Before he was pope, Pope Cardinal Ratguts had all the authority he needed to stop priestly sex abuse -- if he'd wanted to

The downside of being pope: When Pope Cardinal Ratguts went in that hat shop, presumably accompanied by a few flunky bishops and monsignors, and decided to try on the red cowboy hat, there was nobody there to say, "No, Holy Father, unless you're planning to work up an act playing the guitar and singing faith-themed Roy Rogers and Gene Autry songs, I don't think it's you."

“Why did the Vatican end up so far behind the bishops out on the front line, who with all their faults, did change -- they did develop? Why was the Vatican so many years behind?”

-- Australian bishop emeritus Geoffrey Robinson, quoted

by the NYT's Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger
in "Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal"

by Ken

If there was ever any question about the answer to Bishop Robinson's question, every time anyone delves into the history of the Catholic sex-abuse scandal it becomes clearer that the reason the princesses of the Church didn't do nothin' 'bout it is 'cause they didn't wanna -- and they didn't hafta.

Howie has done such a diligent job covering developments in the ongoing Vatican sex-scandal cover-up (see, most recently, "The Pope Is In SHOCK That Belgians Aren't Paying Due Deference To Priestly Child Rapists") that I've felt little need to chime in. However, the kinds of "revelations" in the lengthy Goodstein-Halbfinger NYT piece are so rich in irony and predictability that I can't resist.

I don't mean to denigrate the piece, which looks to be a solid and welcome bit of reporting, the kind of thing the NYT is one of the few papers that has the resources to produce. But really, it's hardly possible to imagine any response but laughter, unless it's yawning, upon being told that, contrary to Pope Cardinal Ratguts' "reputation as the Vatican insider who most clearly recognized the threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the Roman Catholic Church," he was to all intents and purposes, if not the mastermind, then at least the enforcer of the cover-up:

[T]he future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

Gasp! Who'd-a thunk it?

One simple but pungent discovery the NYT reporters made is that what the Vatican claims as a major turning point in its protracted (mis)handling of the sex-abuse problem, "the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly," was a sham.

[C]hurch documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.

The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became so concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican convened a secret meeting to hear their complaints -- an extraordinary example of prelates from across the globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform, and one that had not previously been revealed.

And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has been described by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices. It was mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures that at least one bishop attending the meeting argued had been ignored for too long, according to church documents and interviews.

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But 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. [Emphasis added.]

It's one of the fascinations of the scandal that it broke first in the English-speaking countries. I'm sure somebody can explain the "cultural differences" that account for this. But one thing that surely never figured into it was that the abuse was confined to these countries, though of course the princesses of the Church liked to pretend that such was the case. Now that Old World priests are catching up, not in committing abuse but in having their indiscretions made public, the official response is, as Ralph Kramden might have put it: "Hummina-hummina-hummina."

And as the NYT duo's reporting underlines, the Vatican's response has always been to muddle, obscure, and obfuscate. It turns out that from the start of the scandal there were bishops "who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests," but they couldn't do it on their own. "Dismissing a priest is not like disbarring a lawyer or stripping a doctor of his medical license. In Catholic theology, ordaining a priest creates an indelible mark; to return him to the lay state required the approval of the pope."

Bishops had a variety of disciplinary tools at their disposal -- including the power to remove accused priests from contact with children and to suspend them from ministry altogether -- that they could use without the Vatican’s direct approval.

Some used this authority to sideline abusive priests, minimizing the damage inflicted on their victims. Other bishops clearly made things worse, by shuffling abusers from one assignment to the next, never telling parishioners or reporting priests to the police.

But as court cases, financial settlements and media coverage mounted, many prelates looked to the Vatican for leadership and clarity on how to prosecute abusers under canon law and when to bring cases to the attention of the civil authorities. In the worst cases, involving serial offenders who denied culpability and resisted discipline, some bishops sought the Vatican’s guidance on how to dismiss them from the priesthood.

Those bishops -- you know, the ones who actually assumed some responsibility for doing their job, not to mention for protecting their parishioners -- got as little help as the princesses could possibly get away with giving, or maybe less. One nifty trick: The Vatican made sure there were enough overlapping jurisdictions ("besides Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, bishops were sending off their files on abuse cases to the Congregations for the Clergy, for Bishops, for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and for the Evangelization of Peoples -- plus the Vatican’s Secretariat of State; its appeals court, the Apostolic Signatura; and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts") to create maximum confusion. The NYT duo also points out that the "new Code of Canon Law issued in 1983 only muddled things further, among other things by setting a five-year statute of limitations within which abuse cases could be prosecuted." Way to go, abuse ferret-outers!

Why? Well, here's one answer. See if you can spot the magic words.

During this period, the three dozen staff members working for Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were busy pursuing other problems. These included examining supernatural phenomena, like apparitions of the Virgin Mary, so that hoaxes did not “corrupt the faith,” according to the Rev. Brian Mulcahy, a former member of the staff. Other sections weighed requests by divorced Catholics to remarry and vetted the applications of former priests who wanted to be reinstated.

The heart of the office, though, was its doctrinal section. Cardinal Ratzinger, a German theologian appointed prefect of the congregation in 1981, aimed his renowned intellectual firepower at what he saw as “a fundamental threat to the faith of the church” — the liberation theology movement sweeping across Latin America.

That's right, ladies and germs, if you said "liberation theology," you're a winner!

As Father [Gilbert] Gauthé [the honorary godfather of the priest abuse scandal, having in 1984 acknowledged molesting 37 minors] was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine. Later, he also reined in a Dutch theologian who thought lay people should be able to perform priestly functions, and an American who taught that Catholics could dissent from church teachings about abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality.

Different Focus for Cardinal

Cardinal Ratzinger also focused on reining in national bishops’ conferences, several of which, independent of Rome, had begun confronting the sexual abuse crisis and devising policies to address it in their countries. He declared that such conferences had “no theological basis” and “do not belong to the structure of the church.” Individual bishops, he reaffirmed, reigned supreme in their dioceses and reported only to the authority of the pope in Rome.

[Don't you just love that part about individual bishops reigning supreme in their dioceses? Not only does this negate the hated bishops' conferences, but it is, I believe, what's known in technical terms as a "papal get-out-of-jail-free card." See, it's not our fault; it's those damned bishops' fault! Individual bishops, it would be more accurate to say, are free to run their dioceses exactly as they see fit as long as how they see fit is exactly how their Vatican masters wish.]

I was going to take out that typographical slug "Different Focus for Cardinal," which after all isn't really part of the text. But then I got to thinking, "'Different Focus for Cardinal" is absolutely the point!

And not just for the cardinal. By all accounts nobody lost more sleep over the heresy of liberation theology and all those other blasphemies being practiced by, in particular, New World churchmen than Cardinal Ratguts' master, that sleazy son of a bitch, His Eminence himself, the sainted Pope John Paul II.

Which already suggests how the scandal came to light first in the English-speaking world. This tends to be the part of the Catholic world where doubts about the divinity of the Vatican princesses have gained the most traction. And (again by all accounts), the overriding goal of John Paul II's papacy was to eradicate all that blasphemy, to return the Church to a state of unitary and unquestioned "truth": what the pope says.

This of course is the way any authoritarian government or large bureacracy can be expected to react. And that, I think, is a major reason why the Vatican's astonishing bungling of the scandal holds such fascination for the non-Catholic world: It's a sort of cartoon version of the way pretty much all persons in authority seem instinctively to want to function. They're attacking the church was the sainted sleaze-pope's response, and his sleaze-successor was only recently caught saying -- in the 21st century, some three decades into the scandal! -- the same damned thing.

Of course there's another reason why the non-Catholic world is riveted by the scandal. It is, after all, about priests for Christ's sake sexually abusing minors, while the people in charge fucking look the other way. Naturally this has a lot of Catholics pretty riled up too.

Which is a point Howie has been making in his coverage of the unholy mess. If you look at the history of priest-parishioner relationships, it's hard not to conclude that the Vatican princesses have effectively written those young Catholics off as "booty" for priests whose livelihood depends on the hierarchy. Despite the Church's legendary wealth (such a jarring contrast to the poverty of its worshippers in so many parts of the world), its field workers are compensated on a shoestring budget. And remember that the job description, increasingly improbably in this day and age, includes the appearance of celibacy. Somewhere along the line the deal apparently came to include, implicitly, all the Catholic boy-ass you can grab. Now there's a perk you truly can't put a price on.

You wonder if princesses of the rigidly authoritarian mindset of this pope and his predecessor, so desperately concerned with shoring up the unquestioned authority of the Church hierarchy, notably the highest reaches of that hierarchy, are capable of understanding how much damage they're doing to that authority among the Catholic laity by telling the faithful, in effect, that their children's bodies -- and the psyches that are mauled with them -- are fair game for predation by their Church's hired help.

If you want a good laugh, let's conclude with the NYT reporters' conclusion:

Today, a debate is roiling the Vatican, pitting those who see the American zero-tolerance norms as problematic because they lack due process for accused priests, against those who want to change canon law to make it easier to penalize and dismiss priests.

Where Benedict lies on this spectrum, even after nearly three decades of handling abuse cases, is still an open question.

Oh, he's such a darned stickler for due process, that Pope Cardinal Ratguts!

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