USA Today
July 2, 2010
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2010/07/pope-benedict-sex-abuse-new-york-times/1
Earlier this year, many were shocked by a New York Times story about a Wisconsin priest who abused hundreds of deaf children yet avoided being defrocked by a powerful Vatican office. He begged that he was old and sick and wished to die a priest. The head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger concurred.
Now the cardinal is Pope Benedict XVI, wrestling with a global sexual abuse scandal. And Goodstein has completed a months-long analysis of how he faced Ratzinger dealt with it years before his papacy. It's not pretty. The Wisconsin case was just one in a long line of inactions.
Goodstein and David Halbringer say that while the Vatican office had powers to act long before the crisis came to a boil in the last decade
... for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church's credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.
And they quote an Australian bishop who was present when others pressured Ratzinger to step up in 2000, saying that...
despite numerous warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up to the abuse problems than many local bishops did.
The Times story exhaustively traces a quarter century of abuse cases in the headlines in the USA and the repeated efforts of some US Bishops to urge the Vatican to take action.
In 2004, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, then president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Kathleen McChesney, then head of the bishops Office of Child and Youth Protection, presented the first comprehensive report on the extent of the sexual abuse crisis in the USA. A New York Times story today notes that reforms instituted by American bishops were not extended worldwide by the Vatican office then led by the cardinal who became Pope Benedict.
CAPTION
By Tim Dillon, USA TODAY
Finally, in 2002, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops rammed through -- with Vatican approval -- comprehensive guidelines including zero tolerance for abusive priests and required programs for education and prevention in every parish. The Times notes:
Those measures seem to be having an impact. Last year, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 513 people made allegations of sexual abuse against 346 priests or other church officials, roughly a third fewer cases than in 2008.
Yet the Vatican did not proactively apply those policies to other countries, and it is only now grappling with abuse problems elsewhere. Reports have surfaced of bishops in Chile, Brazil, India and Italy who quietly kept accused priests in ministry without informing local parishioners or prosecutors.
| Photo by By AFP/Getty Images |
And here, finally, is a key image:
Benedict, now five years into his papacy, has yet to make clear if he intends to demand of bishops throughout the world -- and of his own Curia -- that all priests who committed abuse and bishops who abetted it must be punished.
The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is, as usual, unsurprised by any of the Times' findings.
But their statement today says the bishops worldwide share the blame. They didn't call the police, remove accused priests from access to children or suspend them from ministry -- all actions SNAP says didn't require Vatican approval.
The bishops had, and have, one other powerful tool (which is also a solemn duty) to tell the truth, expose the predators, warn the parishioners and protect the kids. Even now, very few bishops voluntarily do this. That's the crux of the crisis.
| Photo by Tim Dillon |
But Michael Sean Winters, freshly ensconced in a new blog at National Catholic Reporter after years blogging for America magazine, blasts the Times report to such a degree, he suspects
... the authors went in with an agenda, and gussied up the "evidence" to make the point they desired to make.
Winters sees errors and willful ignorance and a preemptive dismissal of the whole notion of due process for accused priests. He even manages to weave in a discussion of an issue that was much on the mind of the Vatican and Ratzinger in those years -- Liberation Theology.
Is anything Benedict or bishops do now ever going to be enough? Finally,an old question of mine: What is "enough?"
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.