ConsortiumNews.com,
April 5, 20
Is
Vatican Guilty in Child-Sex Scandal?I
By Robert Parry
Often the worst scandals are ones that have become engrained
as business as usual within an organization or a society, not
entirely accepted but tolerated by the Old Boys Network in command,
like racial segregation, anti-Semitism, bias against women –
or in the case of the Vatican, pedophilia.
No one’s suggesting
that child rape is to the Catholic Church hierarchy what the casting
couch is to a Hollywood producer – one of the job’s
expected side benefits – but it is troubling that the chief
reaction to new revelations about the sexual abuse of boys by
Catholic priests was to rally in defense of Pope Benedict XVI.
If the Vatican truly
took the under-age rape charges as seriously as it should –
and they have been spilling out now for several decades –
there would have been a full-scale investigation and a purging
of Church officials who had any role in tolerating or covering
up these crimes. In the vernacular, many heads would roll, including
those of senior Vatican leaders.
Yet, one of the leaders
implicated in the cover-up is Pope Benedict, both when he was
German Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger and later when he served as
chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Ratzinger was in charge
of the German archdiocese when an abusive priest was allowed to
get some counseling and quickly resettle in another parish (though
the Vatican claims Ratzinger’s subordinate was to blame).
The pope also was in charge of Church discipline when an ailing
Wisconsin priest who had abused 200 deaf boys was spared defrocking.
In both cases –
and in the broader failure to conduct aggressive investigations
– Benedict appears to have adopted the same attitude that
pervaded many other parts of the Church, one of sympathy for the
offending priests and defensiveness toward “attacks”
on the Church.
As the outside world
has looked on with horror at the endless accounts of child molestation,
the main Church response has been to tighten the protective circle
around the Vatican and especially Pope Benedict. Despite some
words of regret about the rape victims, the Vatican's angrier
reactions have been directed against those who would dare question
the pope.
This distorted world
even led one senior Vatican official to cast Benedict and other
prelates in the role of persecuted Jews, even though the Vatican
as an institution played a shameful role in the history of European
anti-Semitism.
During a Good Friday
service at the Vatican, Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to
the papal household, likened the outrage over Catholic priests
molesting boys to pogroms against Jews.
“They [Jews] know
from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence
and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring
symptoms,” Cantalamessa said at St. Peter’s Basilica
with Pope Benedict sitting silently in attendance.
In other words, according
to Cantalamessa’s historical analogy, the people around the
world who are outraged over the sexual abuse of children –
and the Vatican’s long-term neglect of the scandal –
are the Nazis, and Pope Benedict and his Vatican brethren who
continue to live in almost unparalleled luxury are the Jews being
herded into concentration camps.
As New York Times columnist
Maureen Dowd noted, “It’s insulting to liken the tragic
death of six million Jews with the appropriate outrage of Catholics
at the decades-long cover-up of crimes against children by the
very men who were supposed to be their moral guides.”
While Benedict has
offered tepid apologies for the scandal, he also has dismissed
outrage over the scandal as “petty gossip.” He has shown
no sign of reining in his defenders as they shift the blame from
the Pope onto his critics.
Beyond the issue of
Benedict’s personal responsibility, there are questions about
the Vatican itself. Why wasn’t the Church more proactive?
Why has it consistently devoted more energy to deflecting the
blame than to addressing these serious crimes?
Indeed, until the last
two decades of the Twentieth Century when victims finally banded
together to expose the crimes, child-rape cases were treated almost
exclusively as internal Church matters, deserving of rebukes and
penance, but not priest perp walks and prosecution by civil authorities.
Part of the answer
may be that the Vatican is the ultimate Old Boys Club, dating
back two millennia and renowned for its internal secrecy. Thus,
some patterns of behavior, even deviant forms, may have become
an unspoken part of the clandestine culture for so many generations
that the greater shock for the Vatican would be that this behavior
is finally being challenged.
For centuries the Church
would not have expected class-action lawsuits by otherwise-powerless
boys, who had little choice but to suffer their humiliation in
private or to face angry denials if they dared besmirch the reputation
of a well-regarded priest.
To this day, the Vatican
also resists reexamining the church canon imposing celibacy on
Catholic clerics. Indeed, Pope Benedict has been a leading defender
of this rule that seeks to suppress a normal part of human life,
sexual activity, and thus may encourage its resurfacing in destructive
ways.
Though clerical celibacy
is now widely regarded as an integral part of the Catholic faith,
it never appeared as a mandate from Jesus or from early Christian
leaders who were married men. Jesus also grew up in a Jewish tradition
in which rabbis were expected to marry, and there is no explicit
Biblical claim that Jesus himself was celibate.
However, the issue
of celibacy soon emerged as a religious concern for the young
religion, with some zealots forsaking sex as a sign of their devotion
to Christ. In the First Century, Nicolas, one of the early Seven
Deacons, then sought to demonstrate his own religious commitment
by renouncing conjugal intercourse with his wife, according to
the writing of a Fourth Century Church bishop Epiphanius.
Nicolas later decided
that celibacy had too many drawbacks, so – while maintaining
his vow against sex in marriage – he began partaking in promiscuous
sex, including some acts that Epiphanius condemned as unnatural.
Though historians have doubts about these ancient accounts, Nicolas
is sometimes considered the leader of a sect called “Nicolaitism.”
A millennium after
Nicolas, during the Middle Ages, the then wealthy and powerful
Roman Catholic Church was facing embarrassing property claims
from offspring of Catholic clerics. Thus, the Gregorian Reform
targeted the sexual libertinism of “Nicolaitism.” The
First Lateran Council in 1123 banned marriage contracts for clerics
as well as the use of concubines, a practice that had produced
illegitimate children.
“We absolutely
forbid priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks to have concubines
or to contract marriage,” the Council ruled.
The Reformation
However, celibacy remained
a controversial issue within the Catholic Church and emerged as
a major point of contention in the Sixteenth-Century Protestant
Reformation, which blamed celibacy for widespread sexual misconduct
by clerics.
Protestant reformers
cited New Testament scripture stating that clerics should be the
husband of a single wife and declaring that early apostles were
permitted a Christian wife. After breaking with Rome, Martin Luther
and other leading reformers married.
Yet, the Vatican pressed
on with its insistence on clerical celibacy, despite the accumulating
evidence that the tenet was surrounded by hypocrisy and continued
sexual misconduct.
Given this history
and the more recent revelations of priests raping altar boys and
other children entrusted to their care, another question must
arise: Did some Vatican leaders come to tolerate this behavior
as a perverse necessity for continuing the rules of celibacy,
as an outlet for the sex drive that would not produce offspring
and thus claimants on the Church’s property?
The Vatican is after
all not only a religious institution, but a vast political and
business enterprise, complete with secretive banks and alliances
with powerful world leaders. During the Cold War, the Vatican
was a key collaborator in discrediting Third World left-leaning
movements that sought social justice on behalf of peasants and
workers.
In Latin America, the
Church hierarchy historically collaborated with the ruling oligarchies
to maintain order. The Church urged peasants to look for their
reward in the afterlife. At other times, Church leaders worked
hand-in-glove with the CIA in anti-communist counterinsurgencies.
During the 1960s, however,
the Second Vatican Council pushed the Church toward more modern
and liberal ideas, inspiring some idealistic priests and nuns
to adopt the thinking of “liberation theology,” i.e.
putting the Church politically on the side of the poor.
After the death of
Pope John Paul I in 1978 – and the ascension of a far more
conservative prelate, John Paul II – the Vatican began turning
its back on the “liberation theologists” who were increasingly
targeted by right-wing security forces for torture, rape and murder.
The Reagan administration
rewarded the Vatican for its return to intense anti-communism
by granting the Holy See full diplomatic status in 1984.
Meanwhile, as Pope
John Paul II was being elevated into an international icon of
rectitude, the Church was quietly trying to contain the scandal
of priests molesting boys. The scandal emerged first in the United
States and Canada, as people grew braver about challenging powerful
institutions and as the stigma related to homosexuality declined.
Despite the sickening
evidence of these abuses, the Vatican remained disturbingly ambivalent.
Instead of reporting the crimes to civil authorities for prosecution,
the Church usually offered offending priests some counseling before
reassigning them to new parishes.
That pattern of tolerating
the intolerable has continued into the latest phase of the scandal
as new cases were revealed, from a Wisconsin school for deaf boys
to parishes in Germany, Ireland and across Europe.
Again, the Vatican
mixed in a few expressions of regret with an aggressive P.R. campaign
to tamp down the outrage.
A look-back over the
past two millennia, however, might suggest that it is the Vatican
that is due for some serious soul-searching.
Robert Parry broke
many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons,
Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous
books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press
& 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com
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