The Catholic Church - again

Once more I feel I have to write about a continuing theme I really don’t want to have to concentrate on in this blog – I am referring of course to the Catholic church and the positions being taken by many of those in authority there, right up to and including the pope. I think I need to explain something of this reluctance before commenting on current developments.

I spent nine years of my life as a member of a Catholic religious order which I left a year after I had been ordained a priest. Those nine years were exciting, formative, positive and negative, inspiring and frustrating; in hindsight, twenty four years later, a completely normal experience of full-tilt, confusing, ecstatic, exploring, orientating, completely-alive early adulthood. My personal journey through life has taken me much farther since then, away from Catholicism, beyond Christianity, into an open atheistically-inclined agnosticism with which I am generally quite content. As such, the vestigial continuing interest I have in things Catholic could be compared to the interest one has in hearing news of an old lover, with whom one has little current contact but where the mutually inflicted wounds and injuries have long healed over. I feel that I have basically sorted out many of the issues that I had with the church while I was a “professional” member by realising that it was not for me and, following the logic of that recognition, leaving. It took me a few years after leaving to complete this realisation but, from my point of view and that of most of the brothers who remained in the order, the hurts have been forgotten and the bitterness transcended.

On reflection, I would even go a step further, and state that, in many respects, I feel deeply thankful to the Dominican Order in particular for many things, for deep abiding friendships, for a wonderful atmosphere of open intellectual enquiry, for marvellous memories and a personal experience, generally, of great (some might even have said at the time, too great) tolerance. But then, I was part of the whole thing during a period from 1977 to 1986 when the atmosphere was more open and positive than it is today – or such is my impression at any rate. (And, at the same time, there was an unspeakable and unspoken shadow-side of which I was unaware, hundreds of priests abusing children with impunity and – in many cases – with the knowledge of their superiors.)

This is the background to that reluctance to comment I mentioned above. But it is also the background which makes me so angry at the position I see being taken by many “official” representatives of the church during the past couple of weeks. In his Good Friday sermon in the presence of the pope, Benedict’s personal preacher, Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the treatment of the church over sex abuse to “the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism”. Cantalamessa claimed that this comment came from a letter from an unnamed “Jewish friend” and subsequently half-heartedly apologised “if …I hurt the sensibilities of Jews and victims of paedophilia.” There are two points which arise here. Firstly I am somewhat sceptical of the authenticity of the source of the letter quoted. “The more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism”? One might ask what the less shameful aspects of anti-Semitism are. (And before someone accuses me of nit-picking here, let me add that the author of the sermon must have been aware that his words would be reported worldwide.) I find it difficult to believe that a Jew would have written these words. Secondly, the so-called apology is not a retraction of the comparison, but only an expression of sorrow if Jews or victims of paedophilia were offended. The intent is clear, the comparison remains.

All this fits in with other comments coming from official Vatican sources. Among others, Frederico Lombardi, the official Vatican spokesman, has repeatedly referred to a defamation campaign being carried out by those ill-disposed to the church. In an unprecedented laudation before the pope on Easter Sunday, the dean of the college of cardinals, Angelo Sodano, said that the church would not be intimidated by chiacchiericcio, meaning idle chatter or petty gossip.

This approach is a continuation of the knee-jerk reaction of Catholic church authorities in the past decades to any form of criticism. Rather than making any attempt to listen to what is being said, the strategy seems to be to immediately try to discredit those who are expressing the criticism. It is an easy and cheap form of ad hominem argumentation, attacking the messenger who brings bad news rather than taking the message itself seriously.

It is also insulting. It insults those thousands of us critics, most of whom do not spend their lives simply looking for sticks with which to bash the Catholic church (we have better things to do with our lives), many of whom, in fact, may wish the church well. It insults those millions of believing Catholics who, despite the moral abyss in which they see their leaders lost, still try to carry on living their faith. It insults those many sincere sisters, brothers, priests and lay-people who continue to work for the gospel, for the ideals in which they believe. It betrays that very message which these men purport to represent – and, in the spirit of the story the church officially remembered last week, one wonders when the man who claims the title of Peter’s successor will hear the cock crow? How hurtful it must be for those who were actually abused and subsequently let down by the men who had the power to stop the abuse and see the abusers legally dealt with – their superiors – and who instead chose to browbeat the victims, swear them to silence and ignore their suffering is beyond imagination. And now, some of these same men (or, in the case of the bishop of Rome, their spokesmen) try to justify themselves by pointing to campaigns by enemies of the church or by arguing that the whole affair is the result of secularisation and a general weakening of the faith. To quote Scripture, Jesus wept!

On Good Friday, Father Cantalamessa knowingly brought anti-Semitism and, by implication, the Holocaust into the discussion. It would have been better for him to remember that millions of those reading reports of his words know enough history to be reminded of other possible parallels to the Nazi period. I, for one, was led to think of the Nuremberg trials and some of the justifications given by those in the dock concerning obedience to orders and the necessity of some suffering in order to achieve a greater goal.

If these men had any mature sense of moral responsibility, any of them even passively implicated in any cover-up, in any failure to report abuse to the civil authorities would resign. Every time they celebrate mass, they publicly ask forgiveness “for what I have done and for what I have failed to do.” Such gestures might just show the beginning of a way to honestly dealing with the issues which have arisen. Instead, only a few resignations have taken place, practically all of them under pressure and with little or no acknowledgement that the men involved have even understood why they had to go.

In the light of all that is unfolding, I am glad to be able to say that I am no longer a Catholic. And yet, that part of me which was Catholic, which believed in the liberation and joy, the potential for good in the Christian message, which, as part of my personal history, is still part of who I am today, feels sorrow and shame. It was a comment on an earlier post published on this blog by a kinswoman of mine, who like me has had a complex history with the Catholic church, which gave me the deciding motivation to write this piece. Maureen, you summed it up so well: “My dear friend, a Maryknoll Sister, gave her life in El Salvador to protect the powerless against the ruthless. Now the ruthless run the Church. It makes me so very sad.”

(Sources: The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, L’Osservatore Romano, www.cantalamessa.org)

The Pope's Problem

I really didn’t want to come back to this subject again, but the continuing revelations about abuse within the Catholic Church in Germany and the reaction of the Vatican just cannot go uncommented. A few weeks ago I predicted here that the situation was going to cause problems for Pope Benedict XVI. Even then I hadn’t realised how serious they might potentially be.

It was confirmed this week that during Josef Ratzinger’s last years as Archbishop of Munich a priest from the Diocese of Essen, who had been accused of sexual abuse of an eleven-year-old, was transferred to Munich. Ratzinger agreed to the transfer. The reason for the transfer, according to church sources, was so that the man could undergo therapy in Munich. However, this therapy never took place; instead the priest in question was appointed to a parish. A few years later, he was convicted of sexual abuse of minors in Bavaria and given a suspended sentence. He has continued to work in the Munich diocese, although he no longer officially has contact with children.

Assigning the man to parish work was a grave mistake, the Church admits; the sole responsibility for this decision has been taken by the Vicar General of the Archdiocese at the time. While it is possible that the assignment might have been reported to Ratzinger’s office, there is no reason to necessarily believe that archbishop personally approved it. The archbishop was a busy man, there were nearly a thousand priests in the archdiocese at the time, such appointments were the responsibility of the vicar general.

All of this is, superficially, credible. But there is at least one misrepresentation in this statement and a number of deeper questions are conveniently ignored. Of the nearly thousand priests referred to in official church statements, a large minority would have been members of religious orders and congregations, with whom the archbishop per se had practically nothing to do. So the number of priests for whom he was personally responsible was quite a bit smaller.

The deeper questions are more serious. The church has confirmed that Ratzinger had initially agreed to accept the man from the diocese of Essen. Generally speaking, inter-diocesan transfers of priests are not particularly common within the Catholic Church. They happen, of course, but a priest would, in the normal course of events, have to explain to his bishop why he wanted such a transfer and it would be usual to explain the move to his new bishop and diocese as well. If the move took place at the behest of the religious authorities in Essen, it seems very unlikely that the background would not have been explained to his new bishop – in this case Ratzinger.

So, it seems at least quite likely that Archbishop Ratzinger knew why the Diocese of Essen was presenting him with a new priest. It seems probable, reading between the lines of the various Church statements, that the issue of therapy was mentioned.

The astounding thing is – if the Church accounts are true, and Ratzinger knew nothing of the man’s assignment to parish work – that in the nearly two years before he left Munich to take up his new position in Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Ratzinger apparently never troubled to enquire how things were working out with that man from Essen, you know, ahem, the one with that problem. For the Church, and Josef Ratzinger, there is no good answer to this. Either he didn’t ask, and was thus profoundly negligent in his responsibility for the children in his diocese, or he did ask, was told about the parish assignment and saw no problem – once again profound negligence of his responsibility for the children in his diocese. (The only other explanation, one that could just get him personally off the hook, is that he did ask and was lied to, but I haven’t heard anyone suggest that yet.)

Twenty years later, in 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger sent a letter to all bishops advising them that all cases of sexual abuse of minors must be forwarded to his then-office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the cases were to be subject to pontifical secret. Many canon law experts have stated that this secrecy order would not prohibit bishops and religious superiors from reporting suspected crimes to the police. The Irish bishops have, however, stated recently that many of their number misunderstood the letter on just this point and, while the Irish bishops may not the brightest group of men on earth, there is no major reason to believe that they are substantially denser than their colleagues in other parts of the world.

The deeper question is, of course, whether this misinterpretation was due to the stupidity of some bishops or whether it was actually planned for. One is reminded of Cardinal Connell’s explanation of the concept of mental reservation with respect to economy with the truth in the dealings of the Irish Church authorities with abuse cases. It does seem remarkable that, in a letter which lays down precise procedures for dealing with cases of sexual abuse, the then Cardinal Ratzinger did not feel it necessary to give any recommendations regarding contact with the civil authorities in such cases. The least that can be assumed is that misinterpretation was possible and it is not a very big step to speculate that it was wished for. After all, what normal bishop, sensitive above all to conform to the image of being ever obedient to Rome and wary – in light of a long, sometimes murky history – of attracting the closer attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Office, earlier still as the Holy Inquisition), would not hesitate to approach the police about such cases following a letter which told him to put them under the seal of pontifical secrecy and made no mention of reporting them to the civil authorities?

The facts coming to light in the past weeks force me to the conclusion that the pope has no interest in genuinely dealing with this matter in an open way, of sincerely apologising on behalf of the church for all the suffering that has been caused by the way the church failed to remove abusers from positions in which they could continue their perverse cruelty and by the way it has treated those abused with browbeating, ignorance and contempt. The fact that the Vatican is reacting with a counterattack on those raising questions in Germany does not signal a readiness to really face up to issues. Frederico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman stated on Saturday, “In the past days there have been some who, with a certain doggedness, have been trying to find elements in Regensburg and Munich in order to drag the Holy Father personally into questions of abuse.” He added that they had “failed.”

Monsignor Lombardi is very wrong here; there is no need to drag the pope into such questions. He’s already right there in the middle of them.

(Sources: Der Spiegel, Irish Independent, Irish Times)

Resigning

Anyone following Irish current affairs in the past few months will hardly have failed to notice the subject of resigning – I use this term in preference to “resignation” as it implies a certain ambiguity in the sense that one might also comment that anyone who has been following Irish current affairs in the past few months will hardly have failed to experience a feeling of resignation. A number of bishops have (reluctantly) offered their resignations following the scandals resulting from the investigation of child abuse in the church. Some others have not. Two government ministers have resigned in the past week as a result of what can be best described as inappropriate conduct.

This evening, the top headline in the German media is the resignation of Bishop Margot Kässmann, the head of the Council of Protestant Churches in the country, both from her position as bishop of Hannover and that of head of the Church Council. Kässmann was the first woman to be elected to the top post in the German protestant churches last October. The choice was seen in some conservative church circles as questionable as Kässmann had divorced her husband in 2007. She is a woman of principle who is not afraid to raise issues – difficult issues. She has been openly critical of the position of the Catholic Church regarding homosexuality and the use of condoms. She would rather see unused churches demolished than used as mosques. Her sermons last Christmas and New Year in which she asked hard questions of German society in many areas, but particularly regarding the role of German soldiers inAfghanistan, made headlines and led to robust dialogue with politicians.

Last Saturday evening, Margot Kässmann ran a red light inHannover and was stopped by the police. A blood-test showed that she was drunk. The news broke yesterday and the Church Council issued a statement of support for her. At a short press conference this afternoon she announced her resignation. “I would no longer have had the same freedom to critically voice ethical and political challenges. The harsh criticism evoked by a quotation from a sermon like ‘nothing is all right in Afghanistan’ can only be borne when one’s own personal integrity is unreservedly acknowledged.” Her resignation has led to comments of respect and regret from all sides of political and public life in Germany

I am not generally an admirer of church functionaries, however this evening I have nothing but admiration for Margot Kässmann. Her resignation is an act of courage, a clear recognition of the responsibility involved in holding a position of leadership, particularly when this position defines itself or is defined as one which gives a particular authority regarding moral and spiritual issues.

The contrast to the Irish Catholic bishops is, to say the least, striking. Given the current daily increase in reports of abuse of children within the German Catholic Church, I also have the feeling that some bishops here may be feeling a little uncomfortable this evening. Of course, that would only be the case if they are really listening to what she said today; the freedom to critically voice challenges to society from a privileged public position is only there when one’s own personal integrity is unquestioned. Somehow I have the feeling that this moral clarity is something absent in the vast majority of Catholic bishops and church leaders.