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	The Catholic Church's Bureaucratic Lament: "It Wasn't My Responsibility" By Susan Jacoby Washington Post March 19, 2010 http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/03/for_tuesday.html As I drank my coffee, read the Sunday papers and mused over Pope Benedict XVI's bureaucratic, responsibility-evading "apology" for the Irish Catholic hierarchy's long coverup of child sex abuse by priests, I felt a growing sense of familiarity with the spirit, if not the letter, of Benedict's weasely pastoral letter. Then I realized that the pope's tone resembled nothing so much as the standard formulations of Soviet newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when referring to "mistakes" made during the era of the "cult of personality"--the euphemism for Stalin's murderous tyranny. As a young journalist in Moscow during that era, I grew as habituated as Russians to sentences that acknowledged the commission of errors without any admission of who or what was responsible. "You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry," Benedict acknowledged in a pastoral letter read in churches throughout Ireland over the weekend. "Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated." Note the passive voice--not "your church has betrayed your trust" but "your trust has been betrayed." This passive construction is an infallible (you should excuse the expression) sign of the responsibility-evading apology, whether it comes from a celebrity in rehab or a politician. How different it would have been had Benedict written: "As the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, I, along with my predecessor and then-superior, Pope John Paul II, am responsible for allowing my bishops to cover up crimes to protect the image of the Church." But no. The pope merely criticized Ireland's bishops for "grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership"--and did not propose any sort of ecclesiastical punishment for any of them. But how could the pope decree punishment for Irish bishops without decreeing punishment for himself? The pedophile priest scandal, which has pretty much run its course in the United States, is now spreading across Europe. That includes Germany, where the pope was archbishop of Munich before moving to the Vatican as John Paul II's right-hand man. Last week, a psychiatrist who treated a priest accused of child molestation under the watch of then-archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, revealed that he had warned archdiocesan officials in writing that the priest in question should never again be allowed to work with children. The priest was, however, assigned to another parish immediately and was finally convicted in 1986 by civil courts of molesting more boys.One of Benedict's former deputies took responsibility for the decision to reassign the priest to another parish and said the future pope never knew about the psychiatrist's recommendation. That is irrelevant. In an organization with as clear-cut a hierarchy as the Catholic Church, if an archbishop doesn't know what's going on in his diocese, he doesn't want to know. It is all reminiscent of NIkita Khrushchev's excuses in his secret speech to the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress in 1956. Khrushchev denounced Stalin and then asked rhetorically, "Where were the members of the Politburo? Why didn't they come out against the cult of personality in time? Why are they acting only now?" Khrushchev's answer was that other high-level Communists "viewed these matters differently at different times" and hadn't known what Stalin was doing. See why the pope's letter sounded so familiar to me? Except the Catholic bishops of the 1970s and 1980s had much less excuse than Communist apparatchiks of Stalin's era for not doing anything to clean up the cesspool around them. As far as I know, the Church wasn't executing dissenting bishops in the 1980s, as Stalin was executing rivals and dissenting Communist officials in the 1930s. At most, bishops like Ratzinger risked being derailed from the fast track for promotion by owning up to the church's dirty big secret. And what was the Vatican's first response to the spreading scandal reported in the German press this month? First, Vatican officials expressed indignation that the Church was being singled out, given that pedophilia is a much larger social problem. While pedophilia is certainly a broader social problem (actually, a crime), it is certainly natural that the public is more concerned about priests or teachers molesting children than it is about the same crimes being committed by stockbrokers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. People who, by the nature of their profession, work frequently with children and whom children are brought up to trust are far more dangerous pedophiles than those whose professions do not allow them easy access to the young. The Vatican's second response was to attribute the new accusations to some sort of personally or politically motivated campaign against the pope in Germany. On March 13, a spokesman on Vatican radio declared tht it was "evident in recent days that there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tendency, in Regensburg and Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse. It is clear that those efforts have failed." Dream on, Vatican. A church that not only claims to be in possession of absolute truth but has maintained the most centralized hierarchy of any religious institution for the past 2000 years cannot claim that an archbishop is not personally responsible for what happened on his watch (or non-watch) or that the pope is not responsible for what every bishop does in the world. Does anyone think that the archbishop of Rhode Island, who publicly barred Rep. Patrick Kennedy from Holy Communion because of his pro-choice stance, did so without knowing that the Vatican would approve? In the pope's pastoral letter to the Irish, he urged that all Irish priests go on a "spiritual retreat" and suggested that special chapels be set aside where Catholics can pray for "healing and renewal." Terrence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, a lay group that follows church records and procedures in abuse cases, described Benedict's statement as an example of "a strong tendency to approach this aas a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and lack of accountability." Amen. Of course, the Catholic Church is based on the premise that it is accountable to no one but God, which is a fine way of justifying lack of accountability to human beings on earth--if your commmunicants are uneducated people, unaccustomed to freedom of speech and other democratic liberties. That was the case for most of the church's history, but it is no longer the case in the developed world. And that is why the church has lost one out of four American-born Catholics during the past 25 years. It is why the church can no longer count on the submissiveness of the faithful in formerly devoted countries like Ireland and regions like Bavaria. It is why the church can now hope to gain significant numbers of converts only in the most poorly educated areas of the world. And it is why the church has lost any real moral authority, even for those who are religious believers, in its battle against secularism. I am not sorry that the Catholic Church is finally being revealed for the morally bankrupt, bureaucratic institution that it is. But I am sorry that this is happening because of the suffering of generations of children. I am sorry for those who still love the Catholic faith--I grew up with them--and must reconcile that love with the terrible acts of the men who run their church. I am deeply grateful that, as an atheist educated in the Catholic Church, I no longer bear that burden. I also feel a deep sympathy for good priests--and I know many of them--who have never betrayed the trust of loyal Catholics. But for this pope, and all of the other church officials who knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it, I have nothing but contempt. They ought to resign and walk a personal via dolorosa every day of their lives. But they won't do it. They will continue to cling to worldly power with all of their might, even as the moral power of their institution diminishes.
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