Consultant to secular organizations
A former Christian, Kirby is a writer, consultant and project manager, specializing in freethinking and secular organizations. She lives in Scotland
A criminal matter, not a spiritual one
Q:A senior Vatican priest last week compared outrage at Pope Benedict's handling of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews. Church leaders disavowed the comments, but went on to complain about a "vile," anti-Vatican media campaign aimed at weakening the papacy and its authority. Is the news media being fair to the pope? Is the media biased against the Catholic Church or its hierarchy? How would you advise the pope?
A form of madness seems to have gripped the Vatican. An organization which for 2,000 years has been preaching the sinfulness of all mankind and the universal need for confession and repentance is acting as though it thought itself immaculate, the innocent victim of others' malevolence. And this despite having spent decades covering up child rapes committed by its own priests and monks, protecting them from the consequences of their devastating actions, and leaving them free to rape over and over and over again.
In 2001, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in his then capacity as Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (what used to be called the Inquisition), wrote a letter clarifying and reinforcing the infamous Crimen Sollicitationis, which made it an excommunicable offence to breathe a word of child rape allegations outside the church. Under Ratzinger's leadership, rape victims like this one were bullied into silence, called liars, and accused of being simply out to fleece the church for money. The Ryan and Murphy Reports are clear: the Roman Catholic Church consistently put its own reputation, its own status, its own survival, before concern for the children it had flogged and starved and raped, and then tried to prevent investigators finding out that it had done so.
It is hard to conceive anything more heinous than this. And yet, unbelievably, the Roman Catholic Church continues at every turn to demonstrate that it simply has no concept of the extent of its own corruption. For sure, we have had the apologies, and pretty half-hearted affairs they have been too, for the most part. The Pope's recent letter to Irish Catholics was shockingly complacent: it describes the 'problem of child sexual abuse' as "disturbing". And why is it "disturbing"? Because it "has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings". Not, you notice, because it inflicted agony on young bodies, not because it caused lasting psychological damage to impressionable minds, and not because it constituted cynical and brutal exploitation of the young and vulnerable on the part of the perpetrators. No, indeed: let's get our priorities right: it is disturbing because it has led to a loss of respect for the Church. And what, according to the Pope, was the cause of this 'disturbing' behavior? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Those priests and monks and nuns had been infected by secularism!
"In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people's traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected."
And the Pope's proposed solution? A rooting-out of all the rapists and protectors of rapists, perhaps? An open and frank assessment of the extent to which the requirement for celibacy may have exacerbated the problem? A new policy that there must always be a responsible independent adult within calling distance when Catholic clergy or monks have dealings with children in future? No, the Pope's solutions are rather less rigorous. More prayer! More Eucharists! More retreats! More Roman Catholicism, in fact! As if Roman Catholicism itself -- the belief that this Church was personally founded by Jesus and that the Pope is his infallible representative on Earth -- were not at the rotten root of the entire, brutal, obscene scandal. For it was this hubristic belief that made it so necessary to protect the Church even at the cost of further suffering to those who had already suffered so dreadfully, that made it unthinkable that the Church should submit to full public scrutiny, and that led its officials to believe they could sweep the scandal under a carpet and that God and prayer would sort it all out and guarantee a happy ending -- a happy ending for the Church, that is: those brutalized children did not count, just as they did not count when they were being buggered and beaten by the very people into whose care they had been entrusted.
And the world watches in appalled disbelief as senior Vatican figure after senior Vatican figure continues to make matters worse and even worse, and yet worse still. The Vatican's Chief Exorcist (Can there really be more than one? Can there really even be one, in 2010?) has claimed that the devil is targeting the Vatican. And why would the devil do this? Why, because this Pope is so marvelous, of course, that he's got the devil running scared. Yes, THIS Pope, the one who confirmed and reinforced the terms of the Vatican secrecy order ensuring that the child-rapists would never face justice; the one who was warned -- twice -- in his official capacity as head of the department dealing with such allegations, about the U.S. priest who was abusing deaf children, and who chose to ignore it both times, leaving him free to go on inflicting indescribable pain and humiliation and misery on vulnerable young boys; the one whose overriding preoccupation has been to keep the lid on the scandal, to stop people finding out, and who continues to do his utmost to play it down and pretend it has all been dealt with to everyone's satisfaction; the one who claims that the answer is not prosecution but prayer!
THIS Pope is so holy, so saintly, that the devil himself feels threatened by his righteousness and has therefore launched an all-out attack on him through the good offices of investigative journalists. Who, after all, could possibly accuse the Pope of being at the heart of a massive cover-up of child rape on a breathtaking scale, unless they were being prompted by the devil himself? Except that the child rapes really happened. And the institutional cover-up really happened. And it is Ratzinger's signature on the document that confirmed secrecy as official Vatican policy. Not only is there a smoking gun, but it has the Pope's grubby fingerprints all over it. What hope is there for justice, for morality, when every act of depravity committed by the Roman Catholic Church is passed off as the work of an enraged and threatened devil, and therefore as further evidence of the Church's sanctity?
But there is more! Both a senior cardinal and the Pope himself have now dismissed the allegations against the Vatican as "petty gossip". Petty gossip! Since when has child rape been a petty matter? Since when has it been a petty offense to harbor and shield rapists, and enable them to rape again, and again, and again, and again? Since when has the legitimate investigation and reporting of alleged criminal acts constituted gossip? And if the Pope thinks of the allegations as "petty gossip", what does this tell us about the sincerity of the so-called apology he offered to Irish Catholics? We can now see that it was proffered half-heartedly, in the evident belief that it would be accepted without question. But when it failed to do the trick - when decent people around the world had the audacity to point out that it smacked of complacency and did not guarantee that those against whom there was sufficient evidence would be handed over to criminal courts (as opposed to 'appropriately constituted tribunals' - for which read CHURCH tribunals), then the sham contrition was abandoned, and the allegations about which the Pope had claimed to feel such sorrow were reduced to the status of 'petty gossip'. It is hard to imagine anything more disgusting than child rape and the protection of child rapists. Nevertheless, thanks to the Vatican, we are now witnessing the even less edifying spectacle of leading figures in a church which for decades protected those child rapists, claiming that the resulting scandal is just 'petty gossip'.
And yet - astonishingly - we still have not plumbed the depths of Vatican depravity. For on Sunday -- Easter Sunday, no less, the holiest day in the Christian calendar -- the only priest in the entire Roman Catholic Church who is permitted to preach to the Pope used the occasion to focus on the suffering of ... no, don't be ridiculous: of COURSE it wasn't the suffering of those raped, torn, tortured children. No, it turns out that the real victims here are the Roman Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular. And their suffering can be compared to the worst that was inflicted on the Jews! Seriously: what is wrong with these people? What has gone so fatally wrong with their moral compass that they can bring themselves to even think such thoughts, let alone utter them publicly? How dare the Pope's personal preacher claim that the allegations against the Vatican resemble 'the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism'? The more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism involved genocide, the deaths of up to 6 million people, for no other reason than that they were Jewish. It involved the imprisonment of millions of people in death camps, where they were tortured, used as slave labor, starved, experimented on, and in many cases gassed. These were the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism: and 2,000 years of Roman Catholic preaching against the Jews had paved the way for it. Never forget that, far from standing up and being counted in the face of evil, Pope Pius XI was one of the first global figures to rush to agree terms with the newly elected Nazis, an alliance consolidated more notoriously by his successor, Pius XII.
The genocide of the Jews was one of the worst atrocities in human history , yet still a senior Vatican priest has the sheer gall to compare the current 'suffering' of the Roman Catholic Church to that of the Jews. How dare he? How dare he present the CHURCH as the victim, when all that is happening is that it is - at long last - being held to account for the crimes it has perpetrated? We are witnessing the writhings - it would be nice to think they were terminal - of an utterly corrupt, morally bankrupt institution. It seems that just about the only people on Earth who cannot see the true depths of Vatican depravity are those in the Vatican itself. And yet we in the UK now face the exquisite irony of having to foot the bill for a multi-million pound official visit from the Pope, during which he will dispense 'moral guidance', no less.
How would I advise the Pope? Many people have been calling for his resignation, but I am not one of them. Resignation does not go nearly far enough, and the same goes for every single other person involved in this terrible business. Since when has justice been considered to have been done just because a criminal resigns from his job? No: my advice to the Pope would be to hand over every last priest who has been accused of child rape and every last church official -- himself included -- accused of covering up child rape to be tried in a proper criminal court, just like anyone else would be if they were accused of the same offenses; and to further ensure that the Church makes available, without obstruction, every single document required as evidence in these cases. Only properly conducted criminal trials, in proper courts of law, will bring an end to this scandal and - far more importantly - bring some peace and justice to the Church's many victims.
He won't do it, of course, because he clings to the disgraceful but mightily convenient doctrine that the Roman Catholic Church is above earthly law, answerable only to God. Ironic, isn't it, that the man who claims to be the earthly representative of Jesus Christ - who, so the story goes, was willing to pay the ultimate price for other men's sins - should wriggle and squirm and call foul play in order to avoid paying the price for his own.
