The Irish Times – Friday, December 4, 2009
ANALYSIS: The Catholic Church’s hypocrisy starts right at the top of the organisation, writes JASON BERRY
THE DUBLIN diocesan report spotlights the crisis tearing at the Catholic Church’s central nervous system. At issue is the Vatican’s pathological obsession with protecting guilty church officials.
Since the 1990s, the Vatican has forced at least 15 bishops and one cardinal (the late Hans Hermann Groer of Austria) to step down for sexual abuse of youngsters. The Vatican has defrocked dozens of priests but not one bishop has been so punished – they have been removed from office but not from the priesthood.
Irish-born Anthony O’Connell, who abused three seminarians, resigned as bishop of Palm Beach, Florida in spring 2002. A titular bishop still, he lives in a South Carolina monastery.
Rome’s double standard cloaks prelates guilty of covering up too. Cardinal Bernard Law, whose duplicity in Boston ignited the 2002 scandal, resigned in “disgrace”. But after 16 months in a Maryland convent, Law became pastor of a great basilica in Rome.
The Vatican ignores justice to protect bishops in their role as regents to the pope.
The Roman curia’s injustice is embedded in the youth protection charter that US bishops adopted at their June 2002 convention. The charter pledged to remove any priest who abused a youth; it called for lay review boards to monitor allegations. But the Vatican insisted that bishops be removed from the scope of those boards.
In 1989, as the first wave of abuse survivors’ lawsuits hit America, the bishops sent canon lawyers to Rome, seeking permission to defrock paedophiles. Pope John Paul II said no. After years in Poland leading the opposition to communism, John Paul wanted clerics who might sin given every chance to repent. No bishop should usurp his supreme authority over canon law.
In 2002, I interviewed a Vatican canon lawyer. He explained that US bishops had failed to hold canonical trials of priests. Moreover, he said with exasperation that diocesan tribunals “violated grandly – terribly – the annulments of marriage”.
I asked what marriage annulments had to do with paedophiles? “Laxity on annulments set up a resistance to special norms [ie, laws] for paedophiles,” he simmered. “The attitude here in 1989, at the Holy See, was that you have legal provisions. Use them.”
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