By Richard Owen
The Times
March 15, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7061620.ece
VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican launched a counter-attack over the weekend to limit damage over reports in Germany linking Pope Benedict XVI to the clerical abuse crisis. It announced that it would lift the statute of limitations for priests accused of molestation.
Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman, condemned "aggressive attempts" to draw Pope Benedict into the scandals engulfing the Roman Catholic Church after it emerged that a paedophile priest was sent to the Munich archdiocese for "therapy" while the Pope was archbishop there 30 years ago and later allowed to resume pastoral duties.
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| The Pope's spokesman claimed there was a plot to smear the pontiff Photo by Danilo Schiavella |
Father Lombardi said that attempts to involve the Holy Father in the sexual abuse scandals had failed, and hinted that there was a plot to smear him.
"There have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," he said.
Father Lombardi told Vatican Radio that "these events which are spoken of have been amply clarified by the Archdiocese of Munich".
Accusations of a papal cover-up were defamatory, he added. Monsignor Charles Scicluna, "promoter of justice" of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, also said that it was "false and slanderous" to accuse Pope Benedict of a cover-up.
Monsignor Scicluna, a Maltese cleric whose post makes him the Vatican's chief prosecutor in sex abuse cases, said in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops' Conference, that the future Pope had shown "wisdom and firmness" in handling cases of abuse when he was Vatican head of doctrine from 1982 until his election as Pope in 2005.
However, he admitted that "it may be that in the past, perhaps out of a misdirected desire to protect the good name of the institution [of the Church], some bishops were, in practice, too indulgent towards this sad phenomenon".
Critics say that Pope Benedict imposed secrecy on sex abuse cases as head of doctrine in 2001 by making them subject to "papal confidentiality" in a document called Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (Safeguarding the Sanctity of the Sacraments).
On Friday the Munich-based Suddeutsche Zeitung disclosed that as Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope had been involved in a decision to allow a priest accused in Essen in 1979 of sex offences with an 11-year-old boy to stay at a rectory in his Munich archdiocese to undergo therapy.
The victim said that after a trip to the Eifel mountains the priest, "Father H", had given him alcohol, locked him in his bedroom, taken off his clothes and forced him to engage in oral sex.
The victim told German media that his family were assured at the time that the priest would not be allowed near children again.Instead "Father H" was transferred to the nearby town of Grafing – without Archbishop Ratzinger's knowledge, according to the archdiocese. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and fined for sexually abusing minors but later allowed to resume the priesthood.
The Turin paper La Stampa today named "Father H" as Father Peter Hullermann, priest since 2008 at the spa town of Bad Tölz in the foothills of the Alps. However, it said that he appeared to have "gone to ground" and reported no trace of him at his home or the local church.
Monsignor Gerhard Gruber, the former vicar general in Munich, has taken full responsibility for moving the priest to another parish, saying that it was a bad mistake. He said that there had been about 1,000 priests in the diocese at the time, and Cardinal Ratzinger "could not deal with everything".
However, some liberal German Catholics have said that the future Pope was ultimately responsible.
The Pope was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977 after decades as a theology professor. Pope John Paul II transferred him to Rome in 1982 as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, where he remained until his election as pontiff in 2005 after John Paul's death.
Monsignor Scicluna said practice had shown that the current expiry limit of ten years for sex abuse cases was insufficient.
In a rare insight into the Vatican's handling of sex abuse, he said that from 2001 to 2009 his office had examined 3,000 allegations of sexual offences against minors, 80 per cent of them from the United States.
Twenty per cent had come to Church trial, with half of the priests being sacked by the Pope and half stepping down voluntarily.
"We can say that about 60 per cent of the cases chiefly involved sexual attraction towards adolescents of the same sex, and another 30 per cent involved heterosexual relations," he said. Ten per cent, or 300 cases, had involved alleged abuse of pre-pubescent children, "paedophilia in the true sense of the word".
Some cases had not come to trial because of the statute of limitations or "the advanced age of the accused". However, offenders had faced other penalties including being banned from celebrating Mass or hearing confession.
"It must be made absolutely clear that in these cases, some of which are particularly sensational and have caught the attention of the media, no absolution has taken place," Monsignor Scicluna said.
Asked if the Vatican had obstructed justice, Monsignor Scicluna said secrecy during investigations had "served to protect the good name of all the people involved; first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right — as everyone does — to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty".
Church secrecy had "never been understood as a ban on denouncing the crimes to the civil authorities".
The scandal in the pontiff's homeland is part of a wave of sex abuse allegations from Ireland to the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria, including the Vienna Boys Choir.
Father Lombardi said that the Pope wanted an "absolutely rigorous and transparent line" on the paedophilia scandals in the Church and would "confront, judge and adequately punish such crimes under ecclesiastical rules".
Allegations emerged last week of abuse of boys in the famous Domspatzen choir in Regensburg run for 30 years by the Pope's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, who has admitted hitting choirboys.
He said he knew nothing of sex abuse cases, which predated his time at the choir from 1964 to 1994. However, Thomas Mayer, a former Regensburg choirboy, told Der Spiegel he had been sexually and physically abused in 1992.
Another former chorister told Der Spiegel that Monsignor Ratzinger had been so "irascible" that one one occasion he threw a chair at members of the choir and on another yelled in such a rage that his dentures fell out.
The scandals have set off a Church debate over whether paedophilia is linked to priestly celibacy. On Friday Benedict defended celibacy as a "sacred gift" which could not be given up for "passing cultural fashions".
The Pope made no reference to the abuse crisis in his Angelus address today. Instead he attacked atheists, whose resistance to God was "like children rebelling against their parents", as in the parable of the prodigal son. He praised the family as "the hope of Europe".
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