Uncovered priests covered up

As the Vatican scrambles to protect the top guy from the steadily rising sewerage about precisely how many little boys their protected priestly caste diddled while Rome fiddled, we will hear a lot of spin about who knew exactly what and when. We will be told that Benedict did not see a given report or initial this or that memorandum and therefore cannot be held responsible for a specific cover-up of any given crime.

This kind of parsing of details misses the point in exactly the same way as the L.A. cops who smashed up Rodney King were defended based on who swung which baton into his ribcage at precisely what moment. It is more germane to look at what was and was not attracting the attention of world Catholicism while victims and a few concerned bishops were trying to sound the alarms about sexual abuse.

While the Vatican could not mobilize to defend the 200 deaf boys molested by Father Lawrence Murphy in a Wisconsin school, it was hard at work rooting out liberation theologians around the world like Leonardo Boff and reasserting its centralized authority even when that meant indirectly aiding vicious military dictatorships.

Reports of perverts in long gowns did not alarm the Vatican hierarchy, but excessive independence from Christian base communities throughout Latin America merited a systematic campaign to root them out, lest they challenge the power of the Rome Magisterium to dictate Catholic dogma and enforce it. Not even the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero in his pulpit budged John Paul and his theological enforcer, Ratzinger, from their campaign against excessive independence from Salvadoran Catholics. The fascist assassins couldn’t have agreed more.

I witnessed the effects of the priorities established by Benedict’s boss and mentor in Chile where the Catholic Church had vigorously defended human rights against the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and early 1980s until the bishops were steadily undermined by JPII’s new appointments. These were unfailingly unsympathetic to the popular movement to restore democracy, comfortable with the reactionary Catholic movements that supported Pinochet and far more concerned with sex than with the ongoing practice of torture and disappearance.

The most notorious of these new favorites was bishop, later cardinal, Jorge Medina, who as chancellor of Chile’s Catholic University in the darkest days of the dictatorship turned a blind eye to the disappearance of his own professors. John Paul II was rumored to want to name him cardinal of the influential Santiago archdiocese but instead brought him to Rome where he distinguished himself by authoring a volume on the activity of Satan in the modern world and by announcing the election of Benedict XVI from the Vatican porch.

Medina returned to Chile in 2008 to say mass in remembrance of one of his heroes, Augusto Pinochet, and to criticize a performance by Madonna taking place the same week. As we read the steady trickle of information about how little concern Catholic leaders showed for the children in their care, how they vigorously admonished the laddies not to have sex while allowing priests to have sex with them, we should recall that the principal business of the neoconservative regime under John Paul and his successor was not the welfare of actual human beings [click on link to read story of altar boy, extreme left, and his abuser, extreme right] but of their immortal souls, that is, according to Catholic doctrine, the one and only institution capable of assuring it—itself.

That is why the comments of bishops, archbishops and popes invariably refer to the grave injury suffered by ‘the Church’ as if that body were the one upon which the abuse had been practiced. The revelations are then taken as an excellent opportunity for ‘renewal’ and ‘renovation’ of the faith, rather than a clear look at the theologial underpinnings of the centuries of cover-up.