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	Arrest the Pope? I Rather Think We Should The sin of making victims and the community complicit in the abuse cover-up is still not acknowledged By Libby Purves The Times April 11, 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article7094757.ece A pair of voluble atheists — the usual suspects, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — plan a legal ambush to arrest Pope Benedict XVI during his state visit to Britain. They want him arraigned, Pinochet-style, before he can so much as kiss the airport tarmac. Well, we shall see. They come from a particular angle — that of determined unbelief — which dilutes their impact. We know that even if the Vatican had never done anything legally dubious or morally wrong, Hitch and Dawk would still hate it. So let me speak as a Deist and cradle Catholic — albeit long alienated — and say that I rather welcome their campaign. This thing needs airing properly, if the good bits of world Catholicism are to survive. Sometimes, with real sorrow, I fear that they won't. It is not just because of what bad priests did and bad bishops hid: it is also what they made others do. It is now beyond reasonable doubt that for many years — some of them horribly recent — in cases involving the abuse and rape of children the institution valued its own reputation above justice and kindness. Pope Benedict's concern for "the good of the universal Church" strikes a dreadful chill when we hear how dangerous priests were left in charge of children or moved away to oppress some new, unwary community. We now learn that it carried on in Britain even after we were smugly told that systems were reformed. Only four years ago, although a High Court had awarded one boy damages for admitted sexual abuse, the perpetrator, Father Pearce of Ealing Abbey, was kept on as a priest within a school — albeit not as a teacher. He was sufficiently unsupervised to groom another boy for sex, take him to a West End show and dinner and follow him abroad. As the police remarked: "You'd have thought they'd watch him like a hawk": but there is a point where smug corporate loyalty and naivety tip over into wickedness. From Ireland, America, Australia, Austria, the story is always the same: a brave complaint, an admission of guilt including other crimes, followed only by weak supervision and an exaggerated concern for the perpetrator. The wolf retains his clerical dress and status, making other children and their parents feel safe when they are not. Higher authority deplores the sin, takes the confession but won't risk corporate reputation by handling it properly. As the Murphy Commission scathingly put it, the priority was always "the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the Church and the preservation of its assets". What troubles me even more is that in doing this, church authorities repeatedly dragged other people into collusion and thus into what — in more convenient circumstances — they themselves would call sin. Young victims, particularly of sexual crimes, badly need to know that they are absolutely accepted as innocents betrayed: the crime is not their burden and does not define them. One of the ways in which societies achieve this is by openly punishing the perpetrator. Too often, that didn't happen. In some of the most infamous Irish cases the children who suffered were sworn to secrecy, with all the dusty, incense-smelling, habit-rustling impressiveness of canonical process. They were made to collaborate in the shame, by men round whose necks hung the cross they had been taught to revere. Even when there was no such formality, testimonies of the young victims tell us again and again how they would be ordered not to speak of it, often by shocked Catholic parents, and that keeping the invasive memory locked in their breasts bred guilt and shame that festered for a lifetime. Some killed themselves. Many speak of the particular misery of knowing that their silence — their collusion with the lie that all was well — condemned other younger children to the same ordeal. Nor is it only children who were stained by secrecy. The respect for church authority and wisdom in homogenous Catholic communities — schools, slums, villages — bred another horror. Not only did it make parents unwittingly betray their raped children by disbelieving them, but if you read memoirs of victims, such as Colm O'Gorman, you hear how in later years they would find that many of the adults around them always "sort of knew" — that there were jokes about the priest's little ways, that you'd do well not to get too close. From Ealing Abbey now we learn that the criminal Father Pearce was widely giggled about as "gay Dave" by the boys. People knew, but knew they mustn't speak. It is this particular aspect that troubles me ever more, as new cases unfold and the trail goes higher and higher up the hierarchy. To cover up a crime is wrong, especially when there is a clear risk the perpetrator will do it again. Don't take my word for it: turn to The Penny Catechism, which long ago I had to learn by heart. Numbers 328 and 329 refer, making it clear that we are "answerable for the sins of others" when we share the guilt "by counsel, command, consent, provocation, by concealment, by silence . . .". Forget the lordly authoritarianism which speaks of the "good of the Universal Church": that Church itself plainly states that concealing crime by silence is wrong, and that it is worse still to counsel and command others to commit the same sin of silence and concealment. Yet this crime, this sin, was being regularly urged on children, parents and parishioners by men in authority: the solemn clerical authority which purports to draw its privilege direct from the eternal Truth and to see into the depths of the heart. It is an all-male authority, too, in which the greenest young priest outranks an experienced nun or devout mother. It has been the perfect screen for wickedness. Most priests are not wicked. Catholics, in my experience, whether lay or clerical tend to be rather good people: gentle, spiritually aware, concerned for others, kept decently humble by the explicitness of Confession. But their Church has betrayed them, because it fossilised into a culture of hierarchy and unquestioning obedience, at the expense of individual conscience and intelligence. This is the fault line that may bring it down. I don't want that, even if Hitchens and Dawkins do. But in making those who trusted it complicit in concealment, the Catholic Church has done a great and terrible wrong to its faithful. And I fear the Vatican still hasn't grasped the full corruption of that.
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