The Pope and the Sex Abuse Scandal

The New York Times
October 14, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/10/14/the-pope-and-the-sex-abuse-scandal

Pope Francis greeted schoolchildren in Washington, during his recent trip to the United States. Photo by Cliff Owen

INTRODUCTION

“I would like to ask for forgiveness in the name of the church for the scandals that have happened,” Pope Francis told a weekly gathering at St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, in an unusual public apology. He already had to backtrack after he outraged the victims of pedophile clerics by speaking sympathetically, during his trip to the United States, about how the scandal had affected bishops and priests. Then, last week, a video was broadcast showing him calling the residents of a Chilean town “dumb” for protesting a bishop who has been accused of being complicit in the crimes one abusive priest.

Is Pope Francis taking the scandal seriously enough? Has he properly addressed problems of thousands of victims of priestly abuse and the concerted efforts of church officials to cover up?

DEBATERS

KATHERINE GALLAGHER :

Despite his public expressions of sympathy for victims, Pope Francis has done very little to address the policies and practices within the Vatican that created and let flourish a culture of sexual violence and cover-up.

The pope’s calling those protesting sexual abuse and church officials’ complicity “dumb” is shockingly revealing of the lack of seriousness with which he takes this issue – and devastating to those survivors who still held out hope that he would be different from his predecessors.

Only this spring, the Vatican’s official submission to the United Nations Committee Against Torture demonstrated how dismissive Pope Francis’s Vatican is of the severe and long-term damage caused by clergy sexual assault. In response to questions about the handling of these cases, the Vatican rebuked the committee for addressing rape and sexual violence at all, denying that it even fell within the scope of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, and refused to provide it, and the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, the information requested.

Under Pope Francis, the Vatican has continued to insist before both committees that it bears no responsibility for any acts of sexual violence occurring outside of the walls of Vatican City – a position not only at odds with international human rights law but with reality, given the hierarchical structure of the church and the lengths to which church officials have gone to prevent local and national authorities in countries around the world from being able to address the crimes.

While many point to his establishment of a commission to address the cover-up by bishops of abusive priests, those bishops acted in accordance with Vatican policy and expectations when they covered up crimes and refused to cooperate with national justice systems. The Vatican cannot be left to police itself.

Even these statements and meager steps have only occurred after long and sustained pressure from the victims forced the spotlight on the Vatican. Pope Francis must do more.

WILLIAM DAILEY: 

As long as any children are being abused somewhere we would all say there is more to be done. The most useful question to ask about Pope Francis’ response to the church sex abuse crisis is whether he has built upon the reforms undertaken by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.

Many signs indicate he has, though in a worldwide church spanning every human culture, not all corners of the church are at the same place. In a sense the jury is always out.

Pope Benedict, both as the cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and then as pope, centralized church inquiries and decision making about abuse in that important and powerful Vatican office. The congregation under Benedict and Francis has made great strides in ensuring that national bishops’ conferences have developed norms for each locality, following the lead of the wrenching experience of the American church.

Canon law has long required any even a modestly credible report to be reported by a bishop to the Vatican, and the Vatican has also made clear that prelates must obey domestic law concerning reporting to civil authorities. Contrary to oft-repeated rumor, no church instruction to the contrary has ever been in place. The reforms were ordered to bring practice into greater conformity with those moral and legal requirements, with greater structures of accountability. Francis took vigorous action in removing two American bishops from office — in the Twin Cities and in Kansas City-St. Joseph — for their inactions and worse. He also created a new tribunal within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to review and discipline bishops accused of mishandling these cases.

The Vatican’s submission to the United Nations reflects the complexity of being a worldwide church. It rightly distinguishes its moral and institutional authority over the private crimes of priests from its authority as a civil legal sovereign. Under international law, U.S. law governs the civil crimes of U.S. clerics, not Vatican City’s treaty obligations. To conflate these personal crimes with state-sponsored torture twists the treaty far beyond its purpose and reach.

It will always be possible and appropriate to question any particular judgment of church officials, and victims’ voices are vitally important. So too are the procedural rights of the accused, and there will perennially be a tension in balancing these legitimate interests, and occasional disagreement when institutional judgments have been taken.

KATHERINE GALLAGHER :

You cannot distinguish the Vatican’s responsibility over priests’ crimes and its authority as a sovereign state. Since the pope has “supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power” over the Catholic Church, the Vatican can’t credibly claim that local bishops, priests and pastors operate independently and that the Vatican has no responsibility for acts committed outside its borders. That defense conflicts with the legal liability a state has for acts of public officials under its effective control.

It also flies in the face of the reality. Church officials in the United States and elsewhere have actively prevented national justice systems from fully addressing these cases. As seen time and again, they have shielded and shifted offenders, fought statute of limitations reform, hid money needed to provide redress to victims, and refused to cooperate with civil authorities.

And it is not mere “rumor” that Pope John Paul II approved a high-ranking Vatican official's sending a letter congratulating a bishop for not reporting an admitted rapist who had sexually assaulted 10 children to civil authorities and instructing other bishops around the world to do the same. That view was also expressed by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was second in command to Joseph Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI -- when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and later served as the Vatican Secretary of State.

But those were his predecessors; what is Pope Francis doing? First, he appointed Cardinal Gerhard Müller to oversee the handling of sexual violence cases at the Congregation. Müller had previously appointed a pastor he knew had been convicted of sexual assault, and kept that information from parishioners. When the pastor sexually assaulted more children in his new position, Müller disclaimed responsibility for the new cases and threatened legal action against those who spoke out. In 2014, Francis reportedly reinstated a priest removed by Pope Benedict who had been accused of sexually assaulting dozens of children over a 10-year period. When asked by Italian courts for access to evidence submitted to the priest’s canonical trial, the Congregation refused to turn it over.

Francis did not take “vigorous action” against the bishops in the Twin Cities and in Kansas City who were implicated in covering up – and keeping in ministry – priests known to have sexually assaulted children (and he has promoted and/or failed to act on many others). He simply accepted their resignations; he did not condemn their inaction, and he certainly did not make an example of their cases for the importance of mandatory reporting.

To deal with this issue in a way that truly makes the world a safer place for children and demonstrates a real commitment to “zero tolerance,” the pope must make reporting to and cooperation with civil authorities mandatory. And in today’s church, where being a woman disqualifies you from serving as a priest and being married disqualifies you from being a priest, it is incomprehensible that there is no rule that says you can’t be a priest if you have raped a child: the pope must institute such a rule immediately.

WILLIAM DAILEY:

I would be content at this point, to borrow a phrase from the law, to rest on the briefs. But for readers less familiar with the details of matters alluded to in the text and hyperlinks of my interlocutor’s reply, I will highlight a few major difficulties in the case.

Let’s take the most important issue for our debate, which is whether Francis has acted with vigor in the removals of Archbishop Nienstedt and Bishop Finn. It beggars belief that one would contend that Archbishop Nienstedt resigned of his own accord and the Vatican simply acquiesced. Archbishop Nienstedt never acknowledged the gravamen of the complaints before him, and his own auxiliary bishops met secretly with the Vatican’s representative to the United States to urge his removal. Minnesota Public Radio described that meeting as a “brave move that threatened the careers of both men.” Likewise, Bishop Finn’s resignation came only pursuant to a Vatican investigation into his case. As even this very harshly critical article from the National Catholic Reporter makes clear, Finn’s departure was a “removal disguised as a resignation.” It is true that the resignations were not also public denunciations, and as I noted in my first reply, it is certainly within bounds for the faithful to wish the removals had sent an even clearer signal to other bishops. But to suggest that no progress was made in these precedents is to refuse to take yes for an answer.

Considering again the allegation that Cardinal Hoyos’ horribly misguided 2001 letter constituted an official policy of cover-up, I already shared the National Catholic Reporter’s analysis casting doubt on the “smoking gun” interpretation; additional detailed refutation still rightly critical of the Church may be found here and here. Further, the best evidence of what John Paul II thought about the disagreement between Cardinals Ratzinger and Hoyos is that, in the very same year, the former was put in charge of all such cases.

It may be worth responding again briefly on the U.N. point as well. Ms. Gallagher relies upon the ecclesiological principle that the pope is a universal pastor to obscure the the question of whether, in international law, priests are citizens or officials of Vatican City, the legal sovereign that is the signatory to the treaty in question. Even a broad understanding of the Convention Against Torture must recognize that it presumes that domestic law enforcement entities -- like the U.S. criminal justice system -- would deal with crimes that are not state-sponsored, even if they should have been prevented by the sovereign. The treaty aims to hold states responsible for the actions of their officials both as torturers and as those who can reasonably be expected to to exercise the state’s police power to punish crimes of torture, in order to prevent states from acquiescing in torture. I wish to emphasize, however, that while the U.N.’s jurisdiction doesn’t properly touch these matters, that in no way diminishes the need for church officials to be vigilant in preventing abuse and removing abusers from ministry.

Finally, Ms. Gallagher offered a number of links referring to events occurring well prior to Francis’s pontificate. Our task was to examine whether he has made progress even if the jury is still out. Those cases generally remind us why progress is so urgently needed, and I join Ms. Gallagher in fervently hoping that Francis will continue to make the terrible sins of the past far less likely to occur and impossible to be seen as church policy.

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