It is a deep but perhaps just irony for the Catholic Church’s clerical hierarchy that its long and miserable cover-up of sexual abuse by aberrant clergy is striking at the church’s heart in the week of the Easter vigil. The victims in so many countries of rampant serial sexual abuse by priests, to be sure, have suffered the most. But now more than before, the laity must be reeling when congregants mostly had rather celebrate their faith.
Earlier scandals have revealed that the church’s hierarchy closely held secrets about priests who were found to have abused their flock, especially their children. In far too many cases, offending priests have been inadequately reprimanded or reassigned to other parishes where they continued to prey on their charges, while families were urged to keep quiet and the police were rarely contacted.
The scandals that have emerged, generally decades later, have revealed a common pattern of serial molestation and institutional cover-ups in the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, Poland and Mexico. American Catholics were traumatized by the unveiling of such scandals in 2002 and 2003.
The most recent scandals that have rocked dioceses in Ireland, the United States and Germany, however, contain disturbing threads that go straight to the Vatican and touch directly on Pope Benedict XVI.
Before he assumed the papacy, while he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, The New York Times reported last Friday, he declined to defrock a priest who sexually molested an estimated 200 boys in a Catholic school for the deaf in Wisconsin between 1950 and 1974. For decades a group of these boys, grown into men, tried aggressively to get the church to deal with the priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy.
They went to three archbishops of Milwaukee, two police departments and the district of attorney, all to no avail. Last week, they learned that Cardinal Ratzinger, then the Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had declined in 1996 to punish Father Murphy on account of his age. Father Murphy died, still a priest, two years later.
In his role as Prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger was often referred to informally as the Pope’s rottweiler for maintaining conservative orthodoxy in church policies. But while he advocated traditional theological positions for liturgical correctness and against abortion, a married priesthood and women in the clergy, he apparently maintained the traditional church position that “problem priests” and sexual scandals were to be managed in a way that saved the church from scandal.
The current sexual abuse scandal in Germany is apparently widening and sowing increased discontent for another, similar action by Mr. Ratzinger, the first German to become pope, when he was archbishop in Munich. Then, in 1980, he allowed a priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, accused of sexual abuse of a child to be sent to therapy, and received a copy of a memo on his standing. The priest was allowed to continue his parochial duties within days of starting treatment — and was later convicted of sexual abuse of boys in another parish.
That revelation has helped kindle a related scandal in Berlin over a case of frequent sexual molestation at an elite Jesuit high school in the 1970s and 1980s.
The church’s long-standing effort to keep a lid on sexual abuse by priests is also fueling a new controversy in Ireland, where Catholics are now demanding the resignation of Cardinal Sean Brady. They have been angered by the discovery that he helped protect an abusive priest 35 years ago, effectively allowing the offending priest to subsequently become, as a New York Times story put it, “the most notorious child-abuser in the history of the Irish church.”
In another European scandal, two Austrian dioceses have suspended five priests this month pending an investigation into alleged abuse.
The scandals, and Pope Benedict’s vague responses, frame a controversy which pits the church’s traditional effort to protect itself from scandals, which could make it vulnerable to enemies, against present demands for transparency and accountability for aberrant criminal conduct. Historically, the Vatican has treated abuse by its aberrant priests as a sin for which confession, penitence and mercy merited forgiveness — and as a sin better handled by the church than by secular authorities, prosecutors, prisons and public scrutiny.
That model clearly has been broken by serial abusers who have subsequently broken the lives of countless innocent children and congregants. Easter may be the perfect time for the church to acknowledge that breakdown and make amends through an explicit promise to police its priesthood transparently for sins that also are secular crimes against the most vulnerable of church’s worldwide flock.