The Vatican spent more than $2.5 billion settling historic abuse cases in the United States alone between 2004 and 2011. Individual bishops could not have authorized behind-closed-doors settlements of this magnitude. Ratzinger was “The Vatican’s Enforcer.” He was responsible for keeping the church in check, for handing down discipline, as cardinal and then as pope, and for excommunicating those who did not fall in line with John Paul’s views. Yet abusers were protected.
And what of the victims? The pain expressed by Pope Benedict in interviews and speeches repeatedly focused first on his horror that the sanctity of the priesthood was being called into question, before expressing sympathy and concern for the victims. During the 2010 interview for Light of the World, Peter Seewald challenged the pope over comments made by former German constitutional judge Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, who believed “the real reason for the decades-long failure … lies in deep-seated patterns of behavior according to a Church policy that places the welfare and reputation of the Church above all else. The welfare of the victims, on the other hand, automatically becomes a secondary matter, although actually they are first and foremost the ones in need of the Church’s protection.” Benedict’s response? “Analyzing this is, of course, not easy. What does Church policy mean? Why didn’t people react formerly in the same way they do now?” But the pope knew full well what the church’s policy was. He knew it by heart and had personally ratified the perpetuation of the system of cover-ups that had lasted for decades.
THE WORST CRIME
While John Paul and Ratzinger were certainly responsible for years of ignoring and concealing abuse committed by clergy, the practice outlined in the “church policy”—the very one Pope Benedict found so hard to analyze—is part of canon law and dates back to at least 1867. A secret Vatican document circulated to all bishops, bearing the official seal of Pope John XXII—a document that Cardinal Ratzinger would, in a modified form in 2001, ratify and enforce as the church’s instruction today—was obtained and published by The Observer newspaper in 2003. Entitled Crimen Sollicitationis (The Crime of Solicitation), the document showed that the methods employed throughout John Paul’s papacy were, in fact, following time-honored official Vatican guidelines, instructing bishops, when dealing with pedophiles and those guilty of sex with other men, or sex with underage boys or girls or “brute animals,” to “transfer [the offending priest] to another [assignment]” if warranted and deal with the matter “in a most secretive way,” all parties to be “restrained by a perpetual silence,” which is commonly regarded as “a secret of the Holy Office, in all matters and with all persons, under the penalty of excommunication.…” Regarding the secret oath just outlined, the keeping of the secret must be kept also “by the accusers or those denouncing [the priest].” Should the accusation be proved false, the bishops were instructed to destroy all documents, but with one copy of the report to be sent to the Holy Office.
Described by Daniel Shea, an American lawyer working for victims of abuse by Catholic priests, as a “blueprint for deception and concealment,” the document makes for chilling reading. As Collins notes, “At first Rome tried to isolate sexual abuse as a problem in the English-speaking world resulting largely from secularism and ‘pan-sexualism,’ as one curial cardinal called it.… To non-Anglos it seemed as though the US situation was just another example of degenerate preoccupation with sex with a particularly vicious anti-Catholic prejudice built into it.” But the document entitled “Instruction on the Manner of Proceeding in Cases of Solicitation” reveals that the practice of moving priests from parish to parish and protecting their sexual crimes has been common since at least 1962, with enforced papal secrecy surrounding allegations in place from as early as 1867.
Abuse of children, described by the Vatican in its “Instruction” as “the worst crime,” was so common that the church hierarchy had well-oiled procedures in place for dealing with perpetrators. In a document produced in 1922, the Vatican stated that “the accusation itself was considered the most serious accusation one could bring against a Roman Catholic priest. Therefore, the procedure took care to ensure that a priest who could be a victim of a false or calumnious accusation would be protected from infamy until proven guilty. This was achieved through a strict code of confidentiality which was meant to protect all persons concerned from undue publicity until the definitive decisions of the ecclesiastic tribunal.”
Jeffrey Ferro’s book Sexual Misconduct and the Clergy refers to a text from the year A.D. 731 entitled The Penitential of Bede. The author, an Irish monk named Bede, “advises clerics who sodomize children to repent by subsisting on bread and water for three to twelve years.” Moreover, in a series of essays, a former priest and vocal critic of the church’s handling of abuse, Thomas Doyle, outlined that while the vow of celibacy did not become official until the Second Lateran Council, in the twelfth century, it had been a policy advocated in church legislation since the Council of Elvira, in the fourth century, with the earliest “explicit condemnation of sex between adult males and young boys” appearing in the Didache (A.D. 50), known as the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.
Presented with a graphic history over nearly two thousand years, the question surely must be asked: How then could the church maintain such a policy of denial and secrecy around what it terms “the worst crime”?
Joseph Ratzinger would have known that, upon accepting the role of prefect of the CDF, a large part of his responsibilities would have been the handling of sexual abuse allegations. Here, surely, was an opportunity to heal the years of suffering of the victims by revising the procedures in place to promote greater transparency with the world outside the church.
Instead, in a letter explaining the “New Norms for Church Handling of Certain Grave Offenses,” dated May 18, 2001, he, “having carefully considered opinions and having made the appropriate consultations,” essentially reaffirmed the status quo. Ratzinger’s letter issued new guidelines stating that cases of alleged abuse were now subject to a statute of limitations of ten years following the victim’s eighteenth birthday, within which allegations may be considered by the church. It also stipulated that only priests were eligible to conduct “tribunals” when investigating allegations, and once local tribunals had been conducted, “all of the acts of the case are to be transmitted ex officio as soon as possible to the [CDF].” Finally, it reiterated that “cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,” meaning that clergy, victims, and witnesses would be excommunicated should they reveal any details.
Despite Ratzinger’s updated ruling that all cases of abuse were to be sent to the CDF, those bishops and priests who were brave enough to report allegations to Rome frequently reported receiving no answer whatsoever, only silence—an icy silence that prompted many victims to go public with their allegations. And yet, even under the glare of global condemnation, there remained no Vatican encouragement to report pedophile priests to the police.
Also astonishing is that there is no mention of the victims in any of these legal guidelines, other than that they, too, are bound by papal secrecy. In a 2006 Panorama documentary entitled “Sex Crimes and the Vatican,” Thomas Doyle scathingly concurs: “There’s no policy to help the victims, there’s absolutely no policy to help those who are trying to help the victims, and there’s an unwritten policy to lie about the existence of the problem. Then as far as the perpetrators, the priests, when they’re discovered the systemic response has been not to investigate and prosecute but to move them, to move them from one place to another in a secret way and not reveal why they’re being moved.”
Is Ratzinger’s May 2001 letter further evidence of a man so deeply detached from humanity, so oddly removed from the world, so immersed in clerical detail and procedure and the application of rules that he lost sight of human hearts and souls and literally forgot to think of the victims of sexual abuse as people? Or was he a man so wholly conflicted, consciously torn between what he described in his 2005 speech as the “filth wi
thin the church” and his loyalty to and faith in the pope, that he found himself unable to deviate from his course?
UNEASY LIES THE HEAD THAT WEARS A CROWN
Benedict XVI encountered scandal after scandal during his papacy, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the accusation surrounding the case of Fr. Peter Hullermann brought the sexual abuse scandal much closer to home—as close as his own desk.
From his childhood in Nazi Germany right through to handling abuse cases at the CDF and then on through the myriad difficulties faced during his papacy, Benedict’s survival mechanism was to detach, to focus on the doctrine, and to view everything in the abstract. Only when he was forced to remember his part, his hand, his responsibility in the “worst crimes,” did the gravity of the issue seem finally to become real.
As we know, while it was Benedict’s strong desire to preserve continuity after the death of John Paul II—giving a leader-style speech to this end—it was neither Benedict’s intention nor his desire to become pope himself, and this, in part, perhaps contributed to his failures in office. The countless examples of his detachment from reality and from people left him completely out of his depth, all the more so when he seems to have been so badly supported. His resignation, revolutionary given his reputation for conservatism, was described by the Roman daily newspaper La Repubblica as “an eruption of modernity inside the Church.” The irony is clear. As one professor of religion noted, “The theologian who held relativism as the worst foe of the church will be the pope who relativized the papacy.” If the papacy was now just a job from which the incumbent could retire, how then would it maintain its status as a higher, even divine, calling? How much holier than his devoted followers is the Holy Father if he does not elevate himself by devoting his life—his entire life—to the church?
Benedict boarded a helicopter shortly after 5 P.M. on February 28, 2013, and was whisked away over the rooftops of Rome, to a chorus of church bells ringing out below, to the seventeenth-century Apostolic Palace of Castel Gandolfo to begin his new life as “simply a pilgrim beginning the last leg of his pilgrimage on this earth.” At a little after 8 P.M., the Swiss Guards, protectors of popes for over five hundred years, took their leave of the papal summer residence. Benedict had ceased to be pope. He was the pope emeritus now and would, consequently, be protected by the Vatican security personnel at Castel Gandolfo until renovations were completed on the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Holy City, where he would live out his retirement. His beloved piano was traveling with him (his favorite composer is Mozart) along with his papers and many books, all of which would remain with him until rooms had been enlarged, studies created, and spare bedrooms modernized to suit the needs of a former pontiff in the comfort he was accustomed to.
The Vatican’s statements about the future of Benedict were laconic, to say the least, and many were surprised at Benedict’s decision to remain within its realm, having expected him to return to Germany. The thought of having an ex-pope and a sitting pope living side by side was more than a little strange, but the “experiment” had wider implications for ensuring Benedict’s future protection: the Vatican, lest we forget, is a sovereign state, and within its walls Benedict retained immunity from prosecution, should any legal cases of sexual abuse be brought to trial.
With so little information divulged to the public about how the inner workings of this new era could play out, the outside world was left to speculate as the heavy wooden doors of Castel Gandolfo were pulled closed.
Those who remained on the inside could be sure of one thing: here, at last, was the opportunity for change.
6
CONCLAVE
The cardinals voting at the 2005 conclave that elected seventy-eight-year-old Pope Benedict XVI had been fully aware that his advanced age meant his papacy would not be particularly long. It was a relatively straightforward matter to put aside their differences for the good of the church and agree on the direction for its immediate, if not long-term, future. Now Benedict’s dramatically early departure caught most in the curia off guard, and thoughts about a successor were far less defined than many would have wished.
Newspapers across the world published the same headline: the pope was leaving behind a church in crisis, besieged by scandal, and under threat from the spread of secularism. Old rifts about which direction the church should take were resurfacing. At their heart was a fundamental disagreement on the causes and solutions of the crisis. Traditionalists—Vatican II’s followers of ressourcement—believed that the church should look inward and elevate itself above society, giving its followers a higher goal to strive for. Followers, they presumed, look to the church for unchanging and ageless truths, certain that an institution that is married to the spirit of the age will be a widow in the next. The reformists—in favor of aggiornamento—disagreed. They felt such insularity was the cause of the problem, not the solution to it, and that the church should meet the changing needs of its flock and open its doors in a spirit of nonjudgmental outreach, adapting to modern society to ensure its relevance in people’s lives and therefore its own survival.
While the sides were poles apart, however, there were some areas of common ground. Both sides agreed, as eminent Vatican journalist and author John Allen explained to The New York Times, that they needed somebody who could “carry this idea of new evangelization, relighting the missionary fires of the church and actually make it work, not just lay it out in theory.” They needed a pope who would be “the church’s missionary in chief, a showman and salesman for the Catholic faith, who can take the reins of government more personally in his own hands.”
Candidates aside, there was no time to lose. Preparations for the election of Benedict’s successor began in earnest, and the Vatican announced that the conclave would begin on March 12, 2013. Even as the 115 cardinals from forty-eight countries began to pack their bags and gather their thoughts, the race for the 266th pope had begun.
THE ISSUES SEVEN YEARS ON
In the lead-up to the conclave to elect a successor to Benedict, John Allen who spoke with many cardinals in those turbulent days, wrote that the key requirements for the new pope were:
1. A man with global vision, especially someone who can embrace the two-thirds of the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world who live outside the West, a share that will be three-quarters by mid-century.
2. A pope for the “New Evangelization,” meaning someone who has the capacity to arouse missionary fervor in Catholics and to reach out to the wider world, inviting people to take a new look at the Church.
3. A strong governor willing and able to bring 21st century best practices of business management to the Vatican, making the place more transparent and efficient, and holding people accountable for poor performance.
This time, with so many disputes over the causes and solutions to deep-seated problems, there was no front-runner. But there were many potential candidates.
Bookies began taking bets minutes after Benedict’s announcement was made on February 12, but favorites continued to change right up until the day of the conclave, exactly one month later.
In his final year as pope, Benedict appointed twenty-four cardinals, just under one-fifth of the total electorate. This increased his total to a whopping ninety—roughly twelve per year, compared with John Paul’s annual average of nine. Commentators felt that Benedict’s flurry of appointments indicated that he was firming up the papacy for another European: eighteen of the new appointments came from Europe, and ten of those now held positions within the Vatican. But with so many new faces and little time for all members of the curia to get to know one another before the preconclave meeting began, there was an unusually high number of cardinals considered to be papabile.
THE PAPABILE
With the church’s “global vision” and “new evangelism” at the top of the agenda, it is perhaps prudent to consider 2013’s candidates in terms not of their conservative or progressive views, but rather of their position within the Old
or New World. Those from the Old World were perceived to have been cut from the same cloth as Pope Benedict. Candidates who heralded from the New World were the opposite. Most had a strong track record in drawing the faithful, boasting high attendance numbers to prove it. But the overwhelming majority had little to no experience of the inner workings of Vatican politics, casting doubt on their ability to successfully lead a church in crisis.
THE OLD WORLD
Comprising of cardinals from developed countries, the Old World candidates were facing such issues as the rise of secularism, declining church attendance, and scandals of sexual abuse by clergy. Their societies were wealthy and opinionated, which had consequently decreased the centrality of the church’s status and made for more political questioning of archaic church doctrine in the modern world.
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