The crimes within the Catholic Church demand justice.
One by one, as I predicted, the pathetic excuses of Joseph Ratzinger's apologists evaporate before our eyes. It was said until recently that when the Rev. Peter Hullermann
was found to be a vicious pederast in 1980, the man who is now pope had
no personal involvement in his subsequent transfer to his own diocese
or in his later unimpeded career as a rapist and a molester. But now we
find that the psychiatrist to whom the church turned for "therapy" was
adamant that Hullermann never be allowed to go near children ever again.
We also find that Ratzinger was one of those to whom the memo about
Hullermann's transfer was actually addressed. All attempts to place the
blame on a loyal subordinate, Ratzinger's vicar general, the Rev.
Gerhard Gruber, have predictably failed. According to a recent report,
"the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a
routine matter, experts said." Either that—damning enough in itself—or
it perhaps would have been a routine matter, which is even
worse. Certainly the pattern—of finding another parish with fresh
children for the priest to assault—is the one that has become horribly
"routine" ever since and became standard practice when Ratzinger became a
cardinal and was placed in charge of the church's global response to
clerical pederasty.
So now a new defense has had to be hastily improvised. It is argued
that, during his time as archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany,
Ratzinger was more preoccupied with doctrinal questions than with mere disciplinary ones.
Of course, of course: The future pope had his eyes fixed on ethereal
and divine matters and could not be expected to concern himself with
parish-level atrocities. This cobbled-up apologia actually repays a
littlebit of study. What exactly were these
doctrinal issues? Well, apart from punishing a priest who celebrated a
Mass at an anti-war demonstration—which incidentally does seem to argue
for a "hands-on" approach to individual clergymen—Ratzinger's chief
concern appears to have been that of first communion and first
confession. Over the previous decade, it had become customary in Bavaria
to subject small children to their first communion at a tender age but
to wait a year until they made their first confession. It was a matter
of whether they were old enough to understand. Enough of this
liberalism, said Ratzinger, the first confession should come in the same
year as the first communion. One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, reports that he wrote to Ratzinger expressing misgivings about this and received "an extremely biting letter" in response.
So it seems that 1) Ratzinger was quite ready to take on individual
priests who gave him any trouble, and 2) he was very firm on one crucial
point of doctrine: Get them young. Tell them in their infancy that it is they who are the sinners. Instill in them
the necessary sense of guilt. This is not at all without relevance to
the disgusting scandal into which the pope has now irretrievably plunged
the church he leads. Almost every episode in this horror show has
involved small children being seduced and molested in the confessional itself.
To take the most heart-rending cases to have emerged recently, namely
the torment of deaf children in the church-run schools in Wisconsin and
Verona, Italy, it is impossible to miss the calculated manner in which
the predators used the authority of the confessional in order to get
their way. And again the identical pattern repeats itself: Compassion is
to be shown only to the criminals. Ratzinger's own fellow clergy in Wisconsin wrote to him urgently—by
this time he was a cardinal in Rome, supervising the global Catholic
cover-up of rape and torture—beseeching him to remove the Rev. Lawrence
C. Murphy, who had comprehensively wrecked the lives of as many as 200 children who could not communicate their misery except in sign language. And no response was forthcoming until Father Murphy himself appealed to Ratzinger for mercy—and was granted it.
For Ratzinger, the sole test of a good priest is this: Is he obedient
and discreet and loyal to the traditionalist wing of the church? We
have seen this in his other actions as pope, notably in the lifting of the excommunication of four bishops who were members of the so-called Society of St. Pius X, that group of extreme-right-wing schismatics founded by Father Marcel Lefebvre and including the Holocaust-denying Richard Williamson. We saw it when he was a cardinal, defending the cultish and creepy Legion of Christ, whose fanatical leader
managed to father some children as well as to shield the molestation of
many more. And we see it today, when countless rapists and pederasts
are being unmasked. One of those accused in the Verona deaf-school case
is the late archbishop of the city, Giuseppe Carraro. Next up, if our courts can find time, will be the Rev. Donald McGuire,
a serial offender against boys who was also the confessor and
"spiritual director" for Mother Teresa. (He, too, found the confessional
to be a fine and private place and made extensive use of it.)
This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter
of delinquency here and there.
The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.
The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.
This hasn't been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on.
This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the
titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the
children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This
is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not
sickly private ceremonies of "repentance," or faux compensation by means
of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular
authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and
prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men
of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It's enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.
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