Pope mourns for victim--Catholicism

Like Donald Rumsfeld facing the photos from Abu Ghraib, Pope Benedict admits that he is ‘deeply disturbed by the information which has come to light regarding the abuse’, of children in the Pope’s case [emphasis mine]. That is not quite the same as being disturbed by the abuse itself, as the Pope’s extensive letter to the Irish faithful illustrates exceedingly well.

The Irish bishops themselves issued a statement a while back that not only apologized but explicitly recognized the cover-up that they and their predecessors had engaged in. Benedict is having none of that. Instead, he tediously and repeatedly reasserts the primacy of canon, that is, church law over police vigilance. He criticizes the failure ‘to apply existing canonical penalties’ while his calls for change are limited to updating ‘child safety norms. . . . in conformity with canon law’.

Benedict twits the bishops for failing, ‘at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse’. But he limits the role of civic authorities to a vague phrase about cooperating with them in their ‘areas of competence’. Given that the police were systematically excluded from any role at all, including by the Pope himself in his German archbishopric, we can assume that those ‘areas of competence’ are to be understood as extremely narrow ones.

In other words, the Pope is saying that all this could have been handled perfectly well within the limits of existing procedures, had you followed them correctly. The Pope refuses to admit that it was precisely the criminal collegiality and secrecy of the priestly caste that led to the cover-up and enabled the sexual abuse of children to continue for decades.

But this secrecy is not an administrative accident or a slip-up in procedures. It is an essential element of Catholic dogma, which sees the priest as the direct channel of contact with God and the Holy Spirit, awarded to Saint Peter by Jesus and passed down through the millenia of apostolic succession to every pope including the present one. If these and only these men can provide the keys to the kingdom and save souls from Purgatory and damnation, its cohesion and internal loyalty must be iron-clad and monolithic and trump all other considerations--including the welfare of the faithful’s own families.

Again and again, Benedict’s letter focuses on the damage done to the church (or Church, as Catholics must write it) rather than on the unfortunate individuals on the receiving end. Even his most superficially appropriate, contrite phrases betray this stance—that the primary victim is the institution he leads, not sexually abused children. ‘In order to recover from this grievous wound, the church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenceless children’, the Pope writes. Note that the ‘grievous wound’ mentioned is that inflicted on Irish Catholicism.

Predictably and not for the first time, Ratzinger blames the Vatican II renovation and secularism—rather than the ancient dictatorship that he heads—for the abuse of children as if it were sexual emancipation that led clerical pedophiles to win protection from their bishops and archbishops. (I seem to recall the bishops being rather against the loosening of sexual customs.)

In fact, secularization and the deepening of our understanding of human sexuality, including the widespread nature of child sexual abuse, is precisely what enabled the victims to speak out and led to the information which has come to light. In that sense, Benedict is right: it was the ‘60s that brought all this about.

As a writer and student of the English language, I cannot help but notice that the Pope’s letter shifts promptly into the passive voice when addressing the victims of clerical sexual abuse, which comes in Section 6 after a lengthy recap of the glories of Irish Catholicism. Benedict never says ‘priests did X to you’, but rather your dignity ‘has been betrayed’ and you have ‘suffered’. This distancing mechanism is unlikely to be a grammatical accident.

I have no stake in the internal debates among Catholics and would never interest myself in what a Pope says or does not say, thinks or does not think. However, the institution is determined to play a secular role without obeying the secular rules that govern the rest of us. Catholic hierarchs insist upon telling us what social policy is proper and for whom to vote, how we should organize our sexual lives and the medical procedures that should be available to us. It pontificates constantly on family planning and sexual affairs, yet dares to insist that the criminal sexual activity of its own members be shielded from civic control and left to ‘canon law’.

Whatever else happens and however else Catholics decide to respond to their religious leadership, it is an excellent moment to resuscitate the campaign to remove the Vatican’s diplomatic status and return it at last to its proper role in society—as a religion, not a state.