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	Did the Vatican Let Benedict XVI Take the Rap for the Child Abuse Scandal in Order to Protect the Memory of John Paul Ii? By Damian Thompson TelegraphI April 28, 2010 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100036871/did-the-vatican-let-benedict-xvi-take-the-rap-for-the-child-abuse-scandal-in-order-to-protect-the-memory-of-john-paul-ii/ Long before he was Pope, Joseph Ratzinger fought to tighten the Catholic Church’s procedures for dealing with abuse allegations. Yet the Vatican has failed to convey this crucial message during an outbreak of media hysteria directed – lazily and maliciously – at Benedict. Why? Could it have been because telling the truth about Benedict would tarnish the reputation of Pope John Paul II? That’s the suggestion made by John Allen who, despite writing for America’s ultra-Left National Catholic Reporter, is widely regarded as the most authoritative Vatican commentator in the English-speaking world. Even the great Fr Z rates him. (Compare Allen’s measured output with the endless anti-Benedict sniping of the Tablet’s Rome “correspondent”, Bobbie Mickens.) Allen has just posted a piece about the case of the Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who in 2001 wrote an indefensible letter to a French bishop congratulating him for not reporting a priest abuser to the police. The letter was first published years ago, but when it was rediscovered earlier this month the Vatican immediately distanced itself from Castrillon. As Allen notes: In a rare case of “rapid response,” the official Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr Federico Lombardi, had a statement out to reporters almost immediately after stories broke in France. The letter, Lombardi’s statement said, offers “another confirmation of how timely was the unification of the treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors on the part of members of the clergy under the competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” In effect, that was a polite way of saying that Castrillon was part of the problem against which then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, had to struggle in streamlining Vatican procedures for dealing with sex abuse cases. That makes it clear that Benedict, as I keep saying, was part of the solution, not part of the problem. But consider another detail: Cardinal Castrillon revealed last week that he had shown his letter to Pope John Paul II, who authorised it. Here’s the conclusion to Allen’s article (my emphases): Finally, a footnote about the impact of the Castrillon episode: Ironically, resurrecting that 2001 letter may have doomed Castrillon, but it could actually help Pope Benedict XVI. Throughout the most recent round of media coverage, there’s been a serious mismatch between Pope Benedict’s actual record on sex abuse – as the senior Vatican official who took the crisis most seriously since 2001, and who led the charge for reform – and outsider images of the pope as part of the problem. While there are many reasons for that, a core factor is that the Vatican had the last ten years to tell the story of “Ratzinger the Reformer” to the world, and they essentially dropped the ball. That failure left a PR vacuum in which a handful of cases from the pope’s past, where his own role was actually marginal, have come to define his profile. One has to ask, why didn’t the Vatican tell Ratzinger’s story? At least part of the answer, I suspect, is because to make Ratzinger look good, they’d have to make others look bad – including, of course, Castrillon, as well as other top Vatican officials. Lurking behind that concern is a deeper one, which is that to salvage the reputation of Benedict XVI it might be necessary to tarnish that of Pope John Paul II. In this case, however, Castrillon has inadvertently licensed the Vatican and church officials around the world to use him as a foil, effectively waiving a cardinal’s traditional immunity from criticism. From here on out, when spokespersons insist that Pope Benedict fought inside the Vatican for reform, the world will have a much clearer picture of what his opposition looked like. At stake wasn’t just the question of cooperation with the police. Castrillon was part of a block of Vatican officials who thought the sex abuse crisis was fueled by media hysteria, that “zero tolerance” was an over-reaction, and that removing priests from ministry without lengthy and cumbersome canonical trails is a betrayal of the church’s legal tradition. That’s important to keeping the record straight, because the truth is that the real choice in Rome over the last ten years vis-a-vis the sex abuse crisis was never between Ratzinger and perfection – it was between Ratzinger and Castrillon. Allen’s analysis underlines the credibility of reports that Cardinal Ratzinger fought for tougher action against the pervert Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who was sacked from Vienna for assaulting boys and young monks – but failed to persuade John Paul II to commission a proper inquiry. We have to be careful before jumping to conclusions here. The late Pope was a man of titanic courage, personal holiness and high moral standards; we don’t know how much he knew or, indeed, whether he was in a physical or mental condition to tackle a crisis whose scale was being concealed by the Vatican old guard. But the simple fact is that the scandal was not properly addressed during his papacy, and I know I speak for many Catholics when I say that I don’t see why Benedict XVI should take the rap for the mistakes of his predecessor.
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