By Ruth Gledhill
The Times
April 10, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7093936.ece
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| Pope Benedict XVI |
Pope Benedict XVI was dragged directly into the scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church when a letter with his signature emerged implicating him in the failure to defrock a known paedophile priest.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger resisted pleas from a Californian diocese to defrock a priest with a record of molesting children, putting “the good of the universal Church”, above other considerations, according to the 1985 letter.
The correspondence, obtained by the Associated Press, undermines the repeated insistence from the Holy See that Benedict XVI has had no personal involvement in covering up the sins of paedophiles.
The letter, bearing the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s signature, was typed and in Latin, and is part of years of correspondence between the Diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed laicisation of Father Stephen Kiesle.
Vatican officials condemned what they said was a “relentless campaign” to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the sex abuse scandals.
Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s spokesman, said: “The Holy See press office does not believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations. It is not strange that there are single documents which have Cardinal Ratzinger’s signature.”
Father Ciro Benedettini, another Vatican spokesman, said: “The then Cardinal Ratzinger didn’t cover up the case, but as the letter clearly shows, made clear the need to study the case with more attention, taking into account the good of all involved.”
The diocese recommended removing Kiesle from the priesthood in 1981, the year Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which shared responsibility for disciplining abusive priests.
The case languished for four years at the Vatican before Cardinal Ratzinger finally wrote to Bishop John Cummins, in Oakland. It was two more years before Kiesle was removed.
In the 1985 letter, Cardinal Ratzinger said the arguments for removing Kiesle were of “grave significance” but added that such actions required very careful review and more time. He also urged the bishop to provide Kiesle with “as much paternal care as possible” while awaiting the decision, according to a translation by Professor Thomas Habinek, of the University of Southern California classics department.
The future Pope noted that any decision to defrock Kiesle must take into account the “good of the universal Church” and the “detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly considering the young age”. Kiesle was 38 at the time.
He had been sentenced in 1978 to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to charges of molesting two young boys in a rectory in the San Francisco Bay area. In his earliest letter to Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Cummins warned that returning Kiesle to ministry would cause more of a scandal than stripping him of his priestly powers.
“It is my conviction that there would be no scandal if this petition were granted and that as a matter of fact, given the nature of the case, there might be greater scandal to the community if Father Kiesle were allowed to return to the active ministry,” Bishop Cummins wrote in 1982.
Kiesle was eventually laicised in 1987. In 2002 he was arrested and charged with 13 counts of child molestation from the 1970s. All but two were thrown out after the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a California law extending the statute of limitations.
In 2004 he did not contest the charge of molesting a young girl in his home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in prison. Kiesle, now 63 and a registered sex offender, lives in Walnut Creek, California.
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