Prophetic Intelligence Briefings
Catholic Church Scandal Raises Questions about the Pope · March 17, 2010
“As new details emerged on allegations of child sexual abuse by a priest in the Munich archdiocese then led by Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican spoke out on Saturday against what it called an aggressive campaign against the pope in his native Germany.
“At the same time, a high-ranking Vatican official overseeing internal investigations on Saturday acknowledged that 3,000 cases of suspected abuse of minors had come to its attention in the past decade, of which 20 percent had been brought to trial in Vatican courts.
“In a note read on Vatican Radio on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was ‘evident that in recent days there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tenacity, in Regensburg and in Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.’ He added, ‘It is clear that those efforts have failed.’”
Have they really?
“Although his statements were unusually forthcoming for the Vatican,” reported the New York Times, “they left open many questions, including whether the priests involved in cases that had not come to trial ever returned to pastoral work.
“In Germany, a man whose case has raised questions about the actions of the Munich Archdiocese when Benedict was the archbishop there said Saturday that church officials had told him that the priest who abused him in 1979 would not be allowed to work with children again. Instead, the priest was allowed to resume full duties almost immediately, and went on to abuse more children.
“The Vatican also sought to defend the pope against criticism that a Vatican rule requiring secrecy in abuse cases was tantamount to obstruction of justice in civil courts. Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the director of a tribunal inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm, dismissed as “false and calumnious” accusations that Benedict covered up abuse cases when he oversaw investigations for four years as prefect of that congregation before becoming pope.
“In a rare and unusually frank interview that appeared on the front page of L’Avvenire, the Italian Bishops Conference newspaper, on Saturday, Monsignor Scicluna acknowledged that the Vatican had received about 3,000 accusations of abuse by priests of minors in the past decade, 80 percent of them from the United States.”
Apparently, the abuse allegations were so close to implicating Benedict XVI that it was felt that the “rare and unusually frank” interview was necessary to show that the church was confronting the problem. He said that a few of the 3,000 cases had been tried in a church court. Most had not come to trial, though the accused were in seclusion and prohibited from fulfilling their priestly duties. And a small minority were dismissed or resigned from the priesthood.
“In the German case, a man who said he was sexually abused by a priest in Essen in 1979 said that when the abuse was reported, the church handled the accusation as an internal matter without notifying the police or prosecutors. In a telephone interview on Saturday, the victim, who asked to be identified as Wilfried F. to protect his anonymity, said the pastor forced him to perform oral sex. Wilfried F. was 11 years old at the time.”
“Although the matter was not reported to the police, he said church officials in Essen told him the priest had been transferred to Munich ‘and that he would no longer be allowed to work with children.’ The archdiocese said in a statement on Friday that the priest was moved to Munich in 1980 for therapy with the approval of Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the man who later became Pope Benedict. But the priest was soon reassigned to pastoral work by Archbishop Ratzinger’s deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, and was later convicted of sexually abusing minors. ‘You see how they just kept moving him around,’ Wilfried F. said. ‘He could keep doing it like before.’
The Vatican denied that the pope was part of the decision.
But, “in 2001, Benedict, who was then in charge of Vatican investigations of abuse allegations, sent a letter to bishops counseling them to forward all such cases to his Doctrine of the Faith office, where they would be subject to secrecy.
Monsignor Scicluna dismissed the idea that secrecy was imposed ‘in order to hide the facts.’ Rather, he said, it ‘served to protect the good name of all the people involved, first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right, as everyone does, to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. ’But he said church secrecy had ‘never been understood as a ban on denouncing the crimes to the civil authorities.’”
Note that the Monsignor did not say that the allegations that were proven to be true were handed over the secular authorities. All he said was that there had not been a “ban on denouncing the crimes to civil authorities.”
In addition to the questions of papal secrecy and obstruction of justice, the efforts of the church to publically address the matter only raise more questions. How much did Benedict XVI know, and why didn’t he authorize confirmed abuse cases to be turned over to public authorities while in charge of their oversight for four years while at the Vatican?
Also, why were the cases over 50 years merely referred to church tribunals. Those who would try these cases would have a vested interest in keeping them from the public eye. Hence alleged crimes were not tried by impartial judges, but by men whose bias was to protect the criminals. The lack of accountability merely perpetuated the problem all over the world. The allegations in Germany are but the latest in a long string of abuse allegations in many countries.
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