By Richard Owen
The Times
March 10, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/world_agenda/article7056688.ece
ROME -- When Cardinal Sean Brady, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, met journalists in Rome after a two day carpeting by Pope Benedict XVI of Ireland's bishops over sex abuse scandals last month, he appeared contrite. "There have been failures in our leadership," he told us. "The only way we will regain credibility will be through our humiliation."
Lent, Cardinal Brady said, was "a time of penance, and we must begin with ourselves and have a change of heart."
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| The Pope said the abuse was a heinous crime and grave sin, but critics say he needs action not words Photo by Remo Casill |
Similar expressions of contrition and "humiliation" can be expected from Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops Conference, when he meets the Pope on Friday as the growing clerical sex abuse scandal engulfs the Pontiff's native Germany.
Even now though, despite the spread of a scandal that began in the United States in 2002 and has since embroiled Ireland, Austria, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands, there is a danger that the Vatican and Pope Benedict have not fully grasped the devastating damage it is doing to the standing of the Roman Catholic Church.
"Papal Whitewash" ran one headline in the Irish press after Pope Benedict's encounter with the Irish bishops. No bishops were sacked, no abuse victims were heard, and the Pope — who is to visit Britain in September — announced no plans to visit Ireland to apologise and to mend fences.
Vatican officials appear bemused by widespread media coverage this week of the admission by Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's older brother, that he "slapped" choirboys at a Regensburg boarding school where pupils suffered sex abuse at the hands of a "sadistic" headmaster. "This is irrelevant," one said.
But even though Monsignor Ratzinger claimed not to have been aware of the sexual — as opposed to physical — abuse at the school, his remarks opened a window onto the climate of fear, secrecy, repression, hypocrisy and cover ups in which sexual abuse took place in Catholic institutions.
The Vatican has only slowly — and reluctantly — moved from refusal to face the problem of clerical sex abuse to attempts to deal with it publicly as the scandals and lawsuits multiply. The Pope's spokesman argued defensively this week that the problem was wider than the Church, and even claimed the Church had acted "decisively and swiftly".
Roman Catholic bishops in a number of the affected countries have adopted new guidelines to protect children from abuse, including better co-operation with the police and civil authorities. The Vatican has come a long way since the US abuse crisis of 2002, when many senior Vatican officials dismissed the problem of paedophile priests as largely confined to a minority of clerics in the Anglophone world.
Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the Brazilian head of the Congregation for the Clergy, recently admitted sexual abuse was "extremely serious and criminal".
The Pope himself called it "not only a heinous crime but also a grave sin which offends God", an echo of Pope John Paul II's 2002 definition of clerical sex abuse as 'delictum gravius' — or a grave sin. On his 2008 visit to the United States Pope Benedict admitted that he was "deeply ashamed" of the scandal.
Yet it was Pope Benedict himself who as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — the successor to the Inquisition — who imposed secrecy on sex abuse cases in 2001, making them subject to "papal confidentiality" in a document called "Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela" or Safeguarding the Sanctity of the Sacraments.
The suspicion lingers in the Vatican that the crisis is all part of an anti-Catholic plot to undermine the Church — or as the Pope's brother put it this week, to foster "a spirit of animosity" towards it.
The Church, Vatican officials maintain, is being singled out unfairly. Last year the Holy See stated that "in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5 per cent and 5 per cent of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases," adding that the figure was comparable to that of other groups and denominations.
Then there is the argument — advanced by Monsignor Ratzinger among others — that attitudes and mores have changed over the years. As Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, pointed out recently, "Our understanding of this problem has evolved ... In those days, years ago, decades ago, people didn't realise how serious this was, and so rather than pulling people out of the ministry directly and fully, they were moved."
To the wider public however this all sounds like evasion and self-justification, not contrition. The Pope's brothers revelations have brought the sex abuse problem uncomfortably close to home — and many are now wondering how long it will be before sex abuse cases come to light in the archdiocese of Munich, where the Pope was Archbishop from 1977 to 1982.
Even in the short time since he summoned the Irish bishops to Rome, a flood of sex abuse cases has emerged in Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn and other German cities. "An immense tragedy is becoming apparent," said Father Stefan Dartmann, head of the Jesuit order in Germany.
How he responds to that tragedy could be the defining moment of Pope Benedict's pontificate. The pastoral letter he is due to issue to the faithful in Ireland on the sex abuse crisis will be closely scrutinised for evidence that the Pontiff can confront the scale of the crisis.
"Sexual abuses of minors by representatives of the clergy are criminal acts, shameful, inadmissible mortal sins, ignoble actions, among the darkest of the Church," Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Council for Christian Unity, said this week. "There needs to be a serious house cleaning in our Church. The Pope is not just going to stand by and watch."
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