Vatican PR stumble

Perhaps I did not make myself clear: the job held by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, from 1981 to 2002 was to oversee and discipline priests for misconduct. Ratzinger ran the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Inquisition, from whence he had two full decades to pore over theological tracts, discipline those who strayed from orthodoxy as he saw it, battle the loosening of sexual mores, suppress liberation theology, strengthen ultramontanist sects like Opus Dei and denounce birth control.

To say that he wasn’t aware of any of the thousands of cases of clerical sex abuse of children or bears no responsibility for for covering them up is simply not credible.

It is rather grand to see the Vatican dig in its heels as if dealing with some unruly nuns or indignant parishioners who can be flicked off one’s surplice like gnats once the crushing force of the 2,000 years of Catholic social control is aimed at them. The longer the now monolithicly conservative curia continues with that strategy, the deeper will be the resulting crack in the whole edifice.

The first Vatican reaction was to denounce the New York Times for daring to print insulting innuendos about the Holy Father, pretty much like Dick Nixon complaining about the Pentagon Papers. Ho hum. But even the isolated bureaucrats running interference for Benedict seemed to get the message that that posture was going nowhere.

According to the British press, there is some sympathy among Vatican-watching journalists for the view that the Times' excavation of the Wisconsin deaf school case from several decades ago was opportunistic. But as the cases pile up in a half-dozen countries, there are now calls for a special synod of bishops to bail the floundering curia out.

An institution founded on absolute loyalty toward the head guy and the whole chain of command is not likely to have the instincts needed to manage and contain a public relations debacle of this scale. As the crud accumulates, I expect to see the intervention of more savvy operators from outside Benedict’s circle of permanently bowed heads.