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	A Prayer for the Prey The Catholic Churchs Refusal to Deal Openly with the Paedophilia Committed by Its Priests Overshadows the Pope's Visit to the US This Week Guardian (United Kingdom) April 15, 2008 http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matthew_harwood/2008/04/a_prayer_for_the_prey.html Over the centuries many dubious miracles have been claimed on behalf of the power of prayer. But Pope Benedict XVI, who arrived in the United States today for his inaugural visit, is expecting more than a miracle if he thinks that prayer can remove the ugly stain of priestly paedophilia from the Catholic Church in America. The Vatican says the Pope will address the sex scandals during his American visit, while the New York Times today reports that the Vatican will begin screening candidates for the priesthood for paedophilic tendencies. But this is a diversion from the real issue: will the Catholic church deliver its known paedophiles to civil authorities for their prosecution, regardless of the damage to the church's reputation and finances? Back in January, Catholics' intercessor between the depraved and the divine had a novel notion to combat his institution's slide into ill repute: perpetual prayer for purging priests of paedophilia. According to the Times (of London): "All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy [of paedophilia]." Cardinal Cludio Hummes, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, told the Times: "The Pope wanted Catholics to pray for the 'mercy of God for the victims of the grave situations caused by the moral and sexual conduct of a very small part of the clergy.'" It's easy to ridicule the Pope's non-plan, because its sacred salve is that God will take mercy on his church in its time of woe by miraculously curing its lycanthropic shepherds of their inner beast. But when you really consider Pope Benedict's solution of prayer to a problem that has devoured the lives of an unknowable number of children - with 5,000 revealed since 2002 alone - it's hard not to see a callous indifference that refuses to acknowledge the church's complicity in such atrocities because it leads to his own doorstep. Prior to being Christ's Vicar on Earth, Pope Benedict's previous incarnation was the Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which centuries before took the biblical command to "not suffer a witch to live" seriously and went by a different name: the Holy Office of the Inquisition. As defender of the faith, Ratzinger could have amended the Vatican's Crimen Sollicitationis [Crime of Solicitation], which originally drew guidelines for how the church dealt with priests that used the confessional booth to solicit sex from parishioners, even the young. In 2001, Ratzinger revisited the document in a confidential letter to bishops reminding them of the strict penalties whistle blowers faced if they took the matter outside the church. As David France reported in his book Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal, any accusation against a priest for paedophilia, as long as the alleged crime wasn't more than 10 years ago, would trigger a church trial. The rub, however, was that the lawyers and jurors would all be priests sworn to secrecy. "Appeals," France wrote, "would go directly to an ecclesiastical tribunal in Rome, under Ratzinger's authority." More damning, priests that took part in the proceedings could not talk about them, the Irish Examiner reports, until 10 years after the child abused reached adulthood. Lawyer Thomas O'Shea, who represented three young men allegedly molested by a former Houston seminarian, noted in the article that the Vatican's secrecy oath ensures that the statute of limitations for such crimes will have already run out in the US if any priest decided to speak out after his secrecy oath expired. The church rejected O'Shea's accusations and said Crimen Sollicitationis merely clarifies internal procedures. Nowhere in the policy are the victims and their rights mentioned, says canon lawyer Father Thomas Doyle. Ratzinger had the power to change these polices but did nothing. He still does, Doyle told the BBC nearly two years ago, and advised that the church's policy should be: "[F]ull disclosure to the civil authorities, absolute isolation and dismissal of any accused and proven and convicted clerics, complete openness and transparency, complete openness of all financial situations, stop all barriers to the legal process and completely co-operate with the civil authorities everywhere." But nothing has changed and the present policy ensures priests guilty of preying on children will neither face their victims nor secular authorities for their crimes, which Doyle calls an "explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen." He would know - he was fired for being an outspoken advocate for victims of priestly abuse. Unless Pope Benedict repudiates the secret judicial policies surrounding Crimen Sollicitationis, excommunicates paedophile priests currently in the fold, and then delivers them publicly to civil authorities worldwide for their prosecution, this recent pronouncement is nothing more than papal bull. Without a change in the Vatican's Crime of Solicitation policy, Pope Benedict's solution of prayer and background screening is shown for what it is: mere connivance in the interest of protecting the church at the expense of the victims of its priests. Prayer alone is powerless to stop the abuse - its practice will only lead to more prey. Background screening may limit the number of paedophiles that don the collar, but will do nothing to ensure past, present, and future sex scandals aren't shrouded in secrecy, protected by an internal legal system created to sidestep civil legal systems. His Holiness, nevertheless, has it in his power to begin eradicating the church of its disease tomorrow, if he so chooses, by delivering the offenders to secular authorities. By refusing to do so, he shows clearly the absurdity of his moral infallibility and the supreme arrogance of an institution that feels itself immune from man's law, in its pursuit of a divine purpose fewer and fewer actually believe in. The dubious power of prayer has always had its practitioners - but few have been more cynical than this.
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