The Culture of Getting Away With it

By AM Thursday, September 23, 2010

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The first child sex scandal in the Catholic Church took place in AD153, long before there was a "gay culture" or Jewish journalists for bishops to blame it on. By the 1960s, the problem had become so dire that a cleric responsible for the care of "erring" priests wrote to the Vatican suggesting that it acquire a Caribbean island to put them on - Terry Eagleton

Is the pope merely the victim of what one cardinal dismisses as ‘the petty gossip of dominant opinion’ or has he a genuine case to answer in terms of how he handled child sex abuse cases? Last week’s Panorama team cast a critical eye over Joseph Ratzinger, in his role as Archbishop of Munich and, before he became pope, his time as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005. In darker ages it was known as the Inquisition. The function of that notorious institution was doctrinal enforcer. It was in his role as Prefect over this body that Ratzinger wielded enormous power as he hunted down dissidents and silenced opposition. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was in effect the Vatican political police.

Panorama first looked as the case of Stephen Kiesle, a 1970s Californian priest who was convicted for molesting two boys. For A full nine years he was retained in Holy Orders rather than given his marching orders. For the last five of those years the case was being mulled over by the CDF.

Tom Doyle, a priest and church lawyer who is highly critical of the Church’s handling of the abuse issue, told Panorama that the prolonged delay was a result of a ruling by Pope John Paul II that no priest younger than 40 should be allowed to leave the priesthood. ‘I think they saw it that if we made it difficult to impossible to get out of the priesthood then men will stay in.’ It echoes the old IRA line from the James Cagney film Shake Hands With The Devil – ‘once in never out.’ Doyle was scathing in his observation that the attitude of the church hierarchy was that it was better to hold on to a child abusing priest than have one less priest at headcount.

Next, Panorama looked at a case from Tucson in the US state of Arizona. The case of Father Michael Teta came before Ratzinger's office in 1997. Ratzinger had been told by Bishop Manuel Moreno that in his relationships with men and boys Teta displayed a ‘satanic’ character. For seven and a half years angels standing on the head of a pin were looked at from every conceivable angle before this least angelic of characters was expelled. This prompted the acerbic comment fom Lynne Cadiga, the lawyer for one of Teta’s victim, that ‘there’s no doubt that Ratzinger delayed the defrocking process of priests who were deemed ‘satanic by their own bishop.’

Again, it fell to Tom Doyle, the church lawyer, to give a some frank appreciation:

There is no credible answer as to why that case sat there for seven-and-a-half years. I've never in my career as a canonist heard of a case taking that long on appeal - I never have.

Panorama also showed that suspicion of Ratzinger’s mismanagement of child abuse cases reached back into the 1970s. While archbishop of Munich he chaired the meeting examining the case of Peter Hullermann, another erring priest. The meeting recommended that the abuser be given psychotherapy. Werner Huth, the psychiatrist who examined him felt the risk of re-offending to be so high that he informed the bishops of his findings. His advice was ignored. After that Hullermann was brought back into the priesthood, where he took off once more on the trail of abuse until 1986 when he was convicted in a German court of sexually abusing children. At no point had the German police been informed by the Church that the priest posed a danger to children.

Austen Ivereigh of the lay group Catholic Voices sprang to the defence of Ratzinger:

He sat down in 2001 and said I want all these cases on my desk. They began to arrive, 3,000 cases over 10 years. And he spoke later, at the time of his election as Pope, of the 'filth' in the church. I think he, more than anybody in Rome, really got it.

What Ivereigh really should have said was that more than anybody in Rome Ratzinger really got away with it.

The culture of getting away with it has a knock on, filter down effect which has enormous consequences. As Terry Eagleton put it so well:

One blindingly simple reason for the huge amount of child abuse in the Catholic church (on one estimate, up to 9% of clerics are implicated) is that the perpetrators know they will almost certainly get away with it.

How they know they can get away with rape but not with questioning papal infallibility is the terminus any investigation will ultimately arrive at, despite the attempts by the Vatican to divert it into a cul de sac where it can be silently suffocated.