The Economist
Erasmus
AS I said in my initial response, this week’s UN report on child abuse in the Catholic church seemed both too broad and too narrow to address this enormously grave subject. But the report does at least throw into sharper relief a problem of our times: the difficulty that arises whenever a religious institution practises a body of law which co-exists with, and sometimes competes with, secular law.
The legal system used by the Catholic church is known as canon law. Many of its provisions are of little interest, arguably, to people outside the church; they concern, for example, the relations between different levels of church authority, and the prerequisites for a marriage which the church can recognise. But canon law also provides for the investigation of serious misdeeds, including sexual ones, by clergy. It has no power to send anybody to prison but it can be used to defrock a priest or excommunicate a lay-person. So as well as exercising full state power in one small place—the Vatican City—the pope and his team do have a say, putting it mildly, in what happens in many other places.
Now there have been several times in the last decade or so, as abuse scandals were erupting in one country after another, when the Holy See insisted that it could only take full responsibility for what happened in the small patch of Rome that it fully controlled. Accurately enough, the UN retorts that Catholic leadership must also be held to account for things that happen under its influence, and under its rules, across the world. After all, the Holy See is a player in diplomatic affairs (with permanent observer status in the General Assembly and full participation in many UN conventions) by virtue of its global role, not just its administration of a small piece of real estate.
These days, in every country where the influence of the Catholic faith is strong, the church faces a dilemma which the child-abuse revelations have made razor-sharp. Does it cling as long as possible to the privileges and immunities it has traditionally enjoyed under canon law, or does it renounce those privileges and turn all investigations over to the state authorities? If it insists on investigating child-abuse cases internally, then its responsibility for whatever horrors (including cronyism and cover-ups) are ultimately uncovered will be all the greater. But if it accepts the principle that secular state institutions must have absolute primacy in at every stage then it loses all control over the fate of people under its authority.
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