under the sole jurisdiction of the CDF, and established a team there to handle them, headed by a formidable and incorruptible Maltese canon lawyer, Mgr Charles Scicluna. Over the next ten years Scicluna carried through a far-reaching reform of Vatican procedures, and imposed a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy in handling paedophile clergy. He worked against a background of increasingly hostile press coverage of alleged clerical cover-ups, and a series of multimillion dollar legal settlements with victims of sexual abuse by North American dioceses, which threatened to bankrupt the richest province of the Catholic Church. He also worked in a Vatican often resistant to what he had been appointed to do. In 2010 Cardinal Sodano, no admirer of Ratzinger or his protégés, used an Easter sermon in Benedict’s presence to dismiss press coverage of the ever-increasing revelations about clerical sexual abuse as ‘the petty gossip of the day’. Sodano’s aside roused a storm of protest, and revealed for many a failure at the highest levels to grasp the damage being done to the Church’s moral credibility by public perception of its handling of such cases.51

  Scicluna’s reforms, real as they were, did not and could not satisfy demands that all church files on those accused
of abuse should simply be handed over to the secular authorities. The Church had indeed a horror of scandal, and more than a millennium of jealous resistance to secular incursion into spiritual matters. But Vatican reluctance to sanction the denunciation of deviant priests to national police forces was more than self-protecting obstructionism. A global institution which had to operate under hostile and despotic governments as well as liberal democracies was bound to have reservations about agreeing tout court to surrender its competence, its records, and its personnel to state machinery, though it now urged all bishops to comply with the local law of the land. Scicluna (and behind him Ratzinger) was also hampered by resistances within the Church itself. One of the highest profile abuse cases was that of the Mexican religious leader Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado. Maciel was the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, one of the ultraorthodox religious movements favoured by John Paul II, and a personal friend of the Polish pope himself, who praised him as ‘an efficacious guide to youth’ and nominated him to key commissions on clerical formation. It also became apparent that he was a hypocrite on an epic scale, a serial sexual abuser of young seminarians, and the father of at least three children (one of whom he also sexually abused) by several women. Maciel’s double life had been the subject of rumour since the mid-1950s, and he was denounced to Rome by victims in the 1980s, but action against him was ham-strung by his friendship with Papa Wojtyla, who adamantly refused to credit any of the charges, by the support of Wojtyla’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, by a flow of lavish donations to papal causes (Maciel was said to have helped finance Wojtyla’s first visit to Poland), and by cash sweeteners to Vatican officials. Notably, Cardinal Ratzinger had declined the envelope full of cash offered to him after a lecture to the Legionaries in 1997, a fastidiousness sadly not emulated by other high-ranking curial colleagues. The CDF dossier on Maciel, begun in the 1990s and reopened in 2004, had to be left in a drawer till Wojtyla’s death. Frustration about Maciel’s immunity was probably one of the factors informing Ratzinger’s impassioned denunciation of the ‘filth’ which had invaded the Church, in the prayers he devised for the Good Friday Stations of the Cross at the Coliseum in 2005, during the last weeks of Wojtyla’s life. Once elected pope himself, Ratzinger at last moved against Maciel. In May 2006 the Mexican was removed from office, and Benedict ordered him to retreat to a life of seclusion, penitence and prayer. This appeared to be a public declaration of Maciel’s guilt, but did not, in the event, involve much in the way of sackcloth and ashes. He died in January 2008, in a poolside villa in Jacksonville, Florida, financed by the Legionaries, attended by Legion clergy, and comforted by the mother of one of his daughters. He never faced a court, and despite his disgrace, the Legionaries did nothing to distance themselves from his memory, till fresh revelations a year after his death made acknowledgement of Maciel’s villainy inescapable. In 2009 Benedict set up an Apostolic Visitation to investigate the Legionaries. The official communiqué on the Visitation the following year denounced Maciel’s life as ‘devoid of scruples and authentic religious sentiment’, ordered a reform of the system of authority within the Legion which had sustained and concealed his misdemeanours, acknowledged the suffering of his victims, and praised the ‘courage and constancy’ of those who had persevered in uncovering his crimes.

  The Maciel case made clear Benedict’s personal horror at sexual abuse, and his real if hesitant determination to deal with its perpetrators. After some initial reluctance on his part, meetings between the pope and victims of clerical sexual abuse became a feature of papal apostolic journeys, and apologies for the church’s failures were built into key speeches and sermons. But the fear of scandal, deference to power, and rank corruption which had hindered and protracted the process against Maciel, and the fact that neither he nor those who shielded him ever faced a tribunal or secular punishment, also exposed the continued limitations of the Church’s procedures under Benedict.

  A similar mix of good intentions and limited vision characterized Benedict’s response to the crisis over clerical abuse in Ireland. From the 1990s onwards the standing of the Church in what had been till then the most Catholic country in Europe was pulverised by a relentless torrent of revelation and accusation about the physical, mental and sexual abuse of minors by clergy and religious, in parishes, church-run schools, penal institutions and orphanages. Ireland in the age of the short-lived ‘Celtic Tiger’ was in any case in the grip of a gleeful if belated wave of secularization, which the abuse scandals fed. But a series of public reports, particularly those on the diocese of Ferns (2006), and the Murphy report on the Dublin archdiocese (2009), made clear that such abuse had indeed been shockingly prevalent, shielded by a culture of deference and concealment in which civil as well as religious authorities were complicit. These revelations triggered a number of Episcopal resignations over complicity through concealment, the silencing of victims, or the pastoral redeployment of known abusers. In April 2004 the Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond O’Connell, was obliged to step down in favour of his recently appointed coadjutor, Diarmuid Martin, a toughminded Vatican diplomat with clean hands who had been bussed in to lead the Irish Church’s response to the crisis. In March 2010 it was the turn of the Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Sean Brady, to face widespread calls for his resignation, in the wake of revelations that, as a diocesan official in the 1970s, he himself had sworn abuse victims to secrecy.

  In this fevered atmosphere, on 19 March 2010, after a series of frosty meetings with the Irish bishops, Benedict issued a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, deploring the abuse and its cover-up, expressing sorrow to the victims, and acknowledging the roots of the scandal in ‘inadequate procedures for determining the suitability of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life; insufficient human, moral, intellectual and spiritual formation in seminaries and novitiates; a tendency in society to favour the clergy and other authority figures; and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal’.52

  This was the fullest acknowledgement to date by any pope of the problem of sexual abuse and its root causes, and Benedict’s letter was intended to make clear how seriously he took the crisis, in Ireland and more widely. But to many observers within as well as beyond the Church his response seemed to fall short of what was required. The pope suggested in his letter that the wave of abuse might be a consequence of recent secularising trends, in which the softening of zeal since the Second Vatican Council, and the abandonment of traditional practices like regular confession, had played a major part. To his critics, Benedict seemed too ready to blame deep-seated and endemic problems on the liberalisation of Catholicism after the Council, rather than face up to the links between abuse and the Church’s long-standing clericalist ethos and authoritarian structures. Benedict’s letter also laid the responsibility for the mishandling of abuse cases squarely on the shoulders of the Irish bishops. There was no acknowledgement anywhere in it that inadequacies in the Church’s law or in the Vatican’s own direction might have contributed to failures in pastoral care and the demands of justice. And Benedict’s subsequent refusal of the resignation of two of the auxiliary bishops of the Dublin diocese criticized in the Murphy report seemed to many to undermine the efforts of reformers like Archbishop Martin to deal decisively with the situation and restore public confidence.

  Scandal over sexual abuse dogged the last years of Benedict’s pontifcate, and added measurably to the drift away from the Church which he so deplored. In 2010 he had established the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation, with the specific remit of reversing the ‘progressive secularization of society and the eclipse of the sense of God’ in Christianity’s European heartlands. But the relentless leakage went on, not least in his native Germany, where Die Zeit newspaper reported that 180,000 Germans had formally ended their affiliation to the Catholic Church and withdrawn from paying the church tax in 2010, a 40% rise on the previous year, well beyond any mere statistical fluctuation
. In the decade to 2011, the numbers of Catholic clergy in Europe as a whole had dropped by 9%, the number of seminarians was down by 22%, male religious by 18%, female religious by 22%. Scandal over money as well as sex contributed to a growing sense of malaise and disenchantment. The stubborn opacity of the activities of the Vatican Bank (IOR) had led to longstanding suspicions of corruption (notoriously, Vatican financial corruption had provided the central strand for the plot of the 1990 gangster-movie Godfather III). In 2010 the Italian authorities froze $30,000,000 of Vatican funds, on suspicion that it was part of a money-laundering scheme. The money was subsequently released, and later that year Benedict established the Financial Information Authority, in an attempt to increase transparency and restore international confidence. But the Vatican’s financial troubles did not go away. In May 2012, allegedly after a falling out with Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, the bank’s president, Ettore Tedeschi, was ousted by the board of directors, amid mutual accusations of corruption and malpractice. In January 2013 the Italian financial authorities froze all transactions with the Vatican Bank because of its failure to comply with EU regulations governing transparency. For a month, visitors to Vatican City shops and tourist facilities were unable to pay by credit card, until the Vatican was bailed out by a Swiss bank which did not have to abide by EU regulations.