The New Republic, May
18, 2010
Forgive
Not: A Catholic’s struggle with the sins of his church
By » Garry Wills
This early in the
twenty-first century, the rulers of the Catholic Church have suffered
an earthquake of crumbling credibility. Nearly ten years ago,
with the initial revelations about sexual abuse of the young by
priests, some argued that the problem was limited in time and
place, since most of the abuse cases had occurred 30 or 40 years
before, and they took place in the United States. There was hope
that an investigative and reformist effort would restore the U.S.
Church’s authority. An emergency Dallas meeting of American
bishops in 2002 and a lay inquiry with its recommendations in
2004 were supposed to make the problem go away.
But, ten years later,
all across the globe, the problem has shown a stubborn refusal
to subside. Pedophile scandals have devastated the Church in Ireland.
Fresh horrors have come to light in the United States, especially
in Wisconsin and Arizona. There are urgent investigations in Germany,
Switzerland, Austria, Australia, and Italy. And the Pope himself
has been implicated in the scandals, some of which occurred when
he was Archbishop of Munich and some when he oversaw the treatment
of pedophile reports at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith. This has led to calls for the Pope’s resignation,
or arrest, or criminal indictment—things not even imaginable
ten years ago.
It should come as no
surprise that a world scandal has succeeded the American troubles.
Leading members of the hierarchy in country after country dismissed
the U.S. reports of abuse by priests as a thing made up by the
hyperthyroid American press, out of an anti-Catholic animus, a
pro-Jewish zeal, or the hope to cash in on Church wealth. It is
no wonder these foreign cardinals have been blindsided by their
own neglected scandals. At first, the Vatican rejected the measures
taken by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after
their meeting in Dallas, as not being fair to accused priests,
giving too much scope to lay panels of critics, and violating
the confidentiality of confessions.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone,
at the time a second-in-command to Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, and later the second-in-command
(secretary of state) to Ratzinger as Pope Benedict, set the tone
in an interview with an Italian magazine:
[T]here is a well-founded
suspicion that some of these charges [of abuse], that arise
well after the fact, serve only for making money in civil litigation.
… In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated
to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has
admitted the offence of pedophilia is unfounded. … If a
priest cannot confide in his bishop for fear of being denounced,
then it would mean that there is no more liberty of conscience.
Bertone was soon chosen
by the Vatican to serve on a panel that would soften the directives
adopted by the American bishops for punishing pedophile priests.
Another member of this panel, made up of eight bishops, was Cardinal
Darío Castrillón Hoyos, the head of the Congregation
for the Clergy, which handled all issues having to do with priests.
Castrillón Hoyos was delegated to read a papal letter that
mentioned the scandals, where he defended a policy of “keeping
things within the family.” A third member of the panel was
Archbishop Julián Herranz Casado, who attributed the pedophile
scandal to American “exaggeration, financial exploitation,
and nervousness.”
Some critics of the
American bishops’ treatment of the pedophile problem cited
an article from the Vatican-monitored newspaper Civiltà
Cattolica, written by the dean of the canon law department at
Rome’s Gregorian University, famous for training the clergy.
It said that “the bishop and the superior [of religious orders]
are neither morally nor judicially responsible for the acts committed
by one of their clergy.” Among those attacking the Jewish
press in the United States for causing the scandal was Cardinal
Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, who said that the Vatican’s
reception of Yasir Arafat had offended the media, that a supporter
of feminism was judging the priests’ cases in Boston, and
that Cardinal Bernard Law had been subjected to “Stalinist
processes against Churchmen.” At a press conference in Rome,
Rodriguez called the emphasis on the scandals by U.S. newspapers
an “obsession [that] is a mental illness,” and a trick
to get money from the Church:
When I was in
the United States in the 1970s, there was a fashion when one
slipped on a sidewalk to sue the owner of the house for millions.
This became a kind of industry. I remember that people used
to put on a neck brace and go find a lawyer. … So why now
is there such interest in taking up these [pedophile] cases
from the past? Because there is money in play. But we know that
money doesn’t heal any wound. … If it were up to me,
I would give the money neither to the lawyers nor even to the
victims. … For me it would be a tragedy to reduce the role
of a pastor to that of a cop. We are totally different, and
I’d be prepared to go to jail rather than harm one of my
priests.
The harm, you notice,
was to the priests, not to the children they preyed on. The priests,
Rodriguez said, can “also be victims.”
Members of the hierarchy
outside the United States regularly called accusations against
priests the real scandal. Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of
Mexico City said there was “an orchestrated plan for striking
at the prestige of the Church” that constituted a “ferocious
persecution.” Cardinal Jan Schotte of Belgium (where new
scandals have now been reported) cited with approval the Civiltà
Cattolica article by Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, saying that
the priests should not be accountable to secular authorities and
noting that the Belgian bishops had successfully avoided turning
over their records on the grounds that they were official Church
documents. Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez of Guadalajara
claimed that the Church was being persecuted for its opposition
to abortion and its support of Palestinians:
The powerful don’t
like what the Church affirms and testifies to regarding the
defense of life and of the family. For the powerful of the world,
the positions of the Church against the financial strangulation
of the countries of the Third World and in favor of the millions
and millions of robbed and exploited poor don’t go down
well. The powerful also won’t tolerate the balanced position
of the Church regarding the dramatic situation in the Holy Land.
Most of these reactions
by the hierarchy date from two to four years after my book, Papal
Sin, was published. But they show the same patterns of denial,
evasion, defensiveness, accusation, and protestations of innocence
and holiness that I had already analyzed. The U.S. scandals had
not reached their height in 2000, and they did not lead me to
write the book. The occasion for my doing so was a careful reading
of Lord Acton’s collected historical writings. Though Acton
was a lifelong Catholic, he had been a scathing critic of the
First Vatican Council, and of the dishonest way Pius IX extracted
from it a definition of papal infallibility. But he assured William
Gladstone that a papacy that had survived the St. Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre and had based its claims on fraud and forgery for
centuries was just acting true to form.
Acton’s most famous
criticisms of the papacy occurred in his dealings with Mandell
Creighton in 1887. Creighton would later become the Anglican bishop
of London, but, at the time, he was a professor of history at
Cambridge University and the editor of the English Historical
Review. He asked Acton to review in that journal volumes three
and four of The History of the Papacy, which Creighton had just
published. Acton attacked the volumes for whitewashing papal crimes.
Creighton honorably published the review, despite its criticism
of him, but, when Creighton wrote objecting to certain matters
in the review, Acton sharpened his attack. His letter of April
5, 1887, contains this famous passage:
I cannot accept
your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men,
with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there
is any presumption, it is the other way, against holders of
power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility
has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends
to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. … There
is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder
of it.
Though Acton lived
before the Second Vatican Council defined the Church as “the
people of God,” the entirety of Acton’s writings prove
that he never equated Catholicism with the papacy. He was too
good a historian for that. The Pope is a freak of history—specifically,
of medieval history. His office does not date from the early history
of the Christian community. Peter was not a Pope, or a bishop,
or a priest—offices that did not exist in his lifetime. There
are no priests in the New Testament. Peter was not the leader
of the Church in either Jerusalem or Rome—communities led,
respectively, by James, Jesus’s brother, and Clement. Paul,
at the famous clash in Antioch, showed that he did not think Peter
a sound interpreter of Jesus’s message. Males were not the
only ministers at the outset, as the apostle Junia proves. In
fact the early preachers of the Gospel were often a husband-and-wife
team.
When the current Pope
was Cardinal Ratzinger, he was asked how so many Catholics could
disregard official teachings of the hierarchy. He answered that
doctrine is not set by majority vote. But that is precisely how
creeds and doctrines were formulated. At the great Eastern councils,
like that of Nicaea, hundreds of bishops from around the world
voted on the deepest mysteries of the faith—the Trinity,
the Incarnation, the Resurrection. And there was no Pope at any
of those councils. The democracy that would be denounced by Pius
IX had been practiced in the early Church, where priests and bishops
were elected by the people, and bishops could no more leave a
people, once elected, than a man could leave his wife. (That is
why, for a long time, no bishop could become a Pope—he could
not leave his diocese.)
In the Middle Ages,
it was the worldly assumption that all authority had to be feudal
or monarchical in character. So the Pope became a monarch. He
ruled territories. He had armies, prisons, spies. These things
were finally stripped from him, but not until the nineteenth century,
and despite the frantic efforts of Pius IX to retain them. Even
now, the vestigial papal state is being invoked to show that the
Pope, as ruler of a sovereign government, cannot be called to
account for priestly sins.
In keeping with its
ahistorical and medieval roots, the papacy has been reflexively
opposed to social changes. Pius IX condemned democracy as an evil
and illegitimate form of government. The papacy has historically
been at war with science—against the Enlightenment, against
textual criticism from Erasmus’s time onward, against cosmology
and astronomy in Galileo’s time, against the “liberalism”
of Lamennais and others, against biology and geology in Darwin’s
time, against psychology in Freud’s time—and, at present,
against prenatal scans, in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination,
surrogate motherhood, fetal stem-cell research, and condoms to
prevent AIDS in Africa.
In order to protect
what are considered timeless truths, for centuries, the papacy
prevented the study of the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek
forms, insisting that only the Latin Bible of the Catholic liturgy
be considered authoritative. It made it a condition of ordination
that would-be priests take an oath against modernism, subscribing
to the biblical simplisms of Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi.
It tolerated when it did not encourage—until the 1960s!—the
idea that the Jewish people were guilty of deicide.
Since the papacy has
been frozen in a defensive crouch, defying historical fact and
free inquiry, it has been opposed to anything that might diminish
the power of the Church to define reality. The authority of the
bishop, of the priest, of the papacy, was more important than
the Gospel. It was considered the only power that could say what
the Gospel is or demands. Thus, the covering-up of sacerdotal
sins and errors was a given in the Church. The infantilism of
priests, the combined sexual inexperience and prurience resulting
from celibacy, the belief that a celibate male is more attuned
to spiritual reality than a married man—all this created
a framework where sins, when they occurred, had to be denied,
the victims had to be blamed, the solution to the problem was
simply one of praying harder. Where therapy failed, the confessional
would take the sinner with spiritual force beyond the worldly
wisdom of psychiatrists.
Even now, as Church
leaders belatedly try to repent and repair things, the mythical
underpinnings of the priestly system continue to be taught—that
only celibates can be priests (the apostles were married, all
but Paul), that refusal to marry gives a man a superior caringness,
that it makes him unworldly and concerned with other souls. What
real change can occur when such myths are clung to with a blind
ferocity? The resistance to change can be seen in the fact that
the papacy has not faced the facts of a priesthood dwindling in
both numbers and quality, of a financial base eroding as Church
attendance goes down and donations dry up, even as damages in
the billions must be paid to victims of “holy” predators.
The wonderful teaching and nursing services of the nuns have evaporated.
The reaction of the
hierarchy has been to dig itself even deeper into the past—to
blame the Church’s troubles on such old evils as secularism,
relativism, positivism, pluralism, and a “permissive”
culture. The Second Vatican Council is blamed as well, and the
Popes have tried to blunt or reverse its changes. Pope Benedict
wants to go back to the Latin mass, with the priest turned from
the people. He has cut back ecumenical initiatives, denying again
the validity of Anglican orders, forbidding concelebration of
Mass with Protestants, declaring (in Dominus Iesus) that all other
churches are “gravely deficient.” He wants to put nuns
back in their habits. He is driving to canonize the anti-Semitic
Popes Pius IX and Pius XII. These are further signs of the structures
of deceit—of self-deception as the first step to defying
“worldly wisdom.”
I am asked, if I believe
this, why I remain a Catholic. I do that precisely because I do
not equate the people of God with the papacy. Well, I am told,
other churches honor the Creed and the Gospel without the burden
of a papacy as outdated as the medieval costumes it affects. I
want to be at one with Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and
others; but I want all of these communions to come together, and
I cannot do that by renouncing the Catholic membership in such
an ecumenical Christianity, saying some churches are better than
others. When the disciples of Jesus came back from their first
mission away from him, the apostle John reported, “Master,
we saw a man driving out evil in our name, and he was not one
of us, we tried to stop him.” Jesus asks why they did that:
“No one who does a work of divine power in my name will be
able the next moment to speak evil of me” (Mark 9:38-39).
All of us who honor his name must come together. When a Catholic
tells me—often these days, it is a young woman—that
she can no longer put up with the male monarchical Church, I tell
her, “Stay with us, we need you. The people of God need you.”
All those who honor
the name of Jesus are engaged in a joint search for the Jesus
who will not be found in marble halls or wearing imperial costumes.
He is forever on the run. He is the one who said, “Whatever
you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest [elackistoi],
you did to me” (Matthew 25:41). That means that the priests
abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping
Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the
predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualifies
himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care
for their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest.
We say the same thing, but the “our own” we care for
are the victimized, the poor, the violated. They are Jesus.
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