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	What Did Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Know and When? By Opiyo Oloya The New Vision March 30, 2010 http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/20/714624 AS Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter, trouble is brewing about the Vatican’s handling of allegations of sex abuses involving Catholic priests. At the heart of the scandal is the Catholic Church’s unwillingness to confront the issues of sexual abuse in a forthright manner as Jesus would have. Now, because of that failure, there are growing calls for Pope Benedict XVI to resign. That is not going to happen. But the Vatican needs to come clean about what Pope Benedict XVI knew and when. The questions surround several cases of alleged sex abuses that the pope handled when he was still known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. While not all alleged sexual abuses by priests happened under Cardinal Ratzinger’s watch, those raising the most hackles happened during his tenure as the archbishop of Munich, and later as the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. In one case, Father Peter Hullermann, 62, a priest under then Archbishop Ratzinger was accused of sexually abusing an 11-year old boy in 1980. He was temporarily relieved of his duties while he received therapy. Two years later, however, Fr. Hullermann was posted to continue work as a priest in Bavaria where he molested more children, was convicted and given an 18-month suspended sentence. Amazingly, Fr. Hullermann continued to be posted from parish to parish until about a week ago when he was “suspended” after he was found to have violated the condition not to work with children. Apparently, Fr. Hullermann broke the ban when he accompanied children on a camping trip. There is also the case of over 200 deaf boys of Wisconsin, USA who were sexually molested by a Catholic priest between 1950 and 1974. According to the New York Times, information about the cases involving the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy who worked at a renowned school for deaf children started to come out in the 1990s. The victims of the abuse were getting ready to take on their abuser and the Church. US church leaders who became aware of the scandal wrote two letters directly to the future pope, Cardinal Ratzinger who was now working as the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, and whose office was supposed to deal with cases of abuse involving priests. The cardinal did not respond to the letters! But eight months later, Cardinal Tarsicio Bertone, the deputy to Cardinal Ratzinger instructed the US bishops to start canonical proceedings to dismiss the Rev. Murphy from his pastoral job. But, even before the bishops could get started, Cardinal Bertone sent a terse instruction telling them not to proceed after all. What changed was that the Rev. Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, appealing to the future pope to go easy on him, and to allow him to live the rest of his life in peace and tranquillity. Ratzinger apparently sided with the Rev. Murphy, and the proceedings died without seeing light. What’s more, the Rev. Murphy was quietly moved to another parish where he continued to work and interact with children for 24 years until he died of natural causes in 1998. He was still a priest. There were hundreds of other cases of sexual abuses that came forward at the time when future pope Cardinal Ratzinger was the disciplinarian whose duty it was to straighten out priests who become enamoured with children. Yet, somehow, these cases were allowed to either fester, or were dealt with haphazardly without much consideration for the victims. Now, as some have charged, it could be that the Church was more worried about its reputation than with the plight of victims of pedophilia. But, I suspect that at the core of it all is the Church’s inability to unflinchingly call a spade a spade. Jesus whose death on the cross we celebrate during the Holy Week had absolutely no qualms about dealing directly with issues that he knew were wrong. He could not stand the sight of cattle traders and money-changers desecrating the temple and, so, he sent them packing, and not too gently either. Even when Jesus showed compassion as he did in the case of the prostitute who was about to be stoned to death, he was not afraid to acknowledge that the woman had sinned. “If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her,” he told the would-be killers. The problem with the Catholic Church seems to be the inability to acknowledge that there are bad apples in the priesthood who commit very serious crimes and who need to be dealt with firmly. Instead of confronting the problem, however, the Church chooses the path of least resistance, which is to bury the whole thing and pretend it never happened! Now, though, the issue has returned like the stench of two-week-old cow dung, and it cannot simply be ignored. Getting out of the crisis will require honest dialogue about what to do with priests who abuse their robes and authority by molesting children. For starters, there has to be a clearly defined process similar to the one adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in December 2002. Called the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, it clearly spells out how cases of allegation of abuse involving priests should be handled. It is a good first step that needs to be refined and implemented around the world in Catholic parishes. It is the only way to deal with the abuses because, frankly, prayers are not enough. Contact: Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca
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