VATICAN CITY (AP)—Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is rightly credited with having been certainly one of the twentieth century’s most prolific Catholic theologians, a teacher-pope who preached the religion via volumes of books, sermons and speeches. But he rarely got credit for an additional essential aspect of his legacy: having done greater than anyone before him to show the Vatican around on clergy sexual abuse.
As cardinal and pope, Benedict pushed through revolutionary changes to church law to make it easier to defrock predator priests, and he sacked a whole lot of them. He was the primary pontiff to fulfill with abuse survivors. And he reversed his revered predecessor on probably the most egregious case of the twentieth century Catholic Church, finally taking motion against a serial pedophile who was adored by St. John Paul II’s inner circle.
But rather more needed to be done, and following his death Saturday, abuse survivors and their advocates made clear they didn’t feel his record was anything to praise, noting that he, like the remaining of the Catholic hierarchy, protected the image of the institution over the needs of victims and in some ways embodied the clerical system that fueled the issue.
“In our view, Pope Benedict XVI is taking a long time of the church’s darkest secrets to his grave with him,” said SNAP, the important U.S.-based group of clergy abuse survivors.
Benedict “acted as no other pope has done when pressed or forced, but his papacy (was) reactive on this central issue.”
Matthias Katsch of Eckiger Tisch, a bunch representing German survivors, said Benedict will go down in history for abuse victims as “a one that was long responsible within the system they fell victim to,” in line with the dpa news agency.
Within the years after Benedict’s 2013 resignation, the scourge he believed encompassed only a number of mostly English-speaking countries had spread to all parts of the globe. Benedict refused to just accept personal or institutional responsibility for the issue, even after he himself was faulted by an independent report for his handling of 4 cases while he was Munich bishop. He never sanctioned any bishop who covered up for abusers, and he never mandated abuse cases be reported to police.
But Benedict did greater than any of his predecessors combined, and particularly greater than John Paul, under whose watch the wrongdoing exploded publicly. And after initially dismissing the issue, Pope Francis followed in Benedict’s footsteps and approved even tougher protocols designed to carry the hierarchy accountable.
“He (Benedict) acted as no other pope has done when pressed or forced, but his papacy (was) reactive on this central issue,” said Terrence McKiernan, founding father of the net resource BishopAccountability, which tracks global cases of clergy abuse and cover-up.
Ratzinger tried as early as 1988 to steer the Vatican legal department to let him remove abuser priests quickly.
As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for a quarter-century, the previous Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger saw first-hand the scope of sex abuse as early because the Eighties. Cases were arriving piecemeal to the Vatican from Ireland, Australia and the U.S., and Ratzinger tried as early as 1988 to steer the Vatican legal department to let him remove abuser priests quickly.
Vatican law on the time required long and complex canonical trials to punish priests, after which only as a final resort if more “pastoral” initiatives to cure them failed. That approach proved disastrous, enabling bishops to maneuver their abusers around from parish to parish where they might rape and molest again.
The legal office turned Ratzinger down in 1988, citing the necessity to protect the priest’s right to defense.
In 2001, Ratzinger persuaded John Paul to let him seize the issue head on, ordering all abuse cases be sent to his office for review. He hired a comparatively unknown canon lawyer, Charles Scicluna, to be his chief sex crimes prosecutor and together they began taking motion.
“We used to debate the cases on Fridays; he used to call it the Friday penance,” recalled Scicluna, Ratzinger’s prosecutor from 2002 to 2012 and now the archbishop of Malta.
Under Ratzinger’s watch as cardinal and pope, the Vatican authorized fast-track administrative procedures to defrock egregious abusers.
Under Ratzinger’s watch as cardinal and pope, the Vatican authorized fast-track administrative procedures to defrock egregious abusers. Changes to church law allowed the statute of limitations on sex abuse to be waived on a case-by-case basis; raised the age of consent to 18; and expanded the norms protecting minors to also cover “vulnerable adults.”
The changes had immediate impact: Between 2004 and 2014—Benedict’s eight-year papacy plus a yr on either end—the Vatican received about 3,400 cases, defrocked 848 priests and sanctioned one other 2,572 to lesser penalties, in line with the one Vatican statistics ever publicly released.
Nearly half of the defrockings occurred through the final two years of Benedict’s papacy.
“There was at all times a temptation to consider these accusations of this scourge as something that was contrived by the church’s enemies,” said Cardinal George Pell of Australia, where the allegations hit early and hard and where Pell himself was accused of abuse and of dismissing victims.
“Pope Benedict realized very, very clearly that there may be a component of that, but the issue was much, much deeper, and he moved effectively toward doing something about it,” said Pell, who was eventually acquitted of an abuse conviction after serving 404 days in solitary confinement in a Melbourne lockup.
Benedict’s protocol-bending courage only went to this point.
Among the many first cases on Ratzinger’s agenda after 2001 was gathering testimony from victims of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the founding father of the Mexico-based Legionaries of Christ religious order. Despite volumes of documentation within the Vatican dating from the Fifties showing Maciel had raped his young seminarians, the priest was courted by John Paul’s Curia due to his ability to usher in vocations and donations.
“Greater than the hurt that I received from Maciel’s abuse, in a while, stronger was the hurt and the abuse of power from the Catholic Church: the secrecy, ignoring my complaints,” said Juan Vaca, certainly one of Maciel’s original victims who together with other former seminarians filed a proper canonical case against Maciel in 1998.
Their case languished for years as powerful cardinals who sat on Ratzinger’s board, including Cardinal Angelo Sodano, John Paul’s powerful secretary of state, blocked any investigation. They claimed the allegations against Maciel were mere slander.
But Ratzinger finally prevailed and Vaca testified to Scicluna on April 2, 2005, the very day that John Paul died.
Ratzinger was elected pope two weeks later, and only then did the Vatican finally sanction Maciel to a lifetime of penance and prayer.
Benedict then took one other step and ordered an in-depth investigation into the order that determined in 2010 that Maciel was a spiritual fraud who sexually abused his seminarians and created a cult-like order to cover his crimes.
An independent report commissioned by his former diocese of Munich faulted Benedict’s actions in 4 cases while he was bishop within the Seventies; Benedict, by then long retired as pope, apologized for any “grievous faults” but denied any personal or specific wrongdoing.
Even Francis has credited Benedict’s “courage” in going after Maciel, recalling that “he had all of the documentation in hand” within the early 2000s to take motion against Maciel but was blocked by others more powerful than he until he became pope.
“He was the courageous man who helped so many,” Francis said.
That said, Benedict’s protocol-bending courage only went to this point.
When the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, publicly criticized Sodano for having blocked the Vatican from investigating one more high-profile serial abuser—his predecessor as Vienna archbishop—Benedict summoned Schoenborn to Rome for a dressing-down in front of Sodano. The Vatican issued a remarkable reprimand taking Schoenborn to task for having dared speak the reality.
After which an independent report commissioned by his former diocese of Munich faulted Benedict’s actions in 4 cases while he was bishop within the Seventies; Benedict, by then long retired as pope, apologized for any “grievous faults” but denied any personal or specific wrongdoing.
“He had seen the gravity of the situation with much more lucidity than others.”
In Germany on Saturday, the We’re Church pro-reform group said in an announcement that, along with his “implausible statements” concerning the Munich report, “he himself seriously damaged his popularity as a theologian and church leader and as an ‘worker of the reality.’”
“He was not prepared to make a private request for forgiveness,” it added. “With that, he caused major damage to the office of bishop and pope.”
The U.S. survivors of the Road to Recovery group said Benedict as cardinal and pope was a part of the issue. “He, his predecessors, and current pope have refused to make use of the vast resources of the church to assist victims heal, gain a level of closure, and have their lives restored,” the group said in an announcement calling for transparency.
But Benedict’s longtime spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, says Benedict’s motion on sex abuse was certainly one of the numerous underappreciated elements of his legacy that deserves credit, on condition that it paved the way in which for much more far-reaching reforms.
Lombardi recalled the prayers Ratzinger composed in 2005 for the Good Friday Via Crucis procession at Rome’s Colosseum as evidence that the longer term pope knew well—earlier and higher than anyone else within the Vatican—just how bad the issue was.
“How much filth there may be within the church, especially amongst those that, within the priesthood, are presupposed to belong totally to him (Christ),” Ratzinger wrote within the meditations for the high-profile Holy Week procession.
Lombardi said he didn’t understand on the time the experience that informed Ratzinger’s words.
“He had seen the gravity of the situation with much more lucidity than others,” Lombardi said.
