While my last post made it clear that I will not be shedding any tears over I like many others wonder what may have pushed God's Rottweiler to abdicate.
Andrew Sullivan noted:
[T]he suddenness of this is striking. Are new revelations about the Vatican Bank
or the child-rape crisis about to emerge? Is there a more urgent health problem
that we are unaware of? Why not wait till after Easter at least? There will
doubtless be a lot of speculation and gossip.
Interestingly enough
Slate republished today a 2010 piece by the late Christopher Hitchens that zoomed in on Benedict XVI's personal involvement in the rampant, worldwide sex abuse scandal. With countless addition secret internal documents to be released by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, it doesn't stretch the imagination that something explosive might exist that could be extremely damaging. Here are highlights from the 2010 piece:
Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of
the Vatican in the ongoing—indeed endless—scandal of child rape, a few
days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise
of a denial. It was clear,
said
the Rev. Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made "to find
elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse." He
stupidly went on to say that "those efforts have failed."
He was wrong twice. In the first place, nobody has had to strive to
find such evidence: It has surfaced, as it was bound to do. In the
second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the topmost level
of the Roman Catholic Church is a process that has only just begun. Yet
it became in a sense inevitable when the College
of Cardinals elected, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, the man chiefly
responsible for the original cover-up. (One of the sanctified voters in
that "election" was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a man who had already found the jurisdiction of Massachusetts a bit too warm for his liking.)
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.
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.)
The next item on this grisly docket will be the revival of the long-standing allegations
against the Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-reactionary
Legion of Christ, in which sexual assault seems to have been almost part
of the liturgy. Senior ex-members of this secretive order found their
complaints ignored and overridden by Ratzinger during the 1990s, if only
because Father Maciel had been praised by the then-Pope John Paul II as
an "efficacious guide to youth." And now behold the harvest of this
long campaign of obfuscation. The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a
mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the
foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a
man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave
of crime. 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.
Hitchen's words are as true today as they were back in 2010. Benedict XVI or whatever he will be called after his abdication needs to be criminally prosecuted for his involvement in crimes against children. The Vatican should not be allowed to try to whitewash his grievous offenses.
