Pope Benedict was pursued by more than just a cloud of volcanic dust on his way to Malta. RAPHAEL VASSALLO analyses the media eruption over Church child abuse allegations, and asks whether the reportage has done justice to the Pontiff formerly known as God’s Rottweiler
Looks like God may really be on Pope Benedict’s side after all. For why else would He have visited such a timely volcanic eruption on poor, long-suffering Iceland... if not to ground all European journalists and deny them access to Malta, thus allowing his Representative on Earth a little breathing space in a never-ending cycle of scandals, cover-ups and other such ‘idle chatter’?
As things stand, His Holiness arrived yesterday to be welcomed (as expected) by a throng of ardent admirers and a sea of yellow and white flags.... and barely a hostile reporter anywhere in sight. From this perspective, it is hard to resist the notion that the amenable volcanic dust cloud that helped Pope Benedict on his way – just like the freak storm which allegedly blew St Paul off course to Malta around 1,950 years earlier – had been guided across Europe by none other than the hidden hand of the God Himself.
But will this be enough to shield the Pontiff from further media embarrassment while in Malta? Not likely. For even with Pope Benedict safely delivered on Maltese soil – by Alitalia, if not exactly by Divine Providence – the world media furore has shown no signs of abating.
Press-ganged Pontiff With hindsight, one can’t help suspecting that the world press interest in child abuse scandals was deliberately whipped up right before the Pope’s scheduled visit to Malta, specifically to annoy a country that proudly proclaims itself the oldest Catholic nation on Earth.
But in truth, the Pope’s visit is a largely coincidental distraction that has nothing to do with the ongoing controversy. On the contrary, the world press has had it in for Pope Benedict XVI ever since he was elected in 2005... and one does not need to look very far to account for his instant unpopularity among certain newspapers.
For instance, the ultra-conservative The Sun (UK) had announced his ascension under the headline ‘From Hitler Youth to the Vatican’ – a reference to Ratzinger’s forced conscription, aged 14, to the National Socialist Party of Germany, at the height of World War Two. Elsewhere, the left-leaning New York Times has pilloried the Pontiff over the past three weeks, taking pains to link him to the growing number of child abuse cases to have been ‘ignored’ or even covered up by the Church, at a time when the responsibility for such matter could be directly laid at Pope Benedict’s door.
Justified or otherwise, the bulk of these attacks concern decisions (or the lack thereof) taken while Cardinal Ratzinger was still Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith – the Office formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, and which has for centuries been associated with the often violent persecution of heterodoxy – thereby earning the German Cardinal the appellation ‘God’s Rottweiler’.
But it was the more recent child abuse revelations, now pouring in thick and fast from all corners of the globe (Malta included), that have dealt the greatest damage to the reputation of both Pope and Catholic Church in the past few months.
At its mildest, the criticism faced by Pope Benedict XVI is that he ‘had done too little’ to bring predatory priests to justice when still Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith. At their most damning, the attacks involved clear and persistent efforts to implicate Ratzinger himself in a global cover-up of quasi-Apocalyptic proportions... with a certain degree of success that has undeniably tarnished the Church’s reputation as a whole.
Proof of the pudding? So far, the evidence against Pope Benedict does appear compelling, at least on the surface. Last week, the Associated Press unearthed a typed letter in Latin, dated 1985 and bearing Ratzinger’s own signature, which at face value turned down a request to have a convicted paedophile priest defrocked... on the grounds that such sanctions may harm “the good of the Universal Church.”
For many observers, this was the ‘smoking gun’ that directly linked Ratzinger to what (with hindsight) can only be described as a monumental mishandling of a global crisis in the making. And echoing Caiaphas before them, newspaper editors the world over reasoned that it was Benedict’s own words – not to mention his own signature – that condemned him. Coupled with the Vatican’s unsatisfactory reply (basically, an awkward silence), this damning letter did indeed appear to wrap things up nicely for Ratzinger’s critics: at least one of whom, the well-known atheist academic and author Richard Dawkins, has meanwhile called for the Pope’s arrest for ‘crimes against humanity’.
But how much, in truth, can really be gleaned from this one document? And faced with such stark evidence, why did the Vatican not move quicker to limit the possible damage?
Two weeks later, it seems that both these questions can be answered – and while the truth may not entirely put the Church as a whole in the clear, the case for Benedict’s absolution does suddenly appear stronger.
Ignored guidelines Faced with the possibility of a veritable global meltdown, the Vatican soon found itself forced onto the defensive. Having initially made a mess of any attempt to deflect these and other arguments – at times launching wild and desperate counter-accusations, such as the preposterous suggestion (quickly retracted) that the attacks on Pope Benedict formed part of a ‘Zionist plot’ – the Vatican soon collected its wits and slowly (almost grudgingly, in fact) consolidated a more coherent line of defence.
Last Monday, the Holy See posted on its website a previously unknown set of guidelines issued by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and circulated among the global community of Bishops. The document is significantly dated 2001 (i.e., by which time the crisis had assumed more or less the same global proportions it retains today), and signed by none other than Mgr Charles Scicluna, who was Ratzinger’s right-hand man at the time – with a supplementary addendum added in 2003 by the future Pope Benedict in person.
These guidelines clearly state that, when faced with child abuse allegations, local archdioceses were to “follow the laws of the country” where the abuse took place, and above all to report cases “to the relevant authorities”.
Unaccountably, however, this document seems to have escaped the attention of virtually the entire world press. And yet, it has direct relevance to the Pope’s handling of the entire issue of paedophile priests, and goes at least some distance towards dispelling the widely-held view that Ratzinger himself had ‘encouraged’ a culture of secrecy regarding such cases.
Admittedly, matters become slightly more complicated when local legislation is also thrown into the mix. For instance: where American law compels the secular authorities to intervene in all such cases, Maltese law is entirely different – as the head of the Church’s local Response Team Victor Caruana Colombo himself explained this week.
Furthermore, we now know (thanks to revelations in today’s edition by former Gozo Bishop Nikol Cauchi – see page 7) that a local Presbytarian Council had in 1999 shot down a suggestion to report local suspected child abusers to the police – and the circulation of Ratzinger’s recommendations two years later clearly did nothing to overturn this decision.
The spirit is willing Where does all this leave the Pope’s defence in the face of such serious allegations?
On one level, what emerges from the sequence of events is that Cardinal Ratzinger was slow – some would say too slow – to intimate the sheer extent of the global problem of paedophilia among Catholic priests. It is unlikely that, with the knowledge he had evidently gained by 2001, Ratzinger would have issued the same set of instructions to the diocese of Oakland as he did in 1985. Clearly, we are dealing with an evolving approach to the problem: one which started out in denial, but which eventually moved on to acceptance and concern, culminating in an attempt – however late – to finally address the issue.
From this perspective, it is at best unclear how the same Pope Benedict can now stand accused of having ‘sheltered’ paedophile priests... when in fact he had instructed his Bishops to report them to the secular authorities.
At the same time, however, the revelation also casts doubts on the precise extent of Pope Benedict’s own authority within the complex structures of the Church hierarchy. For given the finality of his word in such matters.... how is it possible that such direct instructions could have been so widely disregarded, by Bishops supposedly sworn to obedience of their superiors? And besides: why did the same Pope take so long to apprehend that his own instructions had been ignored?
As more documentation surfaces (as more undoubtedly will in the coming months) the picture that now slowly starts swimming into view is that of a well-intentioned man who – back in the 1980s, at least – perhaps underestimated the sheer extent of the problem of predatory priests worldwide, with serious and harmful repercussions on the Church’s global standing.
But to flash-freeze only that moment in time – as though this former approach were the be-all and the end-all of Pope Benedict’s entire involvement in the matter – would also grossly misrepresent the case for the beleaguered Pontiff’s defence.
The evidence points more towards a man whose spirit is willing, but whose leadership and organisational skills may not be strong enough for the task.
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