Put out an APB for Cardinal Bernard Law
Hitchens gently suggests that the pope should be questioned like anyone else.
His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.
As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same.
The law is not at all powerless to intervene. This is very good to know.
Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on “crimes against humanity”; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.
Now that is very interesting – because the Vatican wants to be considered a state, with Ratzinger as its (flagrantly unelected and unaccountable) head. Well if it is a state, then it is a state that has endorsed (by protecting) child rape, and apparently that makes it subject to the ICC. That is fascinating.
OB: Well said: “Well if it is a state, then it is a state that has endorsed (by protecting) child rape, and apparently that makes it subject to the ICC. That is fascinating.”
The Vaticano’s Il Poppa can join the list which includes those determined cartoon characters Tom (Tom & Jerry) and the Coyote (The Coyote and the Roadrunner): blown up by his own bomb, flattened by his own falling grand piano and thrown sky high by his own bent tree.
Oh dear.
A minor point – the Pope is an elected official.
I am all for arresting him for crimes against humanity and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
No he’s not. I know some cardinals vote for him, but that’s not what “elected official” means in common parlance. He’s not elected by everyone he bosses around or by the adult citizens of his “state.”
I am with you all the way on these topics, Ophelia, but
The lay members of the church are all voluntary and so are the clergy actually. The electors are appointed by previous popes and they are the ones who vote in a (mostly political) process, akin the the smoked filled back rooms of former years of US political parties. He certainly isn’t elected by the people, but neither is any US president when less than half of the eligible population participate.
/end of picayune pedantic comments from me on this topic
Come on, Bob – the eligible population of the US isn’t prevented from participating. (Well – apart from various attempts at poll tax-like barriers recently.) The eligible population is the adult citizen population apart from convicted felons. The vast bulk of the membership of the Catholic church is not eligible to vote for the pope. That is what I meant by unelected and unaccountable. Your comments aren’t so much picayune and pedantic as beside the point. I know the pope is elected by part of his hierarchy, but that’s not what I was addressing. If the US president were elected by 20 Senators, that president would be unelected and unaccountable.