UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
May 7, 2018
by Michael Sean Winters
Cardinal George Pell is going on trial in Australia to face charges he sexually abused minors. As victims’ advocate Anne Barrett Doyle told my colleague Josh McElwee, this trial is a “turning point” in the long saga of compelling accountability by church leaders. It is even more of a turning point than Doyle may realize. Because the big story here is the dog that did not bark, the fact that the Vatican has made no protest at the prospect of a prince of the church standing trial before a civil magistrate.
I cannot think of a single preoccupation of the Catholic Church that has more frequently defined the stances she takes vis-à-vis the ambient culture than the concern for the church’s independence and freedom. From the Middle Ages onward, popes undertook a delicate balancing act with other powers seeking control of the Italian peninsula. In individual countries, the church often fought for her rights against monarchs who wanted to control the church’s personnel or money or both.
One of the most famous such cases was that of St. Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, England. He was killed precisely because he refused to concede that King Henry II had the right to try a cleric for any reason, not only for violations of ecclesiastical law. The church alone claimed the right to judge ecclesiastical persons.
In the 18th century, the Catholic faith was in a bad way. Pope Clement XIV bowed to pressure from the Bourbon monarchs and suppressed the Society of Jesus. Pope Pius VI was coerced into traveling to Vienna to meet with the emperor and seek a rapprochement: The emperor’s play backfired as the simple peasants lined the route to seek the blessing of their spiritual father. Pius later fell afoul of Napoleon’s endless ambitions and died in custody. His successor also spent many years as Napoleon’s prisoner and, after Waterloo, dispatched his crafty secretary of state, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, to the Congress of Vienna to earn back the Papal States, all in the interest of preserving papal independence.
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