[THS] !!!!!! Michael Parenti: Pedophiles and Popes: Doing the Vatican Shuffle

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25414.htm


Protecting the Perpetrators.

Pedophiles and Popes: Doing the Vatican Shuffle

By Michael Parenti

May 10, 2010 "Commondreams" -- When Pope John Paul II was still living in Poland
as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, he claimed that the security police would accuse priests of
sexual abuse just to hassle and discredit them. (New York Times, 3/28/10). For
Wojtyla, the Polish pedophilia problem was nothing more than a Communist plot to
smear the church.

By the early 1980s, Wojtyla, now ensconced in Rome as Pope John Paul II, treated all
stories about pedophile clergy with dismissive aplomb, as little more than slander
directed against the church. That remained his stance for the next twenty years.

Today in post-communist Poland, clerical abuse cases have been slowly surfacing,
very slowly. Writing in the leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza,  a middle-aged man
reported having been sexually abused as a child by a priest. He acknowledged
however that Poland was not prepared to deal with such transgressions. "It's still too
early. . . .  Can you imagine what life would look like if an inhabitant of a small town
or village decided to talk?  I can already see the committees of defense for the
accused priests."

While church pedophiles may still enjoy a safe haven in Poland and other countries
where the clergy are above challenge, things are breaking wide open elsewhere.
Today we are awash in a sludge of revelations spanning whole countries and
continents, going back decades---or as some historians say---going back centuries.
Only in the last few weeks has the church shown signs of cooperating with civil
authorities. Here is the story.

Protecting the Perpetrators. As everyone now knows, for decades church superiors
repeatedly chose to ignore complaints about pedophile priests. In many instances,
accused clerics were quietly bundled off to distant congregations where they could
prey anew upon the children of unsuspecting parishioners. This practice of denial
and concealment has been so consistently pursued in diocese after diocese, nation
after nation, as to leave the impression of being a deliberate policy set by church
authorities.

And indeed it has been. Instructions coming directly from Rome have required every
bishop and cardinal to keep matters secret. These instructions were themselves kept
secret; the cover-up was itself covered up. Then in 2002, John Paul put it in writing,
specifically mandating that all charges against priests were to be reported secretly to
the Vatican and hearings were to be held in camera, a procedure that directly defies
state criminal codes.   Rather than being defrocked, many outed pedophile priests
have been allowed to advance into well-positioned posts as administrators, vicars,
and parochial school officials---repeatedly accused by their victims while repeatedly
promoted by their superiors.

Church spokesmen employ a vocabulary of compassion and healing---not for the
victims but for the victimizers. They treat the child rapist as a sinner who confesses
his transgression and vows to mend his ways. Instead of incarceration, there is
repentance and absolution.

While this forgiving approach might bring comfort to some malefactors, it proves to
be of little therapeutic efficacy when dealing with the darker appetites of pedophiles.
A far more effective deterrent is the danger of getting caught and sent to prison.
Absent any threat of punishment, the perpetrator is restrained only by the limits of
his own appetite and the availability of opportunities.

Forgiving No One Else

The tender tolerance displayed by the church hierarchy toward child rapists does not
extend to other controversial clergy. Think of those radical priests who have
challenged the hierarchy in the politico-economic struggle for liberation theology, or
who advocate lifting the prohibitions against birth control and abortion, or who
propose that clergy be allowed to marry, or who preside over same-sex weddings, or
who themselves are openly gay, or who believe women should be ordained, or who
bravely call for investigations of the pedophilia problem itself.

Such clergy often have their careers shut down. Some are subjected to hostile
investigations by church superiors.

A Law Unto Itself

Church leaders seem to forget that pedophilia is a felony crime and that, as citizens
of a secular state, priests are subject to its laws just like the rest of us. Clerical
authorities repeatedly have made themselves accessories to the crime, playing an
active role in obstructing justice,  arguing in court that criminal investigations of
"church affairs" violated the free practice of religion guaranteed by the US
Constitution--as if raping little children were a holy sacrament.

Church officials tell parishioners not to talk to state authorities. They offer no pastoral
assistance to young victims and their shaken families. They do not investigate to see
if other children have been victimized by the same priests. Some young plaintiffs
have been threatened with excommunication or suspension from Catholic school.
Church leaders impugn their credibility, even going after them with countersuits.

Responding to charges that one of his priests sexually assaulted a six-year-old boy,
Cardinal Bernard Law asserted that "the boy and his parents contributed to the
abuse by being negligent." Law himself never went to prison for the hundreds of
cover-ups he conducted.  In 2004, with things getting too hot for him in his Boston
archdiocese, Law was rescued by Pope John Paul II to head one of Rome's major
basilicas, where he now lives with diplomatic immunity in palatial luxury on a
generous stipend, supervised by no one but a permissive pontiff.

A judge of the Holy Roman Rota, the church's highest court, wrote in a Vatican-
approved article that bishops should not report sexual violations to civil authorities.
And sure enough, for years bishops and cardinals have refrained from cooperating
with law enforcement authorities, refusing to release abusers' records, claiming that
the confidentiality of their files came under the same legal protection as privileged
communications in the confessional---a notion that has no basis in canon or secular
law.

Bishop James Quinn of Cleveland even urged church officials to send incriminating
files to the Vatican Embassy in Washington, DC, where diplomatic immunity would
prevent the documents from being subpoenaed.

Just a Few Bad Apples

Years ago the Catholic hierarchy would insist that clerical pedophilia involved only a
few bad apples and was being blown completely out of proportion. For the longest
time John Paul scornfully denounced the media for "sensationalizing" the issue. He
and his cardinals (Ratzinger included) directed more fire at news outlets for
publicizing the crimes than at their own clergy for committing them.

Reports released by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (one of the more honest
organizations in the Catholic Church) documented the abuse committed in the United
States by 4,392 priests against thousands of children between 1950 and 2002. One of
every ten priests ordained in 1970 was charged as a pedophile by 2002. Another
survey commissioned by the US bishops found that among 5,450 complaints of sexual
abuse there were charges against at least sixteen bishops. So much for a few bad
apples.

Still, even as reports were flooding in from Ireland and other countries, John Paul
dismissed the pedophilic epidemic as "an American problem," as if American priests
were not members of his clergy, or as if this made it a matter of no great moment.
John Paul went to his grave in 2005 still refusing to meet with victims and never
voicing any apologies or regrets regarding sex crimes and cover-ups.

With Ratzinger's accession to the papal throne as Benedict XVI, the cover-ups
continued. As recently as April 2010, at Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square, dean of the
college of cardinals Angelo Sodano, assured Benedict that the faithful were
unimpressed "by the gossip of the moment." One would not know that "the gossip of
the moment" included thousands of investigations, prosecutions, and accumulated
charges extending back over decades.

During that same Easter weekend, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of
Mexico City, declared that the public uproar was an "overreaction" incited by the
doings of "a few dishonest and criminal priests." A  few? An overreaction? Of course,
the picture now becomes clear: a few bad apples were inciting overreaction by
engaging in the gossip of the moment.

The church seems determined to learn nothing from its transgressions, preoccupied
as it is with avoiding lawsuits and bad publicity. 

Really Not All that Serious 
There are
two ways we can think of child rape as being not a serious problem, and the Catholic
hierarchy seems to have embraced both these positions. First, pedophilia is not that
serious if it involves only a few isolated and passing incidents. Second, an even more
creepy way of downplaying the problem: child molestation is not all that damaging or
that important. At worst, it is regrettable and unfortunate; it might greatly upset the
child, but it certainly is not significant enough to cause unnecessary scandal and ruin
the career of an otherwise splendid padre.

It is remarkable how thoroughly indifferent the church bigwigs have been toward the
abused children. When one of the most persistent perpetrators, Rev. John Geoghan,
was forced into retirement (not jail) after seventeen years and nearly 200 victims,
Cardinal Law could still write him, "On behalf of those you have served well, in my
own name, I would like to thank you. I understand yours is a painful situation." It is
evident that Law was more concerned about the "pain" endured by Geoghan than
the misery he had inflicted upon minors.

In 2001, a French bishop was convicted in France for refusing to hand over to the
police a priest who had raped children. It recently came to light that a former top
Vatican cardinal,  Dario Castrillón, had written to the bishop, "I congratulate you for
not denouncing a priest to the civil authorities. You have acted well, and I am
pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all
the bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his ‘son' and priest." (The
bishop actually got off with a suspended sentence.) Castrillón claimed that Pope John
Paul II had authorized the letter years ago and had told him to send it to bishops
around the world. (New York Times, 4/22/2010.)

There are many more like Cardinal Law and Cardinal Castrillón in the hierarchy, aging
men who have no life experience with children and show not the slightest regard or
empathy for them. They claim it their duty to protect the "unborn child" but offer no
protection to the children in their schools and parishes.

They themselves are called "Father" but they father no one. They do not reside in
households or families. They live in an old-boys network, jockeying for power and
position, dedicated to the Holy Mother Church that feeds, houses, and adorns them
throughout their lives. From their heady heights, popes and bishops cannot hear the
cries of children. In any case, the church belongs not to little children but to the
bedecked oligarchs.

The damage done to sexual victims continues to go unnoticed: the ensuing years of
depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, panic attacks, sexual dysfunction, and even
mental breakdown and suicide-all these terrible aftereffects of child rape seem to
leave popes and bishops more or less unruffled.

Circling the Wagons

The Catholic hierarchy managed to convince itself that the prime victim in this dismal
saga is the church itself. In 2010 it came to light that, while operating as John Paul's
über-hit man, Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) had provided cover and
protection to several of the worst predator priests. The scandal was now at the
pope's door---exactly where it should have been many years earlier during John
Paul's reign.

The Vatican's response was predictable. The hierarchy circled the wagons to defend
pope and church from outside "enemies." The cardinals and bishops railed furiously
at critics who "assault" the church and, in the words of the archbishop of Paris,
subject it to "a smear campaign." Benedict himself blamed secularism and misguided
applications of Vatican 2's aggiornamento as contributing to the "context" of sexual
abuse. Reform-minded liberalism made us do it, he seemed to be saying.

But this bristling Easter counterattack by the hierarchy did not play well. Church
authorities came off looking like insular, arrogant elites who were unwilling to own up
to a horrid situation largely of their own making.

Meanwhile the revelations continued. A bishop in Ireland resigned admitting he had
covered up child abuse cases. Bishops in Germany and Belgium stepped down after
confessing to charges that they themselves had abused minors. And new allegations
were arising in Chile, Norway, Brazil, Italy, France, and Mexico.

Then, a fortnight after Easter, the Vatican appeared to change course and for the
first time issued a directive urging bishops to report abuse cases to civil authorities "if
required by local law." At the same time, Pope Benedict held brief meetings with
survivor groups and issued sympathetic statements about their plight.

For many of the victims, the pontiff's overtures and apologies were too little, too late.
Their feeling was that if the Vatican really wanted to make amends, it should
cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities and stop obstructing justice; it
should ferret out abusive clergy and not wait until cases are publicized by others; and
it should make public the church's many thousands of still secret reports on priests
and bishops.

In the midst of all this, some courageous clergy do speak out. At a Sunday mass in a
Catholic church outside Springfield, Massachusetts, the Rev. James Scahill delivered a
telling sermon to his congregation (New York Times, 4/12/10): "We must personally
and collectively declare that we very much doubt the veracity of the pope and those
of church authority who are defending him. It is beginning to become evident that
for decades, if not centuries, church leadership covered up the abuse of children and
minors to protect its institutional image and the image of priesthood"

The abusive priests, Scahill went on, were "felons." He had "severe doubt" about the
Vatican's claims of innocent ignorance. "If by any slimmest of chance the pope and
all his bishops didn't know--they all should resign on the basis of sheer and complete
ignorance, incompetence, and irresponsibility."

How did Father Scahill's suburban Catholic parishioners receive his scorching
remarks? One or two walked out. The rest gave him a standing ovation.


Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader
(City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth); The Assassination of
Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Culture Struggle (Seven
Stories Press), and God and His Demons (forthcoming).  For further information, visit
his website: www.michaelparenti.org.