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	Pride and Wickedness Embattled and arrogant to the last, a Colombian cardinal implicates Pope John Paul II in the cover-up By Austen Ivereigh Guardian April 21, 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/21/religion-castrillon-coverup-johnpaul2 The past weeks' media firestorm over the Catholic Church's handling of sex abuse cases has cleared a lot of debris. The problem is not Pope Benedict, or a celibate all-male priesthood, or homosexuality. It is not, primarily, about structures or guidelines; nor about canon versus civil law. The crisis has at its root a mindset, a mentality, which vividly surfaced last Thursday when a French Catholic website posted a letter from a now retired Vatican official. The way Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos subsequently sought to defend himself has shed more light on the Catholic sex abuse crisis than anything else this year. Cardinal Castrillón was no ordinary official. From 1996 to 2006, he headed the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome, the department which safeguards the interests and rights of priests. In September 2001, he wrote to a French bishop to praise him for refusing to turn over an abusive priest to the police. The letter could not have been clearer or more damning. "I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration," the Colombian wrote to Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux-Lisieux. "You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest." The last was a reference to the fact that Bishop Pican had received a suspended three-month sentence for refusing to report the crimes of Fr René Bissey, claiming that to do so would have violated the confessional (in fact, he had learned of the abuse from one of the victim's mothers). Nor, when Cardinal Castrillón wrote the letter, could he have been in any doubt about the priest's guilt. He had been jailed the year before for 18 years for the sexual abuse of 11 boys. But the letter was significant for a deeper reason. It was written some months after Pope John Paul II had transferred responsibility for abuse cases from Cardinal Castrillón's department to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), headed by Cardinal Ratzinger. The transfer was accompanied by a series of changes to church law which enabled Rome to fast-track the laicisation of abusive priests, and which demanded that all credible abuse allegations against priests be sent by local dioceses to the CDF -- to ensure that they could no longer be brushed under the carpet by bishops. Last week the Vatican was quick to deplore the Castrillón letter which demonstrated, the Pope's spokesman said, the wisdom of transferring the cases to the CDF back in 2001. It was a rare rebuke meaning, in effect, "You see what we were up against?" And if anyone doubted, they had only to watch an interview Castrillón had given a few days earlier to Spanish-language CNN. Last Friday, the 82-year-old cardinal upped the ante by telling a conference in Spain that he had shown the letter to Bishop Pican to Pope John Paul II before sending it, and that the Pope had "authorised me to send it to all the bishops in the world". It's hard to know which is more worrying: the fact that Cardinal Castrillón's letter was sent months after the transfer of cases to the CDF; that it was approved by Pope John Paul II; or that the cardinal's remarks in Murcia were applauded (according to this local newspaper report) by senior Spanish bishops. Because what it reveals is a clericalist mindset that the Church was supposed to have abandoned at the Second Vatican Council. When Castrillón writes that "the relationship between a bishop and his priests is not a professional one, but a sacramental one which creates very special bonds of spiritual paternity" he is saying nothing surprising. But as a justification for a bishop not informing the police of his priest's crimes, it is deeply shocking. This view of the Church as a societas perfecta – a community complete unto itself; unaccountable to, and without needing to refer to, wider society – was one that prevailed in the 1950s, which the Second Vatican Council rejected. Unsurprisingly, Cardinal Castrillón has long been a leading light in the move to restore the liturgical rite that existed before the Council. But it may matter more that Castrillón is Colombian. That "perfect society" mentality is much harder to uproot from the Church in countries where monarchical bishops and strong families co-exist with a weak, deferential or/and hostile state (Ireland, until not long ago; Poland, Italy, Spain, Latin America). That is why the reform of the universal Church's practice has come –and needs to come – from countries with a traditional respect for the law, where the state is not corrupt, and where the Church recognises the need for its own good of transparency and accountability. That's why it takes a German pope to challenge this clericalist mentality -- and British and American Catholics to model the guidelines that will, in the long term, defeat it.
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