Source: New York Times, Associated Press, AP, Reuters, AFP, Der Spiegel, BBC
Victims of abuse by Catholic priests and nuns in Ireland and elsewhere expressed deep disappointment over an eagerly anticipated pastoral letter released Saturday by the Vatican after weeks of consultation with Irish bishops.
In the letter, which was to be read at all Catholic churches in the country, Pope Benedict XVI apologizes to victims of abuse and rebukes Ireland’s church leaders for “grave errors of judgment” in failing to observe the church’s secretive canon laws, Associated Press reports.
In the long-awaited, eight-page pastoral letter, the pope said to abuse victims,“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.”
“Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen,” the pope wrote.
He added, “I know some of you find it difficult even to enter the doors of a church after all that has occurred.”
But Benedict did not ask for resignations from Cardinal Sean Brady, the head of the Irish church, or any other member of the Irish hierarchy and did not not require that Roman Catholic leaders be disciplined for past mistakes as some victims were hoping, New York Times reports.
Nor did the pope indicate that the Irish abuse cases reveal deeper problems with church rules.
“My first response was deep disappointment in the letter,” said Maeve Lewis, executive director of victims group One in Four. “We feel the letter falls far short of addressing the concerns of the victims,” Lewis told Reuters.
Lewis said that the pope wasted “a glorious opportunity” to address “the core issue in the clerical sexual abuse scandal: the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church at the highest levels to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children”.
Pope’s apology to Irish abuse victims satisfies few [contd.]
“There is nothing in this letter to suggest that a new vision of leadership exists,” Lewis said, according to AFP.
Victim abuse campaigner Christine Buckley, who was abused by nuns in the Goldenbridge Industrial School in Dublin, told AFP that the pope should have specifically apologized to victims of institutional abuse in Ireland.
“The whole issue of institutional abuse has been forgotten. We were the forgotten children,” she said.
About 165,000 children had passed through various childcare institutions funded by the state and run by the church, AFP reports.
While accusations of a long-term culture of abuse within the Catholic church are spreading to other countries in Europe—including Benedict’s native Germany—the pope’s letter remained tightly focused on Ireland.
The narrow focus of this week’s letter dismayed victims’ groups around the world who had hoped the pope would address the broader crisis, New York Times reports.
“I find that deceitful because we know that this is a global and systemic problem in the global church,” Colm O’Gorman, the co-founder of an Irish victims’ group, told the Times. O’Gorman said he was sexually abused by a priest as a teenager in Ireland in the early ’80s. “It’s all about protecting the institution and, above all, its wealth.”
“The greatest contribution the pope could have made was to stop the abuse of victims, and he’s not even done that,” he added.
St. Sebastian by Italian painter
Il SodomaChristian Weisner, a spokesman for the reform group We Are Church in Munich, said that he disappointed, but not surprised, that Benedict did not address Germany in the letter. “It’s a global problem and a global answer is needed,” he said, according to the Times.
BBC’s David Wiley wrote from Rome on Thursday:
During four decades of reporting from the Vatican, I have never seen a graver crisis affecting the very credibility of the leadership of the world’s longest surviving international organization, the Roman Catholic Church. …
The Pope has been busy writing new instructions to the clergy and faithful of traditionally Catholic Ireland, drawing up stricter rules for dealing with priestly pedophilia.
Without warning, he was suddenly confronting new, similar scandals which have come to light in his own country, Germany—including one in the very town where he taught at the university and where his brother was choirmaster of a famous boys’ choir.
His promised pastoral letter to Ireland has had to be put on hold.
Now his record as Archbishop of Munich in the late 1970s and early 80s, is being mercilessly scrutinized by the international media.
Irish government reports issued last year revealed decades of systemic abuse by clergy at Catholic schools and churches. The reports found that church officials routinely withheld from civil authorities information about priests who had committed felonies.
Four Irish bishops offered their resignation in the wake of the publication of the report on Dublin in November, but the pope has accepted only one, according to the New York Times.
Earlier this week, Cardinal Brady said he was ashamed by events in the 1970s when he did not report to police allegations of abuse against a Nobertine priest, Brendan Smyth, who was later convicted of child abuse and died in prison, Reuters reports. Brady indicated that he would resign if the pope asked him to.
But he said nothing about that offer Saturday in a homily after reading the pope’s letter at a morning mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, Northern Ireland.
“I welcome this letter,” Brady said.
“It is evident from the Pastoral Letter that Pope Benedict is deeply dismayed by what he refers to as ‘sinful and criminal acts and the way the Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them,’” Brady said, according to Reuters.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi defended the pope’s statement during a Saturday news conference at the Vatican. He said the document was intended as a pastoral letter, not a document outlining “administrative or juridical measures.”
In his letter, Benedict offered a prescription for Irish Catholics—including clergy—on how to renew their faith. He urged all Irish clergy to go on a spiritual retreat and suggested that dioceses set aside special chapels where Catholics could pray for “healing and renewal”, the Times reports.
That approach is a symptom of the broader problem that has infected the church for decades, said Terrence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks church records on abuse cases.
“There’s a strong tendency to approach this as a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and a lack of accountability.”
In her in-depth New York Times report, Rachel Donadio writes from Rome:
Some Irish church officials have said the problem has been deepened by confusion over the interpretation of a 2001 directive by Benedict, then a cardinal, reiterating a strict requirement for secrecy in handling abuse cases. The directive also gave the authority for handling such cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Benedict was prefect of the congregation from 1982 until becoming pope in 2005.
In his letter, Benedict spoke of “a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situation,” adding that “it is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse.”
The pope attributed the problem in part to “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties.”
In the letter, Benedict also directly addressed bishops. “It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse,” he wrote.
But Benedict’s own actions regarding at least one abuser when he was a bishop in Munich have been called into question as allegations of abuse in Germany have become public.
His former diocese is facing new allegations of physical and sexual abuse on a daily basis, Associated Press reports.
“It is like a tsunami,” Elke Huemmeler, who leads the diocese’s newly founded abuse prevention task force, told AP on Friday.
She said about 120 cases had come to light so far in Munich, about 100 of them at a boarding school run by monks, BBC reports.
Huemmeler said the diocese had to hire a third expert last week to help it investigate the wave of allegations it has uncovered.
At least one of the cases involves Archbishop Ratzinger—now called Pope Benedict—who ran the diocese in the 1980’s before transferring to a major new job at the Vatican, where he took over as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—a position that was once called “Grand Inquisitor”.
But Ratzinger was still leading the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in 1980 when a priest who had been accused of sex abuse by three sets of parents was transferred there from another diocese. The priest continued to work with—and to abuse—children.
The priest was convicted by German authorities of child abuse in 1986, but was still allowed to return to work with children. The priest was not suspended from the church until last month.
An associate of Ratzinger’s at the diocese says that it was he and not the future pope who approved the initial transfer of the priest-abuser.
BBC’s Wiley writes:
Naturally the Vatican public relations machine has been working overtime to deflect all personal criticism away from the pontiff.
A German prelate has taken the rap for the Munich cover up. The Vatican’s version is that Pope Benedict knew nothing about one particularly worrisome and well-documented case which has remained in the headlines for days.
Ordinary Catholics in many countries are now asking questions about a subject which has been taboo at the Vatican ever since I can remember.
In this week’s issue, the German magazine Der Spiegel offers an extensive six-part cover story on the abuse scandal that is only now breaking in Germany.
The magazine’s staff writes:
A tremor is currently passing through the Catholic Church in Germany. It could be merely the beginning of an earthquake of proportions which have so far only been seen in the American and Irish Church. Tens of thousands of abuse cases were brought to light in both countries. Could Germany be next?
The magazine found some indications that it could:
For decades, German bishops tried to look the other way when their pastors engaged in sexual abuse, as well as to downplay the problem by characterizing it as isolated incidents. Now they are finally revealing their own figures, though hesitantly. According to a SPIEGEL survey of Germany's 27 dioceses conducted last week, at least 94 priests and members of the laity in Germany are suspected or have been suspected of abusing countless children and adolescents since 1995. A total of 24 of the 27 dioceses responded to SPIEGEL’s questions.
The long-term pattern of sexual abuse that has now been revealed within Catholic institutions in the US and in Europe has prompted some to question the wisdom of many church doctrines on sexuality.
A Catholic theologian and psychologist at the Münsterschwarzach Benedictine Abbey in Germany calls for the end of celibacy for priests and the ordination of women, Der Spiegel reports. Wunibald Müller, who has argued for more openness in matters of sex, said that those two steps would be “a form of prevention”.
Müller insists that members of the clergy must address their sexuality. “They cannot suppress this area, or else it will find ways to slip out and cause problems for other people.”
“The experience of pain and suffering can lead us to God,” he told Der Spiegel, “but so can eroticism and sexual passion.”
But there’s little sign that messages like Muller’s are making it through to the Vatican.
Instead, Benedict and the reactionary bishops that he and his predecessor have appointed, appear to be intent on doubling down with more repressive and unrealistic messages about sex and sexuality.
Source: Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal | New York Times
Pope slams Irish church, no Vatican blame in abuse | Associated Press/Houston Chronicle
Inside Germany's Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal | Der Spiegel
Munich Diocese Faces ''tsunami'' of Abuse Claims | Associated Press/NY Times
Irish victims disappointed by pope abuse letter | Reuters/Washington Post
Vatican ends "wall of silence" over child abuse scandal | BBC
Pope's letter 'doesn't address concerns | AFP/Brisbane Times