The Catholic Church Remains Incapable of Reform

 

As a long time critic of the Roman Catholic Church I was not the least surprised when a new report out of Germany found that the former Benedict XVI was guilty of covering up sexual abuse by Catholic clergy while he was archbishop of Munich and Freising, from 1977 to 1982.  Nor was I surprised when Benedict - the head of what was once known as the Inquisition under the less than saintly John Paul II at first lied about his culpability.  Once caught in the lie, Benedict issued a mealy mouthed response that was short on contrition and reflected the larger inability of the Church hierarchy to admit past grievous wrongs and a refusal by the majority of the heirarchy to let go of 12th century dogma based on ignorance and a rejection of modern knowledge on sexual orientation among a host of other issues. Some German bishops have been speaking out for wholesale change, including a total re-writing of the Church's continued jihad against gays.   Though needed, I doubt these reforms will come to pass and the Church will continue to hemmorage membership in modern nations and become increasing centered in Africa where an ignorant populace allows the heirarchy to continue under its 12th century dogma.  Sadly, others will suffer the harms this engenders (it took years of therapy to undo the emotional and psychological harm I suffered). A piece in The New Yorker looks at the situation:

In Germany, lately, powerful bishops have been speaking of prospects for change in Catholic life with a frankness not seen from the Church hierarchy anywhere else in a long time. When some hundred and twenty-five priests and other Church employees collectively “came out” as gay last month—with a manifesto faulting the Church’s “defamatory” teachings on sexuality and gender—Jean-Claude Hollerich, a Jesuit who is the archbishop of Luxembourg, told the German news outlet KNA that the foundation of Catholic teaching on homosexuality “is no longer true,” and called for a “fundamental revision of the doctrine.”

Reinhard Marx, the archbishop of Munich and Freising—who last year spoke approvingly of the prospect of some form of Church blessings for same-sex-unions—said, “I think that things as they are cannot continue,” and that allowing some priests to marry “would be better for everyone.” Another bishop announced that gay people employed by his diocese, including priests, can profess their sexual identity without fear of discipline. Meanwhile, a process of Church renewal called the Synodal Way has led to formal proposals for laypeople in Germany to take a role in choosing bishops—a change that would alter the Church power structure profoundly.

Those are openings of the kind that progressive Catholics have sought from the hierarchy for decades. The issues they raise are so complex and controversial that a serious effort to address them could break the Church apart. Yet they’ve been overtaken by a different controversy—one about the role of Benedict XVI, the Pope emeritus, in enabling priestly sex abuse when he was an archbishop in Germany, and whether his “heartfelt request for forgiveness” is an admission of guilt.

Benedict turns ninety-five in April. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he served for more than two decades as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that oversees Church teaching. He was elected Pope in 2005, resigned in 2013 (the first Pope to do so since 1415), and, after Pope Francis succeeded him, took up residence in a monastery behind St. Peter’s Basilica. His request for forgiveness came earlier this month, in a personal letter (“Dear Sisters and Brothers”), following a report that included a section on his handling of priestly sexual abuse while he was archbishop of Munich and Freising, from 1977 to 1982.

The report was prepared by a team of outside lawyers, and commissioned by Cardinal Marx, who was prompted by a 2018 report on abuse in Germany as a whole, which estimated that roughly four per cent of priests had committed sexual abuse of minors in the seven decades after the Second World War. The new report runs to nearly two thousand pages, and chronicles at least four hundred and ninety-seven victims and at least two hundred and thirty-five abusers.

Marx, who submitted his resignation to Pope Francis last June over the “catastrophe” of clerical abuse (it was declined), said that he was still prepared to do so. “I am not clinging to my job,” he said.

During the report’s preparation, the authors sought testimony from Benedict, and received a written eighty-two-page statement in response. The report concludes that the Pope emeritus “can be accused of misconduct in cases of sexual abuse,” for allowing, in four instances, priests suspected of sexually abusing minors to continue in pastoral ministry. (Benedict has denied wrongdoing over the cases.)

“We do not find the testimony or the statement of Pope Benedict that he was not at this meeting to be credible,” he said. Reaction was swift. Benedict was accused of lying and covering up. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, an American advocacy group, suggested that, having resigned as Pope, Benedict should also resign as Pope emeritus.

The report has forced the German Church to ponder its recent past, a period shaped by Ratzinger’s view of Catholic doctrine as inviolable and the Church as the last redoubt of order and stability in a rapidly changing world. . . . With John Paul, he maintained that Church teachings on sexuality and on the priesthood belong to an inalterable “magisterium,” or body of official teaching, and he saw to it that only men who affirmed that position were chosen as bishops. His rigorous defenses of the magisterium and his silencing of theologians who took positions other than his (which earned him the nicknames Ratzweiler and the Panzer-Cardinal) have affected Catholicism ever since—to the extent that the current German bishops can be said to be dealing at last with long-standing issues that he had used his supervisory powers to prevent their predecessors, and so the Church as a whole, from dealing with.

Four days after the press conference about the Munich report, Benedict’s secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, issued a statement saying that Benedict’s false claim was “the result of an oversight in the editing of his statement,” for which the former prelate was very sorry, . . . That response was seen as evasive, and not just by Benedict’s longtime critics.

It wasn’t the first time that Benedict had engaged in controversy from his monastery quarters via a personal letter. In 2019, he issued a six-thousand-word missive on clerical sexual abuse, which he attributed to a range of causes: the sexual revolution and the “new normalcy” of sexual permissiveness, the liberalizing of theology after the Second Vatican Council, the rise of “homosexual cliques” in Catholic seminaries, and the decline in religious belief in the West.

The new letter, by contrast, runs to just a page and a half, . . . . The letter is a “mea maxima culpa” with minimal “culpa” and no “mea” to speak of. “At no time does he ask for personal forgiveness for any actions of his own!” the prominent Irish clerical-abuse survivor Marie Collins told the Catholic news site Crux. As if to make that clear, the letter’s release included an “addendum” from Benedict’s legal team, which sought again to clear him of any responsibility.

Benedict’s supporters point out that he was the first Pope to act directly against sexual abuse: defrocking priests, streamlining the process for discipline, meeting with survivors, and banishing the Mexican serial abuser Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who had been close to John Paul II. For those supporters, and there are many of them, Benedict’s legacy is now at stake. They see the Pope emeritus as a traditionalist counterweight to Pope Francis, whom they regard as bent on shattering the unity of the faith in a vain attempt to make the Church relevant.

More than a Pope’s legacy is at stake, however. The situation in Germany is a bellwether for Catholicism elsewhere. The German Church’s Synodal Way is headed toward a global synod in Rome next year, where other nations may decide to follow its path. Following on the reports in Germany, and one in France last fall—which estimated that more than two hundred thousand people had been abused by Catholic clergy in the seven postwar decades—the Church in Italy, long resistant to scrutiny, is under pressure to commission a report on abuses there.

There’s no telling how the process of change will play out, but it will take profound honesty, not the lofty and defensive approach to truth that the Pope emeritus has practiced and required of others for so long.