BishopAccountability.org
	Ratzinger Then, Benedict Now By Ross Douthat The New York Times March 19, 2010 http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/ratzinger-then-benedict-now/ It tells you something about the horror of the Catholic sex abuse scandals — where there always seems to be some fresh awfulness to be exposed — that I’ve been hesitant to say anything about the allegations surrounding then-Archbishop Ratzinger’s handling of a sex abuse case in 1980s Germany. As far as I can tell, the future Pope Benedict’s role in the case seems to be wildly overstated. But of course there’s no way to be sure what tomorrow’s revelations will bring … I feel confident, however, recommending this characteristically trenchant piece from John Allen, the dean of Catholic journalists, which examines how the future Pope’s approach to the sex abuse crisis changed in the early 2000s, while he was still running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. For most of his time as a Cardinal, Allen suggests, Ratzinger held “the standard Vatican attitude at the time — that while priests may occasionally do reprehensible things, talk of a ‘crisis’ was the product of a media and legal campaign to wound the church.” But that began to change four years before he was elected Pope: Though it didn’t look like it at the time, the turning point in Ratzinger’s attitude came in May 2001, with a legal document from John Paul II titled Sacramentum sanctitatis tutela. Technically known as a motu proprio, the document assigned juridical responsibility for certain grave crimes under canon law, including sexual abuse of a minor, to Ratzinger’s congregation. It also compelled diocesan bishops all over the world to forward their case files to Rome, where the congregation would make a decision about the appropriate course of action. In the wake of the motu proprio, Ratzinger dispatched a letter to the bishops of the world, subjecting accusations of sexual abuse against priests to the authority of his office and insisting upon “confidentiality,” which critics typically regard as a code-word for secrecy. Whatever the merits of the 2001 letter, it set the stage for a dramatic change in Ratzinger’s approach. Msgr. Charles Scicluna, a Maltese priest who serves as the Promoter of Justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — in effect, its lead prosecutor — said in a recent interview with the Italian Catholic paper L’Avvenire that the motu proprio triggered an “avalanche” of files in Rome, most of which arrived in 2003 and 2004. Eventually, Scicluna said, more than 3,000 cases worked their way through the congregation. By all accounts, Ratzinger was punctilious about studying the files, making him one of the few churchmen anywhere in the world to have read the documentation on virtually every Catholic priest ever credibly accused of sexual abuse. As a result, he acquired a familiarity with the contours of the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic church can claim. Driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as “filth” in the church, Ratzinger seems to have undergone something of a “conversion experience” throughout 2003-04. From that point forward, he and his staff seemed driven by a convert’s zeal to clean up the mess. Read the whole thing — and especially the conclusion, where Allen notes that while the Pope has taken much more a stringent line on abusive priests, he’s stopped short of establishing mechanisms of accountability for the bishops whose administrative decisions have often made the scandal that much worse. (It’s a point that has particular relevance for the Church’s ongoing agony in Ireland.)
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.