Germany and Ireland call on Catholic Church to Hold Child Sex Abuse Inquiries

Things seem to be only getting worse for the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and in my view deservedly so. The question remains as to how bad things need to get before Benedict XVI will have no choice but to act and/or resign himself. The Guardian is reporting that in Ireland and Germany the demand for national inquiries is growing. Meanwhile increasingly damaging information and columns are coming out detailing Benedict XVI pivotal role in directing cover ups during his tenure as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a/k/a the Inquisition. Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens have particularly damming columns that focus on BenedictXVI's gross malfeasance. I have sympathy for rank and file Catholics who with the best of intentions have foolishly trusted Church leaders - as I stupidly did myself for many years - but I have no sympathy for Benedict and his morally bankrupt senior clerics. Think of your own children, nieces and nephews and ask yourself how any true Christian could have been so callous and uncaring. Then remember the real motives that drive the Church hierarchy: money, power and control. Actually living the Gospel message would seem to have nothing to do with it. First, some highlights from The Guardian:
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The crisis gripping the Catholic church deepened today, with calls for national inquiries to be held in Germany and Ireland to fully disclose the detail and extent of sexual abuse by priests. With hundreds of allegations surfacing in Europe since the start of the year, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the scandal of abuse in the country's churches and schools posed a "major challenge" that could be resolved only through a full and frank inquiry into all cases.
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In Ireland, which has already seen far-reaching investigations into the abuse, the Archbishop of Dublin said a national inquiry into historic claims may be the only way to fully restore confidence in the church. The most senior Catholic in the country, Cardinal Sean Brady, resisted intense pressure to resign over his part in helping cover up the scandal.
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The scale of the abuse – with additional allegations of clerical scandals emerging in Switzerland, Austria and Brazil – has caused as much alarm in some quarters as has the church's response.
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Merkel's intervention revealed the level of concern in Germany. Addressing the Bundestag in her first public statement on the subject, she called the sexual abuse of children a "despicable crime". She added: "The only way for our society to come to terms with it is to look for the truth and find out everything that has happened."
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Andrew Sullivan and Hitchens rightly focus on the top of the hierarchy that has made abuse cover ups a standard Church policy. Andrew states as follows concerning Benedict XVI which echos my own thoughts:
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But if the Pope asked Brady to resign, wouldn't he also have to ask himself to resign? After all, the Pope was part of a similar cover-up in Germany in which then-cardinal Ratzinger knowingly assigned a pedophile priest to therapy, without informing the authorities that he knew that the priest had forced an eleven year old boy to fellate him, and then allowed that priest to continue in his career, with his finally being convicted of more child abuse six years later. He was only removed from pastoral duties a few days ago.
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I don't know of many things I find as repugnant as knowingly putting the interests of an institution's public relations before children's protection from molestation. Yet this is the Pope we have. This is the moral judgment he made. How can anyone retain confidence in that figurehead? How can any orthodox Catholic not find this repugnant? And what has the Pope done since this has been revealed? He has said nothing, and put out a p.r. campaign to accuse critics in Germany of being anti-Catholic.
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How much more do we have to see, how much more damage has to be done to human beings, before the hierarchy cones to terms with its denial about homosexuality, its warped psyche on sexuality, the brutal consequences of its celibacy requirements ... and the total iniquity of allowing children and teens in your care, entrusted to men of God, to be raped and abused and molested with impunity for years? When will this Pope step down?
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In his column in the Washington Post, Hitchens fleshes out the details of just how responsible Benedict XVI has been in the massive policy of cover up and reassignment of sexual predators to positions where they could molest additional victims:
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There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the shame and disgrace that goes with it. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked, and forced to suck the penis of his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing "abuse"?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for "therapy" by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care. But it took no time for Ratzinger's deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, to return him to "pastoral" work, where he soon enough resumed his career of sexual assault.
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Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office ... under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)
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Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil--a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice--and speedily at that.