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	Mistakes Were Made. Boys Were Abused By Robert Fulford National Post March 27, 2010 http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=fa8e268a-14c3-4406-a224-73e1db8f6ecf In his recent letter to Irish Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI remarked that one cause of the sexual-abuse scandal was a fear of scandal itself. "A misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church" apparently caused bishops to hide the monstrous crimes of priests and leave them unpunished. That was last weekend. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that court papers filed in a suit against the diocese of Milwaukee indicate that the Pope himself committed precisely that error. In 1996, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, heading the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he declined to challenge a priest who had molested perhaps 200 deaf boys in his care. The priest died in 1998 without official stain on his record. He was buried in his priestly vestments--a scandal in itself. In writing to Ireland, the Pope expressed a generalized "shame and remorse that we all feel" in response to sexual crimes against children. He said nothing about his connection to the Milwaukee case or a German case that has thrown another shadow across his record. His letter, which deserves careful study, demonstrates the way language often reveals more than a writer intends. The writer says one thing but the prose conveys something else. The Pope's letter, on a subject so dangerous it appears to be eroding the status of the Church, betrays his mood: anxious, insecure and defensive. In the Vatican's official English version, the letter's most obvious quality is the persistent use of passive verbs. As every book on prose makes plain, the best writers favour transitive verbs ( "John cheated Joan") and avoid, so far as possible, the passive voice ( "Joan was cheated"). The first way makes the meaning clear; the second obscures it by ignoring the identity of the person responsible. The passive encourages evasion. Again and again, the Pope uses the passive voice and clouds his meaning. While he notes that priests committed crimes and bishops failed adequately to punish them, a reader of the letter is left with only a sketchy idea of what happened. What was actually done? By whom? How often? The Irish must look elsewhere for specific information. "Grave errors of judgement were made and failures of leadership occurred" is a typical passive phrase from the text. He mentions "the problem of abuse that has occurred" and "the serious sins committed against defenceless children." Addressing victims and their families, he writes, "Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated." Again, by whom? The Pope's language changes sharply when he moves from the present to the past. Listing the historic achievements of the Irish Catholics, all the way back to the establishment of monasteries in France and Italy by St. Columbanus (540-615 CE), the Pope adopts a notably active voice. He says Celtic monks "spread the Gospel in Western Europe and laid the foundations of medieval monastic culture"; The Church "provided education, especially for the poor"; "Generations of missionary priests, sisters and brothers left their homeland to serve in every continent." Yet such active verbs are scarce pretty much everywhere else in the 4,600-word letter. The Pope's vagueness undercuts his reassurances. Without providing details, he says the Church has made serious progress in dealing with pedophiles. Since the gravity and extent of child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions "first began to be fully grasped, the Church has done an immense amount of work" to remedy it. From that sentence an innocent reader might assume that the scandal appeared only recently. In fact, the first widely known case in the United States came to light 26 years ago; the perpetrator, a Louisiana priest who had been sexually exploiting little boys for about a decade, received a 20-year penitentiary sentence. More such crimes surfaced. They became an epidemic in the 1990s. The Pope's vagueness expands to cover modern history. Discussing possible reasons for the wave of sexual abuse, he says that Vatican II was sometimes misinterpreted. Is he saying that Vatican II had the effect of encouraging priestly misbehaviour? Can that be true? In fact, the intimidating power of priests helped make the crimes of pedophiles possible. So the loosening of priestly authority by Vatican II should have made it easier for Catholics to speak the truth about their priests. What it didn't do, apparently, was persuade those in power to follow Christ's teaching and protect the weakest members of the flock. Contact: robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
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