By David Gibson
Politics Daily
March 10, 2010
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/10/abuse-scandals-draw-uncomfortably-close-to-the-pope/
With each passing news cycle, the scandal of the sexual and physical abuse of children by Catholic clergy seems to be moving closer to the Vatican. What was once dismissed by Vatican officials -- including then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI -- as a relatively minor problem in the United States that was being blown out of proportion by an anti-Catholic American media, the crisis has instead spread inexorably across Europe in recent weeks and now threatens to reach as far as the pope himself.
A confession by the pope's older brother, Father Georg Ratzinger, that he himself slapped boys in the world-famous Bavarian church choir he directed for 30 years was the latest shocker in a series of reports about abuse decades ago in the German church.
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No sooner had Benedict concluded an unusual summit meeting at the Vatican last month with all of the bishops of Ireland to discuss the abuse crisis roiling the Emerald Isle than revelations of past abuse began to emerge in the Netherlands, Austria (which had already been rocked by scandal in the 1990s) and most surprisingly, in Germany.
More than 170 former students at Catholic high schools across Germany have come forward with allegations they were abused, but the charges from students at two schools connected to the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir were especially discomfiting to the Vatican. That's because the choir -- whose singers are called the Cathedral Sparrows -- was directed by Father Georg Ratzinger, now 86, from 1964 until his retirement in 1994.
Father Ratzinger says he was completely unaware of allegations of sexual abuse at the schools in Bavaria, the southern German and very Catholic province where the Ratzinger children grew up. And he said the sexual abuse allegations date from before his tenure.
"These things were never discussed," Ratzinger said in Tuesday's edition of the German daily, Passauer Neue Presse, according to a translation by The Associated Press. "The problem of sexual abuse that has now come to light was never spoken of."
Yet Ratzinger did say the boys under his charge would tell him of beatings at one of the choir's feeder schools under investigation, in Etterzhausen.
"But I did not have the feeling at the time that I should do something about it," Georg Ratzinger told the German newspaper. "Had I known with what exaggerated fierceness he [the head of the Etterzhausen school] was acting, I would have said something. . . . Of course, today one condemns such actions. I do as well."
Then Ratzinger admitted he himself had hit boys when they got out of line.
"At the beginning I also repeatedly administered a slap in the face, but always had a bad conscience about it," Ratzinger said, adding that he was happy when corporal punishment was made illegal in 1980.
Ratzinger said a slap in the face was the easiest reaction to a failure to perform or a poor performance, the AP reported. How hard the slap was varied, depending on who administered it.
"At the same time, I ask the victims for pardon," Ratzinger said.
The Vatican is clearly concerned about the proximity of the latest reports. Benedict is scheduled to meet with the head of the German Bishops Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, on Friday, and that may be a prelude to a larger summit with the German hierarchy similar to the one the pope held with Ireand's bishops. A papal letter on the Ireland crisis, which Benedict promised at last month's meeting, could come out as soon as next week.
Also, the papal spokesman on Tuesday rejected charges that the Vatican was stonewalling and defended the reactions by church authorities across Europe as "timely and decisive." The spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, also said investigations on child abuse must focus on the problem in the wider society as well.
All of which could presage a statement by a higher-ranking Vatican official, or the pope himself, should the revelations continue.
So, could any of this damage Benedict or even imperil his papacy?
That's highly unlikely, unless there were direct and credible allegations against the pope himself. That seems like a long shot given Benedict's longstanding history of personal rectitude and his revulsion at revelations of clergy sexual abuse in the United States -- which to some extent turned him from an early skeptic to a pope who has taken a fairly assertive line against abusive priests (though not so much against the bishops who covered for them).
Moreover, unlike his brother, Joseph Ratzinger has very little experience in parish work or working with young people or seminarians. He spent almost his entire career in academia and in "upper-management" jobs in the church. He was archbishop in Munich from 1977 to 1982, before Pope John Paul II made him head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a high-ranking and influential post he held until his own election as pope in April 2005.
So he has arguably been out of the pastoral circles of religious and diocesan life where these scandals occurred and were covered up.
On the other hand, the Vatican under Benedict often seems to be lurching from crisis to crisis -- from the 2006 speech Benedict gave that offended Muslims and touched off violence, to his repeated clashes with the Jewish community, to his rehabilitation last year of a schismatic right-wing bishop who is also a Holocaust denier. Benedict later chalked that up to the Vatican's failure to use an Internet search engine to get some basic background information on the bishop.
In the end, if Benedict's papacy becomes known as one that simply goes from misstep to misstep, and crisis to crisis, then that could become its defining dynamic -- and one that even the best preaching would find it difficult to overcome.
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