By Sandro Magister
Chiesa
May 20, 2010
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1343359?eng=y
The royal road sketched out by Benedict XVI. Schönborn and O'Malley's shots at Sodano. The roles of Bertone and Fr. Lombardi. The battle of "La Civiltà Cattolica" against the "culture of pedophilia"
The Catholic hierarchy is responding in three ways to the scandal of sexual abuse committed by priests.
The first is at the initiative of the pope. The second through the work of a few cardinals. The third, thanks to the scholarly Jesuits of "La Civiltà Cattolica," with the imprimatur of the Vatican secretariat of state.
1. THE ROYAL ROAD
The royal road is the one sketched out by the pope. The Church – Benedict XVI has said on a number of occasions, beginning with his March 19 letter to the Catholics of Ireland – must understand that her greatest tribulation does not come from the outside, but from sins committed within her. And therefore penance is her main duty, in order to open herself to conversion, and ultimately to the regenerating grace of God.
The pope made his most urgent appeals to travel this path in conjunction with his pilgrimage to Fatima. The message of the apparitions of Mary to the shepherd children can, in fact, be summed up in precisely this word: "Penance!" And the pope theologian had no fear – on the contrary – of associating himself with the popular piety there.
But even after his return to Rome from Portugal, pope Joseph Ratzinger has insisted on blazing this trail. He has done so with a message, and with a greeting.
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The message was addressed to Kirchentag, the ecumenical gathering of German Catholics and Protestants held in Munich from May 12 to 16. The papal text bears the date of May 10, and was read at the opening of the event. But given the scarce attention it received in Germany, the Vatican press office decided to distribute it to the media all over the world, together with an Italian translation of the original German.
The message was clearly composed by the pope himself. It is an invitation to "rejoice in the midst of tribulations," because even if the Church is full of weeds, these will still not be able to choke off the good wheat. And if ten just men would have been enough to spare Sodom from the flames, "thanks to God, in our cities there are many more than ten just men."
As for the greeting, this is the one that Benedict XVI addressed at midday on Sunday, May 16, after the recitation of the "Regina Cæli," to the 200,000 faithful crowding Saint Peter's Square and the adjacent streets, having come from all over Italy to show their support for the pope (see photo).
"We Christians are not afraid of the world, even if we must protect ourselves from its seductions," Benedict XVI told them, because "the real enemy to be feared and fought is sin, spiritual evil, which sometimes, unfortunately, also infects members of the Church."
The two texts are reproduced in their entirety further below, and the first, in particular, is of great significance.
It is certain that Benedict XVI will return to the argument next June 10 and 11, at the prayer vigil and Mass with which he will close the Year for Priests that he proclaimed precisely to restore spiritual vigor to the clergy.
2. THE CLASH IN THE SACRED COLLEGE
While Pope Benedict is sketching out the broad outlines, some of his cardinals are determining the consequences at the level of Church governance.
The cardinals who have come out in the open are Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, and Sean O'Malley, archbishop of Boston. The former with statements published on May 4 by the agency Kathpress, the latter in a May 14 interview with John L. Allen for the "National Catholic Reporter."
Both of them had harsh words for Cardinal Angelo Sodano, secretary of state under John Paul II and then under Benedict XVI, in the first year of his pontificate. They accused him of blocking, for a long time, the work of purification undertaken by then cardinal Ratzinger toward high-status figures like Hans Hermann Gröer, archbishop of Vienna, and of Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, both accused of sexual abuse and ultimately, too late, found to be guilty.
Moreover, Schönborn and O'Malley blasted Sodano for dismissing as "tittle-tattle" the accusations hurled by the media against the Church on account of pedophilia, thereby causing "immense damage" to the victims of abuse. Sodano had effectively expressed himself in this way, in the act of homage that he read to Benedict XVI on Easter in the name of the entire college of cardinals: an act of homage that was not requested, let alone "begged for" by the pope, as Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, took care to clarify.
These accusations against the ignorant Sodano, contrasted with the prescient Ratzinger, also cast a shadow on the pontificate of John Paul II, during which the revelations of sexual abuse among the clergy reached their peak, without any effective damage control.
But Schönborn and O'Malley don't go this far. Pope Karol Wojtyla, they say, was too elderly and sick to take the question in hand. And his colleagues "formed a shield around him," mistakenly believing that the problem concerned America, and not the rest of the world. In O'Malley's view, Sodano and the other heads of the curia acted this way "often [out of] ignorance rather than malice."
The fact is that Sodano is now the dean of the college of cardinals, as Ratzinger was when Wojtyla died. In the eventuality of a conclave, he would therefore be the one to preside over the interregnum, with the global media pillorying him relentlessly, an image disaster for the entire Church. It is in part to prevent this result that two first-rank cardinals like Schönborn and O'Malley have opened fire. They want Sodano out of the way for good, as soon as possible.
But that isn't all. The offensive of the two cardinals is, in fact, finding support in the curia with Sodano's successor at the secretariat of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Bertone was secretary of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, at Ratzinger's side, when Ratzinger was an "obstacle" for Sodano and his allies. And now he is showing that he, too, wants to settle the score with the old guard of the curia.
This can be seen in the strictness with which Bertone is "cleaning house" among the Legionaries of Christ, the congregation founded by the disgraced Maciel, defended and praised to the end not only by Sodano, but also by John Paul II's personal secretary at the time, Stanislaw Dziwisz, and by other heads of the curia.
This can also be seen by how, on April 15, Bertone repudiated – with a biting statement from Vatican spokesman Lombardi – a letter written in 2001 by the prefect of the congregation for the clergy at the time, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, in support of a French bishop sentenced for failing to report a priest guilty of pedophilia.
Castrillón Hoyos defended himself by saying that he had given the letter to John Paul II to read, and had received his approval. But the fact remains that such behavior is not acceptable anymore. In the latest issue of "La Civiltà Cattolica," the Jesuit magazine printed after review by the Vatican secretariat of state, the examples of good conduct provided are the dioceses of Munich, Cologne, and Bolzano, "where the bishops have taken an attitude that could be called 'proactive', meaning preventively collaborative with the civil authorities."
And with this article in "La Civiltà Cattolica," we come to the third modality of reaction to the scandal of pedophilia.
3. THE CULTURAL BATTLE
Strictly speaking, there are two articles in question, the cover stories of the May 1 and May 15, 2010 issues of the magazine. The authors, Jesuit Frs. Giovanni Cucci and Hans Zollner, teach psychology at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome, and approach the question of pedophilia from the psychological-social perspective.
In the first of the two articles, the authors describe, on the basis of the scientific literature, the personalities of the authors of these acts – who were often victims of abuse as children – and their incidence among the Catholic clergy, in dramatic contrast with the high moral and educational profile that should distinguish this vocation.
Among the lessons to be drawn from the scandal, the authors insist on the preparation of candidates for the priesthood, whose equilibrium and maturity must be seriously ascertained.
They deny that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between celibacy and pedophilia.
And as for the request to reduce to lay status the priests guilty of pedophilia, they observe:
"Of course, this can be an obligatory procedure, provided for by the code of canon law, but it is not necessarily the best thing for the possible victims, the children, and for the abuser himself, who often returns to society without any supervision and, left to himself, goes back to committing abuse. This was the case with James Porter, a priest of the diocese of Fall River (Massachusetts): once he was dismissed, he was not monitored at all by the civil authorities, he got married and shortly afterward was charged with abusing his children's babysitter."
In the second article, Cucci and Zollner denounce the "strange silence" on this question on the part not only of those who work in the field of education (parents, teachers, etc.), but also of those who should be most qualified to talk about it with genuine expertise: psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists.
The scientific literature on the subject seems reticent and uncertain. The leading dictionaries and encyclopedias dedicate a few lines to pedophilia, out of thousands of pages. The same is true for ephebophilia. In public discussion, as a result, competence is replaced by "hearsay." And the "moral panic" that distorts the real dimensions of the problem is fostered.
In public opinion that is so confused, Cucci and Zollner remark that the discussion "swings between criminalization and liberalization." They cite numerous cases in which pedophilia is defended in the name of sexual freedom. They recall a document and a conference prepared for this purpose, by the Italian radical party, at the senate building in 1998. They recall the creation in Holland, in 2006, of a pro-pedophilia party. They point out that the current justice minister of the German federal government, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, one of the most fiery critics of the Church today, was one of the leaders of the Humanistische Union when this organization was fighting to liberalize all "consensual" sexual acts, including those with minors.
"These observations," the two authors conclude, "should require bringing into question again a broader and often uncritically accepted cultural context that approves of transgressions and perversions as manifestations of freedom and spontaneity." In order to be recognized as a perversion, and opposed, pedophilia "requires the recognition of an ethical and psychological norm, before that of law."
So the battle must also be cultural. A battle in which the Church of Pope Benedict is on the front lines.
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