Pope Apologizes Now He Should Reform the Vatican, Mark Stricherz, True/Slant, May 11, 2010

Pope Apologizes, Now He Should Reform the Vatican

By Mark Stricherz
True/Slant
May 11, 2010

http://trueslant.com/markstricherz/2010/05/11/pope-apologizes-now-he-should-clean-up-the-vatican/

Pope Benedict’s confession on behalf of the Church is welcome. He could have refused to discuss the topic further. Instead, he said the Church needs to bear responsibility for the scandal:

“The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church,” the pontiff said. “The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice.”

Benedict’s words may not please Catholic defenders and non-Catholic critics; Catholics think, with some justification, that the secular media distorted Benedict’s role in the scandal, while non-Catholic intellectuals argue, with some justification, that Benedict needed to crack down on a pedophile priest in his own diocese and defrock two others. And in a less fallen world, the pope would have apologized for and explained his own role in the scandal, as minor as it was.

Yet the pope’s latest statement is likely to have one salutary effect: It shifts the political terms of debate about who is to blame for the scandal. Catholic centrists and conservatives can no longer say that the secular world is to blame, unless they want to say that they’re more Catholic than the pope. Benedict recognizes, like any true penitent, that change must begin inward before it begins outward.

Benedict can’t stop here. His next goal should be to reform the Vatican. He could start by ending the practice of letting cardinals accept donations from supporters and not reporting them if they are for private charity. As Rod Dreher exhorted, read Jason Berry’s expose for The National Catholic Reporter about Legionaries of Christ founder Marcial Maciel Degollado. Degollado got away with his sexual abuse of boys and fathering of children partly because of his generous donations to influential Vatican cardinals, including no less a person than Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State:

After the ex-Legion victims filed a canonical case in 1998 against Maciel in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Sodano as secretary of state — essentially, the Vatican prime minister — pressured Ratzinger, as the congregation’s prefect, to halt the proceeding. As NCR reported in 2001, Jose Barba, a college professor in Mexico City and ex-Legionary who filed the 1998 case in Ratzinger’s office, learned from the canonist handling the case, Martha Wegan in Rome, of Sodano’s role.

Sodano came over with his entire family, 200 of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal,” recalled Favreau. “And we fed them all. When he became secretary of state there was another celebration. He’d come over for special events, like the groundbreaking with a golden shovel for the House of Higher Studies. And a dinner after that.”

The intervention of a high Vatican official in a tribunal case illustrates the fragile nature of the system, and in the Maciel case, how a guilty man escaped punishment for years.

“Cardinal Sodano was the cheerleader for the Legion,” said one of the ex-Legionaries. “He’d come give a talk at Christmas and they’d give him $10,000.” Another priest recalled a $5,000 donation to Sodano.

Ending this corrupt practice will not be easy, as doing so requires changing canon law. But as Benedict knows, it’s only a matter of time before corruption turns to a sin, a sin to a scandal, and a scandal to crimes that cry out to heaven.