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	Catholic Abuse Cover-Up Starts at Top The Australian March 18, 2010 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/catholic-abuse-cover-up-starts-at-top/story-e6frg6zo-1225842013029 ON March 10, the Vatican's chief exorcist, the Reverend Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", and that "when one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true, including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia". This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation. Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing, indeed endless, scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial. It was clear, said the Reverend Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made "to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse". He went on to say that "those efforts have failed". He was wrong twice. In the first place, nobody has had to strive to find such evidence: it has surfaced, as it was bound to do. In the second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the top-most level of the Roman Catholic Church has only just begun. Yet it became, in a sense, inevitable when the College of Cardinals elected, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, the man chiefly responsible for the original cover-up. (One of the sanctified voters in that "election" was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a man who had already found the jurisdiction of Massachusetts a bit too warm for his liking.) There are two separate, but related, matters here: first, the individual responsibility of the Pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider law-breaking and for the accompanying shame and disgrace. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked and forced to perform oral sex on his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing abuse?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for "therapy" by a decision of then archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer work with children. But it took no time for Ratzinger's deputy, vicar-general Gerhard Gruber, to return him to pastoral work, where he resumed his career of sexual assault. It is, of course, claimed, and it will no doubt later be partially unclaimed, that Ratzinger himself knew nothing of this second outrage. I quote, here, from the Reverend Thomas Doyle, a former employee of the Vatican embassy in Washington and an early critic of the Catholic Church's slowness in responding to child-rape allegations. "Nonsense," he says. "Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He's the old style. Anything like that would, necessarily, have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar-general to find a better line." Joseph Ratzinger, before the church made him its supreme leader, obstructed justice on a grand scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, then pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way restrained by a perpetual silence and everyone is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office under the penalty of excommunication". As far as I know, nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offence could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! Not content with shielding its own priests from the law, Ratzinger's office even wrote its own private statute of limitations. The church's jurisdiction, claimed Ratzinger, "begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age" and then lasts for 10 more years. Daniel Shea, the attorney for two victims who sued Ratzinger and a church in Texas, correctly describes that latter stipulation as an obstruction of justice. "You can't investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10, the priest will get away with it." The next item on this grisly docket will be the revival of the longstanding allegations against the Reverend Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-reactionary Legion of Christ. Senior ex-members of this secretive order found their complaints ignored and overridden by Ratzinger during the 1990s, if only because Maciel had been praised by John Paul II as an "efficacious guide to youth". And now behold the harvest of this long campaign of obfuscation. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice and speedily at that.
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