Where Was the Real Cover Up, by Andrew Brown, Guardian, March 23, 2010

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	Where Was the Real Cover Up? By Andrew Brown Guardian March 23, 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/mar/23/religion-catholicism VATICAN CITY -- Culture is harder to change than rules and the real problem for the Vatican was not the printed rules but the tacit understandings I said there was something extraordinary and rather shocking hidden in Mgr Charles Scicluna's interview last week. It's hidden in plain sight, so obvious that it has so far been invisible: there was no Vatican conspiracy. There was no Vatican cover-up. Instead of one centrally ordered cover-up, there were hundreds of little local ones. They didn't require special regulations. They grew quite naturally out of the clerical culture. They worked by silence and omission rather than anything more obviously sinister. The scandal is going to be much worse as a result. Now the one thing that everybody knows about the Vatican is that it is an organisation which all priests must obey and all Catholics should, and that it has conspiracies, policies, secret orders written in Latin and so on. I don't expect anyone who believes in this to be persuaded. But here is the evidence, anyway. Scicluna is, in plain English, the Vatican's prosecuting council. He works at the CDF, which descends from the Inquisition. It is the body charged with maintaining discipline in the ranks. It is where the present Pope earned his nickname as God's Rottweiler when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. Since 2001, when Ratzinger demanded that all cases of sexual abuse be sent there for judgment, it has processed 3,000 cases, mostly American, from the last fifty years. Ratzinger worked on these himself before becoming pope, and Scicluna has a staff of nine to help him. It's not a great many, but all of the Vatican is understaffed by the standards of organisations outside. That has some relevance for the story which unfolds. Scicluna feels – of course – that the Vatican is being unfairly attacked. He says that they have now overcome the backlog which built up after Ratzinger's demand for cases in 2001, and are working in real time. They get around 250 cases a year now, out of the 400,000 priests around the world. That's about 0.06% of the priesthood every year, which is not, as he says, the figure which headlines would suggest. But the crucial line in his evidence comes much earlier. He says that between 1975 and 1983, there was not a single case referred to his office from anywhere in the world. This is astonishing. I'm sure he's telling the truth. But this should be scaring him out of his wits because the period when nothing at all was reported to Rome was also when the abuse was most frequent and widespread and from which the worst stories have since emerged. Look at the graph here, which admittedly only covers America. There were never fewer than 350 priests reported in any of the years between 1975 and 1983. None of those cases reached Rome for judgement. All of them were covered up spontaneously, almost unconsciously, by the local bishops. What this means, of course, is that in every country where there was abuse there were also cover-ups, and these will come to light all round the world. But it also means that there was no Vatican conspiracy. There was no central policy. There didn't need to be one to produce the terrible results that we see. Scicluna mentions the document Crimen Solicitationes, which is regularly brought up as a sinister proof that there was a centrally organised conspiracy. This was he says, drawn up in 1922, and reprinted for the bishops of the Vatican council 1962. But only 2000 copies were then printed, which wasn't nearly enough, so they were never distributed and just mouldered in the libraries. This kind of confusion sounds like every organisation I have ever known or dealt with. In any case, he says, the secrecy which this document laid down was only procedural: "A poor English translation of that text has led people to think that the Holy See imposed secrecy in order to hide the facts. But it was not like that. Secrecy during the preliminary phase of the investigation 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 otherwise. The Church does not like showcase justice. The norms on sexual abuse were never understood as a ban on denouncing [the crimes] to the civil authorities." Again, I believe him, though it is a bit rich for a spokesman of the church which invented the Auto da Fé to claim that "The Church does not like showcase justice", especially when he works in the office that administered those fiestas. But the important point is that Scicluna's defence makes matters worse. An explicit policy which demanded secrecy would be much easier to overturn than a culture which took it for granted. No ban may have been intended on denouncing the crimes to civil authorities, but neither was any explicit ban necessary. The denunciations never came. In Catholic terms, the church was structurally sinful.

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