By Paola Totaro
Sydney Morning Herald
April 15, 2010
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-enforcer-with-a-gentle-manner-20100414-scxh.html
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| Paola Totaro meets the Pope on his way to Sydney's World Youth Day celebrations. |
The order came without warning: “Remove your security tags, no notebook, no pen, no tape recorder. . .now, come with me”.
Two minutes later, heart pounding and palms sweating, I walked the length of a near-empty jumbo jet, past the curtains that delineate first class and was ushered to an audience with Pope Benedict XVI.
It was a brief meeting with a white haired, rheumy eyed old man who chatted benignly, held my hand like an ordinary grandfather and issued a quiet blessing as I left. Returning to my seat, I walked past a conclave of cardinals dressed in medieval garb and wondered at this surreal collision of an ancient faith and the 21st century inside a pressurised steel projectile hurtling at 560 miles an hour some 40,000 feet above the earth.
That odd vignette returned to me in technicolour this week as the sex abuse scandal engulfing the Catholic church spread from Europe to the US and now Chile, threatening to stain indelibly the reign of this, the 265th pontiff – and possibly that of his popular predecessor too. My brush with Pope Benedict occurred on board a specially re-configured Qantas 747, en route back to Rome from Sydney two years ago almost to the day. The Pontiff had been in Australia for World Youth Day and I’d been recalled from my London base to Sydney to cover the pilgrimage. I remember clearly that despite the long haul flights, long days and demanding schedule, the Pope was relaxed, content and happy to converse informally – if briefly – with journalists. His visit to the Antipodes had been a PR triumph. Footage of enormous crowds of young people thronging to see him on the shores of Sydney’s photogenic harbour had been beamed all over the world, briefly reinvigorating his fusty, severe image. Not even a long awaited – and meticulously managed - meeting with angry survivors of sexual abuse in Australia could dampen his coterie’s ebullient mood.
The Pope who appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s to deliver his Easter message last week, however, looked a different man: weary, embattled, surrounded by a phalanx of fiercely defensive generals. And this time, the media – from the New York Times to Der Spiegel in Germany - was not friend but foe, accused of exaggeration and dismissed by key Cardinals of being carriers of “petty gossip”.
Indeed the very same men that flanked him on that plane - Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and his steely Jesuit Press Secretary, Federico Lombardi - have spent the past week avoiding, covering up and pointing the finger at anyone and everyone in a desperate attempt to deflect accusations that in the end, the buck stops with the boss.
No matter how you look at this tragic, never ending affair, there is unarguable evidence that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – as the Pope was known then – was directly informed of the rape of scores of German children, by one priest, Peter Hullerman, who worked in a parish under his direct control.
Not only that, but it was the very same Cardinal Ratzinger who chose not to report or defrock the priest, allowing him to undergo therapy – and go on to rape again and again. The Vatican’s initial response has been that the Pope knew nothing of the case: a subordinate, Gunther Gruber, had taken responsibility for all the decisions. But then, a psychiatrist came forward and told the New York Times that he personally had warned the Cardinal’s office that the priest was a danger and had to be kept away from children. This apparently was the “petty gossip”, dismissed so summarily by a senior Cardinal on the Easter weekend.In the US, the case of the 200 deaf boys abused, raped and molested by a Father Lawrence in Wisconsin, is less clear cut for the Pope. It was, after all, successive local archbishops who obfuscated, ignored and delayed a proper response to the crimes of one of their own. Indeed it wasn’t until 1996 that the files finally reached Rome and the attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - and its then head, Cardinal Ratzinger. What happened to these children is a nightmare: they were not even safe in the confessional. Some commentators have argued that here, there is a little more room for Ratzinger to credibly claim that he was merely on the periphery of an issue that had been going on for decades. That perhaps he really was out of the loop.
In my mind, the problem with this defence is that Cardinal Ratzinger was not a hands-off enforcer, relaxed with delegation. When he wanted to impose his will, he did so.
I also remember clearly in late 1999 in Sydney when the Sisters of Charity, the courageous order of nuns that run St Vincent’s Hospital, agreed to become licence holders for a medical experiment designed to save the lives of heroin addicts. The medically supervised injecting room was a first for Australia, a last ditch attempt to provide safe harbour for those who die homeless and alone on the streets, in doorways or in fetid flats with needles in their arms. The Labor government had agreed, Sydney’s Cardinal Clancy was quietly on side, the sisters, who opened the first specialist units for HIV patients in the 1980s, were ready and even the Catholic Weekly described the decision as “a great step forward for human dignity”.
Then, without warning, Cardinal Ratzinger, stepped in from afar: “It has deeply disturbed the faithful that such an initiative is proposed for by members of the religious congregation, to whom they look for example”. With one signature – but without the dignity of providing an explanation – the good sisters were humiliated by the Vatican and forced to pull out.
Compare that example of personal, hands-on, hand-written interference in the public health policy of another nation with the decades of wilful inaction that ended up blighting the lives of hundreds of innocent children.
The gentle old man who held my hand high above the Australian desert is also the religious leader who personally jettisoned support for a facility created solely to save the lives of the most desperate of drug addicts. This very same septuagenarian also stayed silent about men - felons in fact - who wouldn’t last a second at the hands of their peers in a high security prison.
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