Those familiar with the ongoing revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy will recognize, in the title to this post, Christopher Hitchens’ grim humour (somehow I cannot imagine Hitchens having any other kind). The spectacle provided by the leadership of what increasingly resembles (in addition to whatever else it is) a pedophile cult, as it frantically trims, slices and parses its way through the thicket of accusations of abuse from all corners of the world, might inspire a cringeworthy pity for its fecklessness if it weren’t for all the lives it ruined and destroyed.
It should be clear by now that the leadership of the Catholic Church, expert as they are in casuistry, have been engaged in a vast exercise of jesuitical turd-polishing in the face of its worldwide child sex scandal.
Now from Ireland comes the latest coprolite, another instance of Church lying and evasion.
As reported by the Associated Press on January 18, 2011:
A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police – a disclosure that victims’ groups described as “the smoking gun” needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.
The newly revealed letter... documents the Vatican’s rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland’s first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.
The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church’s right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than give that power to civil authorities.
When challenged in lawsuits that name the Pope as a defendant, the Vatican insists he cannot be sued because it is a nation state, that thereby the Pope, as head of state, is immune from prosecution, that priests and others who commit these crimes do not “work for” the Vatican, and that the Vatican cannot be held responsible for what is done by these miscreants. Yet this so-called nation state also claims jurisdiction over sex crimes committed on the soil of other sovereign nation states by those it claims to have no power over. The polite term for this is sucking and blowing at the same time, something that, sadly, the Church and the pederasts among its clergy are all too good at.
It is clear that the clerical side of the Catholic Church has never listened to radio station WWJS. If they had, they might have heard these golden oldies, straight from the lips of a certain Jesus of Nazareth, yo: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me…. [I]f you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
You get the picture: Jesus clearly wanted pederasts to get the cement shoes treatment. This, I submit, gives you an indication of how seriously He would have dealt with this latter-day corruption of the innocents, and of the enormity of the Church’s (including this unworthy Pope’s) response to it, which has been to coddle the criminal and punish the victim, further compounding their sin. Der Kurrent Pope himself has voiced the typical self-pitying response of the Church: “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the church.”
Hitchens responds to the response:
On April 10, the New York Times—the apparent center of this “planned campaign”—reprinted a copy of a letter personally signed by Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI] in 1985. The letter urged lenience in the case of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, who had tied up and sexually tormented two small boys on church property in California. Kiesle’s superiors had written to Ratzinger’s office in Rome, beseeching him to remove the criminal from the priesthood. The man who is now his holiness the pope was full of urgent moral advice in response. “The good of the Universal Church,” he wrote, should be uppermost in the mind. It should be understood that “particularly regarding the young age” of Father Kiesle, there might be great “detriment” caused “within the community of Christ’s faithful” if he were to be removed. The good father was then aged 38. His victims—not that their tender ages of 11 and 13 seem to have mattered—were children. In the ensuing decades, Kiesle went on to ruin the lives of several more children and was finally jailed by the secular authorities on a felony molestation charge in 2004. All this might have been avoided if he had been handed over to justice right away and if the Oakland diocese had called the police rather than written to the office in Rome where it was Ratzinger’s job to muffle and suppress such distressing questions.
Until now, this Pope has said nothing directly about the role he played in protecting child rapists from justice. Instead, he whines that the shame brought upon the Church is a result of a concerted campaign by those who expose crimes by its clergy, crimes that Jesus himself stated should be punished by throwing the perpetrators into the sea with millstones tied around their necks. Only when the light of day was shone on the Church’s ugly secret did Herr Ratzinger respond, with words of regret crafted to deflect moral and legal accountability, all the while defiantly insisting that the Church continue to call its own balls and strikes.
Until he confesses his own sins, as the Church requires every Catholic to do, until he releases all internal Church documents that would in any way shed light on all cases of child rape by clergy and the actions undertaken to protect these monsters from answering to the law, until he resigns and accepts whatever punishment is meted out by due process of the law, Ratzinger cannot expect anyone to accord him the least deference or respect. Until that time, the institutional Church will continue to be seen as morally rotted out.
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