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Paul --
Barbara Dorris http://www.snapnetwork.org/ |
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SNAP · PO Box 6416, Chicago, IL 60680-6416, United States
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What Pope Benedict Knew About Abuse in the Catholic Church
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The
election of Pope Francis, in 2013, had the effect, among other things,
of displacing the painful story of priestly sexual abuse that had
dominated public awareness of the Church during much of the eight-year
papacy of his predecessor. The sense that the Church, both during the
last years of Benedict and under Francis, had begun to deal more
forcefully with the issue created a desire in many, inside and outside
the Church, to move on. But recent events suggest that we take another
careful look at this chapter of Church history before turning the page.
During
the past week, a German lawyer charged with investigating the abuse of
minors in a famous Catholic boys’ choir in Bavaria revealed that two
hundred and thirty-one children had been victimized over a period of
decades. The attorney, Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the Diocese
of Regensburg to conduct the inquiry, said that there were fifty
credible cases of sexual abuse, along with a larger number of cases of
other forms of physical abuse, from beatings to food deprivation.
The
news received widespread attention not only because of its disturbing
content but because the director of the Regensburg boys’ choir from 1964
to 1994 was Georg Ratzinger, the older brother of Joseph Ratzinger, who
became Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger was the Archbishop of Munich from
1977 until 1981, when he went to head up the powerful Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, which establishes theological orthodoxy and
was also one of the branches of the Church that dealt with priestly
sexual abuse.
The developments in
Germany raised the question of what the two Ratzinger brothers knew
about the abuse in the Regensburg choir. Most of the sexual abuse took
place, apparently, at a boarding school for elementary-grade students
connected to the choir. The chief culprit, according to Weber, was
Johann Meier, the boarding school’s director from 1953 until 1992. The
composer Franz Wittenbrink, a graduate of the school, told Der Spiegel
magazine, in 2010, when the abuse scandal became public, that there was
“a system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure.”
At
that time, Georg Ratzinger, who was on the three-person supervisory
board of the elementary school, acknowledged that some choirboys had
complained about the punishments they received at the school. “But I did
not have the feeling at the time that I should do something about it,”
he told the Passauer Neue Presse, in 2010. “Had I known with what exaggerated fierceness he was acting, I would have said something.”
In
fact, accusations of abuse surfaced and were investigated in 1987, but
no one saw fit to remove Meier from his post until the year of his
death. When asked at his press conference last week whether Georg
Ratzinger had been aware of the abuse, Weber replied, “Based on my
research, I must assume so.” He estimated that a third of the students
in the choir had suffered some form of abuse. Georg Ratzinger has said
that he routinely slapped choirboys when their performance was not up to
snuff, standard treatment until Germany banned corporal punishment, in
the early eighties. So far, the Regensburg diocese has offered
compensation of twenty-five hundred euros for each victim.
In
the early nineties, a monk who worked at the Vatican told me, “You
wouldn’t believe the amounts of money the church is spending to settle
these priestly sexual-abuse cases.” He was not exaggerating. By 1992,
Catholic dioceses in the U.S. had paid out four hundred million dollars
to settle hundreds of molestation cases. These financial settlements
were reached largely to keep the victims quiet: in almost all cases, the
documents were sealed and the victims signed a non-disclosure
agreement. Given the enormous amounts of money involved, the men running
the Vatican were well aware of the problem.
The
basic outlines of the sex-abuse scandal were already evident that year
when Jason Berry, an American journalist, published his first book,
“Lead Us Not Into Temptation.” (While the “Spotlight” team at the Boston Globe
is rightly getting its moment of glory, praise is also due to Berry,
whose pioneering work on the subject, a decade earlier, was done with
far less institutional support.) As Berry reported, Ray Mouton, a lawyer
whom the Church hired in 1985 to defend a pedophile priest in
Louisiana, warned that, if the Church did not adopt a policy for helping
victims and removing pedophiles from the ministry, it could face a
billion dollars in losses from financial settlements and damage awards
in the next decade. It turned out that Mouton had actually
underestimated the financial cost of the crisis. By 2006, the Church had
spent $2.6 billion settling sexual-abuse cases, as Berry wrote in the
2010 edition of “Vows of Silence,” his second book on the pedophile
crisis, which he co-authored with fellow-journalist Gerald Renner.
Most
cases of abuse were handled (or not handled) by local bishops and
archbishops, but some were adjudicated by Cardinal Ratzinger’s
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The most prominent of these
cases was that of Father Marcial Maciel, a favorite of Pope John Paul II
and the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful Mexican
religious order that, at its pinnacle, included eight hundred priests,
fifteen universities, and a hundred and fifty prep schools, as well as a
lay movement with a reported seventy thousand followers.
In
the seventies and eighties, former members of the Legionaries reported
that, as young boys, they had been sexually abused by Maciel. As the
Church later acknowledged, the complainants were highly credible and had
no ulterior motives: they were not seeking monetary compensation or
notoriety. They followed Church procedures by filing formal charges
through ecclesiastical courts in Rome, but nothing was done. In fact,
Pope John Paul II called on Maciel to accompany him on papal visits to
Mexico in 1979, 1990, and 1993.
When
one of the former Legionaries expressed his frustration, in the
lawsuit, about the Church’s inaction, Berry and Renner reported in their
book, the Legionaries’ own canon lawyer, Martha Wegan, who made no
secret that her first loyalty was to the Church, replied, “It is better
for eight innocent men to suffer than for millions to lose their faith.”
Cardinal
Ratzinger reopened the case against Father Maciel in 2004, and, when he
became Pope, in 2006, he acknowledged the validity of the claims,
forbidding Maciel to continue his ministry and limiting him to a “life
of prayer and penitence.” The Vatican found Maciel guilty of “very
serious and objectively immoral acts . . . confirmed by incontrovertible
testimonies” that represent “true crimes and manifest a life without
scruples or authentic religious sentiment.”
Though
the sexual-abuse crisis reached its peak in the public sphere during
Benedict XVI’s papacy, the single figure most responsible for ignoring
this extraordinary accumulation of depravity is the sainted John Paul
II. In the context of his predecessor’s deplorable neglect, Pope
Benedict gets slightly higher marks than most. In 2001, he acted to give
his office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
jurisdiction over all sexual-abuse cases, and soon he began to push the
Maciel investigation, despite considerable Vatican opposition. After
ascending the throne of St. Peter, he became the first Pope to kick
predator priests out of the Church: in 2011 and 2012, the last two full
years of his papacy, the Church defrocked three hundred and eighty-four
offending priests.
That said, it
was too little, too late. As the second-most-powerful man in John Paul
II’s pontificate, Ratzinger had more ability to know and to act than
almost anyone. The actions he finally did take were largely dictated by a
series of embarrassing scandals: his move to take control of pedophilia
cases in 2001 closely followed scandals in the U.S., Ireland, and
Australia, and staggering financial settlements for American plaintiffs.
The decision to reopen the case against Maciel would almost certainly
not have happened without the courageous reporting of Berry and Renner.
And the zero-tolerance policy that led to the systematic defrocking of
abusive priests happened only after the annus horribilis of 2010, in which a new sexual-abuse scandal seemed to explode every week and loyal parishioners left the Church in droves.
Ratzinger
understood better than most, if late, that priestly abuse was the
negation of everything the Church was supposed to stand for. But, for
much of his career, his focus and priorities were elsewhere. During most
of his tenure, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was too
busy disciplining anyone who dared step out of line with Church
teachings on personal sexuality and family planning to bother with the
thousands of priests molesting children. In 2009, a nun named Margaret
McBride sat on the ethics committee of a San Diego hospital that had to
decide the case of a pregnant woman whose doctors believed that she (and
her fetus) would die if they did not terminate her pregnancy. The
committee voted to allow an abortion, and the woman’s life was saved.
Almost immediately, McBride’s bishop informed her of her
excommunication. It took multiple decades and thousands of cases of
predatory behavior to begin defrocking priests, but not much more than
twenty-four hours to excommunicate a nun trying to save a human life. In
2011, also under Pope Benedict, the Vatican lifted its excommunication
of McBride.
A reëxamination of the
sexual-abuse scandal may help the Church reconsider the standoff between
traditionalists and progressives during Francis’s papacy. The
traditionalists, who oppose changes such as offering communion to
remarried couples, bemoan the good old days when papal authority was
unquestioned, civil authorities treated the Church with extreme
deference, and parishioners obeyed without objection. They have
forgotten that those good old days were also a time when children were
slapped, beaten, and often sexually abused, and priests, bishops,
parents, and police looked away.