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	A Cover-Up beyond Forgiveness By Ian Bell Herald Scotland March 21, 2010 http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/ian-bell/a-cover-up-beyond-forgiveness-1.1014819 SCOTLAND -- Pope Benedict has called it "the child abuse crisis". Crisis of what, exactly, and for whom? In his general audience at the Vatican last week the pontiff also spoke of "this painful situation". Is it still possible to hope that something important was lost in the translation of those miserable words? One by one, even the defences of the well-meaning are being stripped away. The hopes of the remaining faithful, still attempting to live their lives in Christ, are being shattered. All those who have done no harm, who love their church, whose anger and horror are a match for any secular cynic, have less and less to offer. What remains? The claim, as though in excuse, that there will always be an inescapable few who are tainted and twisted? It no longer holds. The stream of documented cases, far less the flood of allegations, says that the suggestion is an insult. Ugly words – institutionalised, globalised – are now apposite. Could you black out the organisation's name and simply present the list of known crimes – only those – to Scotland Yard or the FBI, a stunned assessment would follow. This, it would say, is the world's biggest paedophile ring. A pastoral letter from Benedict, to be read out at masses across Ireland this morning, is a pathetic gesture. More new guidelines? So how many countries now? Ireland, Germany, Italy, Holland, Austria, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland, Britain, all points of the American compass: whom shall we spare? And how many must – must – have known? Secondary to the claim that a few vicious men wrought havoc is the belief in a handful of careerists procuring silence and concealment. The cover-up, despite its precise repetition in place after place, is also called an aberration. Not plausible. Not tenable. The vast geographic extent of systematic rape and torture, far less its reach across generations, is compelling evidence that a great many people – otherwise good, otherwise blameless, their consciences "troubled" – knew perfectly well. They knew or could guess every detail. And the ­Vatican knew. Or have I read too often of its matchless "intelligence service", and of a bureaucratic self-knowledge, stored in the archives, that spans centuries? Has no-one in the church ever signed an unusual cheque, or authorised a quiet pay-off, or arranged for a certain priest to follow his calling a thousand miles away? In Rome, they knew. Benedict knew. For 24 years that priest was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It causes annoyance in some quarters to call it the Inquisition. But the former Joseph Ratzinger has written, in the so-called Ratzinger Report, of a church whose "­fundamental structures are willed by God himself, and therefore they are inviolable. Behind the human exterior stands the mystery of a more than human reality, in which reformers, sociologists, organisers have no authority whatever". The then-cardinal, fretting over heresy, did not add "and courts" to his list, but there was no need. Charged by John Paul II with the job of addressing the first child abuse scandals, Ratzinger ordered that investigations should be secret, and further that any evidence should remain "confidential" for a decade after the victims had become adults. So who, for God's sake, was calling the cops? Now the 16th Benedict, the doctrinal specialist, harbours in Rome a prince of the church named Bernard Law. That cardinal was in charge in Boston when unspeakable scandals engulfed the church. Tens of millions of dollars have been paid out to those who suffered. Law is wanted still – hence his sojourn in Italy – by a grand jury. But the pope, guardian of inviolable structures, fears what might follow if mystery is subordinated to temporal authority. Or if one of his own has to face a court. The theology is fascinating, the practical consequences absurd. Germany, like Ireland before it, is preparing for a national inquiry into what Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the "despicable" treatment of children. What good will that do if a church refuses to accept its obligations under the law, and if it cannot be trusted to regulate its own affairs when hideous crimes are at stake? Its best shot, thus far, is sorrow – there is always sorrow – and the promise – there are always promises – of transparency. Good enough? Another stratagem is to claim that all the horrors are in the past, that everything has changed. This falters, to put it no higher, as one generation of victims succeeds the last: we are at the 1980s now, and closing. So when do we begin to accept that sexual abuse is traditional among a celibate priesthood, and then begin to ask about the environment created by celibacy? A priestly calling is a hard road for many, no doubt, but it is clearly, beyond question, a hazard to the psyches of some. These are men granted power over children who have exploited the authority of faith and the protection of a global institution. It is not good enough to say, as one writer last week wished to say, that less "than half of 1% of Catholic clergy in the UK over the last three decades or so have been accused of child abuse". What sort of moral accounting is that, exactly? Is there an actuarial scale for sex crimes? Besides, what became of the claim that the Catholic Church is different, fundamentally different, from all others in its status and role? Adherents will forgive me – or not – if I quibble, but some of the claims made for the primacy of a religious group seem strange amid so much squalor. Last week, after the panic and the apologies elsewhere, an adoption agency named Catholic Care won the chance, thanks to London's High Court, to go on ­treating gay couples as less than human. In pursuit of its church's teachings, the organisation will continue to wage war on England's Charity Commission, and on equality. Say a prayer. Elsewhere, Benedict's God-willed authority strikes at women's reproductive rights with increasing ferocity. It goes on insisting that condoms have no part in the struggle with HIV. It demands a political role, increasingly, in British life. And those celibate men continue to tell young couples what is right and best for children. Meanwhile, the Primate of All Ireland has yet to decide, at the time of writing, whether resignation might not be his next, most appropriate, move. Cardinal Sean Brady did another of those standard-issue apologies in Armagh Cathedral on St Patrick's Day. Thirty-five years after the fact, he was troubled by his part in the effort to bully two abused children into silence, and by his failure to call the police over clear evidence that a priest, one Brendan Smyth, was a vicious and persistent predator. Other Irish bishops, like their colleagues around the world, have already quit over their "lapses". In other parts of the Vatican's imperium the evidence has emerged, time and again, that the likes of Smyth roamed freely through churches, schools and homes, that they were not rare beasts, and that their church cared more for the brute than the brutalised. Above all, always, it protected itself: that was the beginning of the crime. Before anyone suggests otherwise, I take no particular satisfaction from that. I can vindicate the weary arguments against the godly without the evidence of infant terror. But a thought: Benedict would be best advised if he cancels that visit to Scotland. As things stand, he has little to say, and nothing to celebrate.
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