By Rachel Donadio
The New York Times
April 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/europe/07vatican.html
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| Pope Benedict XVI at his inaugural Mass in April 2005. The cardinals who elected him hoped he would strengthen the church. |
ROME — The sexual abuse scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church is by far the most tenacious and complex crisis Pope Benedict XVI has faced. And it is a crucial test for a papacy that many Vatican observers say has a deep internal flaw: its management.
A shy theologian, Benedict is “a brilliant teacher and preacher, but not a strong administrator,” said George Weigel, an expert on the Vatican and a biographer of Pope John Paul II, in an e-mail message. “That’s fine for a pope, so long as he gets a strong administrator (or administrators) to do that side of the job.”
“To be candid,” Mr. Weigel added, “that’s what has seemed to many sympathetic observers of this pontificate that it has been missing thus far.”
It was not supposed to be this way. Five years ago, the cardinals who elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy saw in him a tough-minded leader who could strengthen the church, drawing on his two decades directing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s powerful doctrinal office.
But Benedict has run into administrative trouble at every turn. Four years after he quoted a Byzantine emperor’s assertion that Islam had brought things “evil and inhuman,” angering Muslims, he does not seem to have put in place a system to make the wheels of government run smoothly — or to help prevent the next public misstep.
That Benedict’s papacy has gone from crisis to crisis points to its difficulties as an ancient institution still struggling with modernity, even though the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in the 1960s was supposed to update the church’s relation to the world. Instead, it is facing the growing pains of a bureaucracy created in the 16th century to contend with the Protestant Reformation and the discovery of the New World. By some lights, it is still grappling with both.
A decade after a sexual abuse crisis hit the United States, stirring up fierce anger and costing the church an estimated $2 billion in settlements, Vatican experts say the Vatican has not yet constructed an adequate infrastructure for processing abuse cases. In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger took control of sexual abuse cases, with the stated aim of holding predator priests more accountable. Still, an office of only 10 people has worked on about 3,000 cases over 10 years, once they have been evaluated locally.
Nor has the Vatican adapted its centuries-old insular culture to face the exigencies of civil courts, let alone the courts of public opinion. Easter weekend provided two examples of what has become a pattern of tone-deafness in the hierarchy: The pope’s own preacher delivered a Good Friday sermon in St. Peter’s Basilica comparing criticism of the church’s handling of the sexual abuse crisis to anti-Semitism, offending abuse victims and Jews.
Then, during Easter Mass, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican secretary of state, denounced as “petty gossip” recent criticism of the church and of Benedict, who has been under scrutiny for his handling of sexual abuse cases when he was archbishop of Munich in 1980 and when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The cardinal’s remarks highlight a siege mentality that may comfort the pope, but does not answer his critics.
And while the Vatican may be a world power, it often seems to be run like an Italian village. “The Vatican is facing two main challenges: generational and cultural,” said one diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of straining ties with the Vatican. “The biggest challenge here is management.”
“If you look at the growth of the Catholic Church and the diversity and the sheer size, it’s a global organization,” the diplomat said. “But its institutional architecture hasn’t moved at a pace with that.”
The Vatican is divided into departments that rarely communicate with one another, out of a centuries-old culture of secrecy and autonomy. Benedict appears to make most decisions and write most speeches with little consultation. This has led to diplomatic incidents, as when the cardinal in charge of interfaith dialogue said he had not been informed that Benedict had revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, including one who turned out to have denied the scope of the Holocaust.
As in past crises, all eyes are on the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, for years Benedict’s trusted deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who is now responsible for running the Vatican’s political machinery — and for keeping the pope informed. Vatican insiders say that the pope is increasingly isolated and that Cardinal Bertone is one of the few officials who regularly see him.
A warm and charismatic figure, Cardinal Bertone does not have a diplomatic background, and Vatican observers and foreign diplomats accredited to the Holy See increasingly fault him for what they see as a worldview that revolves disproportionately around Italy.
Accusing the news media of calumnious attacks is a routine strategy in Italy, but it has not gone over well internationally. “That is a problematic approach, to say the least, given a global public opinion that widely disapproves with how the hierarchy in general has dealt with this issue,” said David Gibson, a biographer of Benedict who writes about religion for politicsdaily.com.
“If the pope would deal with this crisis the way he has dealt with past blowups — with some kind of personal explanation — Catholics and others would find it a much more satisfying and human and pastoral response,” Mr. Gibson said.
In his 2008 visit to the United States, Benedict apologized for priestly abuse and met with victims. Now, beyond a letter to Irish Catholics last month, he has not addressed the issue directly.
Both critics and supporters are waiting to see how — or if — the Vatican’s slow gears engage. Observers say there is a growing awareness inside the Vatican that the number of cases made public is certain to multiply — even in its own once untouchable backyard, Italy.
The prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William J. Levada, acknowledged last week that his office devoted a third of its time to handling abuses cases and that it would probably need to expand its staff as new cases arrived.
Few personnel and bureaucratic decisions have had so much riding on them — the legacy of Benedict’s papacy high on the list.
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