By Carolyn Churchill
Herald Scotland
April 9, 2010
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/pope-opposed-defrocking-of-abusive-priest-1.1019685
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| Pope Benedict XVI was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at the time of the letter |
The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted a proposal to defrock a priest with a record of sexually abusing children, according to a 25-year-old letter bearing his signature.
In the document, dated November 1985, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said the “good of the universal church” needed to be considered in assessing the case of the Reverend Stephen Kiesle, who had been sentenced in 1978 to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco Bay area church rectory.
The correspondence reignites the child abuse row and raises further questions about the Vatican’s insistence that the Pope played no role in blocking the removal of paedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office.
A spokesman for the Vatican confirmed the signature on the letter, but added: “The press office doesn’t believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations. It is not strange that there are single documents which have Cardinal Ratzinger’s signature.”
The Diocese of Oakland in California recommended removing Kiesle from the priesthood in 1981, the year Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed to head the Vatican office which shared responsibility for disciplining abusive priests.
The case then languished for four years at the Vatican before Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to Oakland Bishop John Cummins. It was two more years before Kiesle was removed.
In the letter, Cardinal Ratzinger said the arguments for removing Kiesle were of “grave significance”, but added that such actions required very careful review and more time.
He also urged the bishop to provide Kiesle with “as much paternal care as possible”
while awaiting the decision, according to a translation by Professor Thomas Habinek, chairman of the University of Southern California Classics Department.
In his earliest letter to Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Cummins warned that returning Kiesle to ministry would cause more of a scandal than stripping him of his priestly powers.
Kiesle was defrocked in 1987. In 2002, he was arrested and charged with 13 counts of child molestation during the 1970s. All but two were thrown out after the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a California law extending the statute of limitations.
He pleaded no contest in 2004 to molesting a young girl in his home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison.
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