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  Will New Scandal Mar Catholic Church?

By Tom Beyerlein
Dayton Daily News
April 1, 2010

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/will-new-scandal-mar-catholic-church--630660.html?showComments=true

OHIO -- Reports suggest pope helped cover up cases of abuse in U.S., Germany.

David Bayer of Kettering is a self-described cradle Catholic who loves the church and its Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.

"As an ex-police officer, I'd take a bullet for him," said Bayer, a longtime parishioner at St. Albert the Great Church. "He's someone special. I have no doubts about this man at all."

David Bayer of Kettering, a self-described "cradle Catholic," holds a crucifix in his home. He is the coordinator of the St. Albert the Great Parish Small Faith Group. Staff photo by Jim Witmer
Photo by Jim Witmer

But during this Holy Week, Benedict is at the center of what the National Catholic Reporter newspaper is calling "the largest institutional crisis in centuries, perhaps in church history," after the New York Times published stories last week suggesting the pope helped to cover up cases of sexual abuse by priests in the U.S. and Germany.

"It's serious, there's no question," David O'Brien, professor of faith and culture at the University of Dayton, said of the controversy. "This whole episode has damaged the authority of the hierarchy."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Merz, who headed a National Review Board on child abuse for the U.S. bishops, said, "I don't think it's likely the church will meet its demise over this. (But) there's certainly the possibility for very serious long-term consequences."

The New York Times reported that a Vatican office headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope dropped efforts in the 1990s to defrock a Wisconsin priest who abused as many as 200 boys at a school for the deaf. The Vatican has said the priest, who appealed to Ratzinger for leniency, wasn't defrocked because he was in ill health and the abuse happened decades earlier.

As archbishop of Munich in 1980, Ratzinger led a meeting that restored an abusive priest to pastoral work, the Times reported. The priest went on to abuse other children. A subordinate has taken responsibility for the decision, but the Times said an internal church document it obtained shows the future pope was notified.

Benedict XVI, the only pope to meet with victims of child sexual abuse by priests, can help defuse the international furor over the latest revelations by spelling out his own role in disciplining pedophile priests, local Catholics who have studied the abuse scandal say.

Benedict has been mostly silent about the matter, although Vatican sources and others have downplayed any role the pope may have had in some controversial cases.

"I would say a personal accounting by the pope would be enormously helpful in restoring trust," said Merz.

Merz said he has "a lot of sympathy" for the viewpoint that bishops have largely avoided punishment for covering up the crimes of pedophile priests by secretly moving them to new parishes where they sometimes abused again. "It's time to hold bishops accountable as well as the (abusive) priests."

Merz, who is involved in crafting a major study on the causes of the scandal to be released late this year, said the crisis won't be over until victims feel free to come forward and "when everybody can trust we're doing the right thing to deal with it."

That will require an accounting by the pope, the disciplining of complicit bishops and an international set of rules similar to the U.S. "zero-tolerance" policy enacted in 2002, he said. That policy forbids secret settlements and requires background checks of those who work with children.

O'Brien said Benedict has a better record of dealing with the sexual abuse crisis than his predecessor, the popular John Paul II. As former head of the Vatican's disciplinary office, Benedict is said to have become particularly sensitive to the concerns of victims, and met with a group of them in 2008.

O'Brien thinks Benedict, then head of the disciplinary office, probably didn't mishandle the 1990s case of the late Rev. Lawrence Murphy, a Milwaukee priest who abused as many as 200 boys from a school for the deaf decades earlier. Murphy was seriously ill and near death by the time the Vatican learned of the case and declined to defrock him.

But "in Munich, I think he'll end up like so many American bishops, where he knew these transfers (of pedophile priests) were made," O'Brien said. The Times reported documents show that when Benedict was Munich's archbishop, he would have been aware of the transfer of a known pedophile who went on to abuse other children.

Kristine Ward of Kettering, who heads the victims' group, the National Survivor Advocates Coalition, said Benedict should publicly release documents pertaining to his handling of sex abuse cases. "It now becomes a question of what did the pope know and when did he know it and what did he do with the knowledge," she said. "The church has laryngitis in its moral voice — the only cure is the truth."

The Rev. David Brinkmoeller, pastor of St. Helen Parish and dean of the Dayton Deanery, said, "the truth has to be out — whatever the truth is."

"There's no room in the pulpit for somebody who's violated a child," Brinkmoeller said. In the American church, he said, "we've learned that the hard way."

 
 

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