Child Abuse
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In the wake of the 'Panorama' documentary, the Pope faces fresh questions about the paedophile scandal. Peter Stanford on why despairs for his church
The crimes of clerics who prey on children continues to cast a shadow over everything else the Church does. The details of the abusive behaviour are familiar but repetition cannot take away their horror. And last Sunday's Panorama on BBC, 'Sex Crimes and The Vatican', made me once again ashamed to be Catholic.
Ashamed that our priests could so abuse the trust traditionally placed in them and their vocation. Ashamed that our bishops could take so much trouble to cover up their appalling activities and help the guilty avoid punishment. And ashamed that the same bishops, in a church founded on love and compassion, showed so little of either for the children concerned.
Straight after the broadcast, the Catholic leader in England, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, wrote to the (Catholic) Director General of the BBC to complain that the Corporation was "deeply prejudiced" against the Church. The cardinal's reaction to seeing grown men weeping, 20 years on, at the memory of how they were repeatedly raped in presbytery bedrooms, sums up the failure of Catholic bishops everywhere to understand the damage done.
Where they regard unveiling such crimes as an attack on the institution of the Church, the rest of us react with dismay at so much misery caused in the name of God.
Panorama was presented by Colm O'Gorman, himself a victim of a paedophile priest. 0'Gorman tried to point a finger of blame at Pope Benedict XVI. But dramatic and unsettling as his programme was, the accusation didn't quite stick.
He attacked on the wrong grounds. O'Gorman's great revelation - that for years the Vatican had been issuing a secret document, Crimen Sollicitationes, telling bishops to hush up such cases by invoking the seal of the confessional - is hotly denied by church authorities. They say the document is simply to do with proper practice in the sacrament of confession.
The programme's linked allegation that the current Pope had endorsed such a cover-up in the early 1980s, when a senior official under Pope John Paul II, also felt a bit thin. But it did turn the spotlight on Benedict's record on this issue, and it is not one to be proud of.
Catholic leaders in Ireland, Britain and America, all countries blighted in the past by paedophile priests, are adamant that they have now put their houses in order. Each bishops' conference has in place strict guidelines that seek to make sure no more children suffer in such a fashion.
But Panorama showed that the determination to root out abusive priests is not shared in other Catholic countries, and has not been given priority by the Vatican under Benedict. Where, in the highly centralised, bureaucratic multinational that is the universal Catholic Church, is the Papal directive ordering zero tolerance of abusive priests everywhere?
No such ruling has been issued by Benedict in 18 months in office. As a result, in the developing world perverted clerics are still being moved from parish to parish by their bishops once complaints are made by distraught parents.
One grandmother from Anapolis in central Brazil told Panorama how, in the past five years, her grandson was sexually abused by their parish priest. The local bishop knew he had already been forced out of four parishes in Sao Paulo because he was a paedophile and that the police wanted to arrest him. The Catholic Church continues to operate as if it is a law unto itself.
And Benedict's determination to downplay this issue goes back a long way. When the first allegations about an official cover-up in the Boston archdiocese began to appear in 2002, the then Cardinal Ratzinger was put in charge of handling the matter by an ailing John Paul II.
The future Pope's first public reaction, in November 2002, was to blame the whole thing on "a planned campaign" by the press. He then claimed that "the percentages of these offences among priests is no higher than in other categories, and perhaps even lower".
Many authoritative studies show the opposite. One, commissioned by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York by the American Catholic bishops, put the number of abusers at between 2.5% and 4.3% amongst priests, compared with around 1% in the general population.
However, at Easter of 2005, standing in for a gravely ill John Paul II at his annual Good Friday talk, the cardinal had apparently changed his mind. He spoke of "how much filth there is in the church - even amongst those...in the priesthood". He had reached such a conclusion, it was said, by spending every previous Friday for months reading through the files of paedophile priest cases from the United States as a kind of penance.
Yet all that reading does not seem to have changed his fundamental prejudice that the church comes first and damaged children second. So in May 2005, Benedict was praised for putting an end to the legal protection that the Vatican City State had long given Father Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a traditionalist religious order.
Despite well-documented allegations going back many years about Fr Maciel's sexual abuse of youngsters in his seminaries, John Paul II had treated him as a welcome guest in the Vatican, embracing him publicly while, in effect, refusing to honour international arrest warrants for him to face charges of rape and buggery.
By contrast Pope Benedict has disciplined Maciel. He has ordered the priest, now in his late 80s, never again to say mass or speak in public. But many of Maciel's victims want to know why the man who had abused them isn't going to appear in the dock of a court.
Why should the Catholic Church deal with him by God's law, not man's? Their anger is compounded when they see others who have been accused of abuse - or conspiracy to cover-up abuse - living as refugees from justice within the walls of the Vatican. Cardinal Bernard Law, for instance, may have been forced to resign his post in Boston, but continues to hold a sinecure position in the Vatican civil service and is said to retain influence at the court of Benedict XVI.
The other supposedly 'positive' action by Benedict came in November of last year when he banned those with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from training for the priesthood. Quoted as evidence of Benedict's determination to tackle paedophile priests, it instead demonstrates his muddled thinking. The Pope is conflating homosexuality and paedophilia as if two adults of the same gender having sex with each other is the same as an adult sexually abusing a child.
The Vatican remains fond of sending out instructions to its bishops on the minutiae of Catholic life. Yet its policy of leaving it to local initiatives to tackle the most corrosive allegations of modern times is a damning testimony to its continuing inability to realise quite how serious the crisis is.
And principal among those in a state of denial is Benedict himself.