Prophetic Intelligence Briefings
Secret Vatican Meeting didn’t Address Abuse Problem · July 19, 2010
A 2001 Vatican decision to give Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith authority to streamline the handling of abuse cases is often cited in defense of the Catholic Church, but didn’t really change anything, reported the New York Times.
Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, has been painted by the Vatican as the “insider who most clearly recognized the threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the Roman Catholic Church. But church 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.”
80 years before, in 1922 the Congregation had been given authority to deal with sex abuse cases. But for the 20 years of Cardinal Ratzinger’s tenure in the Congregation he never used the authority, even while cases of sex abuse became public in the U.S., Australia, Ireland and other places.
Finally in frustration, Bishops from all over the world demanded a meeting at the Vatican in 2000 to discuss the problem with Vatican officials in Rome. The secret meeting revealed a history of confusion about canon law process and an entrenched bureaucracy more concerned about protecting the priests than the children being abused.
“Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, an outspoken auxiliary bishop emeritus from Sydney, Australia, who attended the secret meeting in 2000, said that despite numerous warnings, top Vatican officials, including Benedict, took far longer to wake up to the abuse problems than many local bishops did.
“John Paul… often dismissed allegations of pedophilia by priests as an attack on the church by its enemies. Some say that “Cardinal Ratzinger would have preferred to take steps earlier to stanch the damage in certain cases. But the 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.”
Even as pope, Benedict has belatedly reopened an investigation into one especially egregious case and eventually removed him from ministry.
Even though the abuse scandal is still roiling the church, “the Vatican under Benedict is still responding to abuse by priests at its own pace, and it is being besieged by an outside world that wants it to move faster and more decisively… Several decades after sexual abuse by priests became a problem, Benedict has not yet instituted a universal set of rules.”
“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 only a papal decision can remove a priest from the ministry. “Yet throughout the ’80s and ’90s, bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome, according to church documents and interviews with bishops and canon lawyers.”
“‘There was confusion everywhere,’ said Archbishop Philip Edward Wilson of Adelaide, Australia.”
As the crisis spread, Cardinal Ratzinger was preoccupied with theological issues, requests of divorced Catholics to remarry, examining supernatural phenomena, like apparitions of the Virgin Mary, so that hoaxes did not “corrupt the faith,” and even reigning in national bishops’ conferences from acting independent of Rome in dealing with the sexual abuse cases in their jurisdiction.
When “bishops and church administrators from across the English-speaking world began meeting to compare notes on how to respond to it. This led to the demand of 17 overseas bishops to have the secret meeting in 2000.
“Many came out of frustration: the Vatican had too often thwarted bishops’ attempts to oust pedophile priests in their jurisdictions. Yet they had high hopes that they would make the case for reform… Yet many at the meeting grew dismayed as, over four long days in early April 2000, they heard senior Vatican officials dismiss clergy sexual abuse as a problem confined to the English-speaking world, and emphasize the need to protect the rights of accused priests over ensuring the safety of children, according to interviews with 10 church officials who attended the meeting.
“Archbishop Wilson said in an interview that during the session he had to call Vatican officials’ attention to long-ignored papal instructions, dating from 1922, and reissued in 1962, that gave Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith… sole responsibility for deciding cases of priests accused of particularly heinous offenses: solicitation of sex during confession, homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality…
“If the old instructions had prevailed, then there would be no cause for confusion among bishops across the globe: all sexual abuse cases would fall under Cardinal Ratzinger’s jurisdiction… Bishops and canon law experts said in interviews that they could only speculate as to why the future pope had not made this clear many years earlier.”
The Vatican eventually permitted the American bishops to institute a no-tolerance policy for sex abuse cases, but it did not apply those policies to other countries, some of which have exploded with allegations of sex abuse cases. “Reports have surfaced of bishops in Chile, Brazil, India and Italy who quietly kept accused priests in ministry without informing local parishioners or prosecutors.”
“Benedict, now five years into his papacy, has yet to make clear if he intends to demand of bishops throughout the world — and of his own Curia — that all priests who committed abuse and bishops who abetted it must be punished…
“The Vatican, moreover, has never made it mandatory for bishops around the world to report molesters to the civil authorities, or to alert parishes and communities where the abusive priests worked — information that often propels more victims to step forward… It was only in April that the Vatican posted “guidelines” on its Web site saying that church officials should comply with civil laws on reporting abuse. But those are recommendations, not requirements.”
Could it be that this abuse scandal is laying the foundation for the fulfillment of the following prophecy by the last generation of faithful men and women under the power of the latter rain?
“Thus the message of the third angel will be proclaimed. As the time comes for it to be given with greatest power, the Lord will work through humble instruments, leading the minds of those who consecrate themselves to His service. The laborers will be qualified rather by the unction of His Spirit than by the training of literary institutions. Men of faith and prayer will be constrained to go forth with holy zeal, declaring the words which God gives them. The sins of Babylon will be laid open. Great Controversy, page 606.
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