Vatican priorities chapter 2
Right, the Vatican and the pope and secrecy and what oh what is the catholic church supposed to do about all these priests having sex with children. Wikipedia provides a parallel translation of Crimen sollicitationis, with a little commentary. Clearly the subject is using the ‘sacrament of Penance to make sexual advances to penitents’; that’s the crime, that’s the accusation at issue, that’s the problem. It’s a church thing. And one bit of the commentary reveals the…weirdness.
Except in connection with the sacrament of Penance, canon law imposed no legal obligation – though a moral one might exist – to denounce clerics guilty of engaging in or attempting a homosexual act; but the procedure described in Crimen sollicitationis was to be followed also in dealing with such accusations (71-72). And any gravely sinful external obscene act with prepubescent children of either sex or with animals engaged in or attempted by a cleric was to be treated, for its penal effects, as equivalent to an actual or attempted homosexual act (73).
If you read that carefully it bcomes clear that the issue is the priest, and the priest’s sin, and obscenity. It’s about the priest being dirty. It’s not about the priest harming anyone else. It’s dirty nasty sinny – it’s equivalent to an actual or attempted homosexual act. Eric pointed this out in comments, and there it is, spelled out. It’s not about harm, it’s about smut. It’s not about others, it’s about the self. It’s not altruistic or compassionate or even basically minimally decent, it’s self-regarding and self-protective and self-obsessed (the ‘self’ here being the church and the priesthood in general).
So no, I have no immediate plans to withdraw anything I’ve said about the pope. On the contrary, I’m learning that I haven’t yet understood how twisted and impervious they really are.
Ain’t that the truth. I tend to get irritated when people say “amen”, and here I find myself wanting to say it myself.
“On the contrary, I’m learning that I haven’t yet understood how twisted and impervious they really are.” And have been for CENTURIES. Go get ’em!
Jesus fucking Christ. Just when you think you’ve got it sussed, and your brain is breaking with the stress of it, they turn out to be even further beyond the pale.
The overall picture I’m getting from this is a complete lack of any connection between morality and empathy or compassion. Morality is instead about following rules and deference to authority.
I still can’t quite figure out just how far the rules on secrecy are supposed to extend. That is most likely intentional, sort of like a mafia boss making heavily veiled threats in case any G-men are listening. Those in the know will understand exactly what is being said, while those who attempt legal action will find the whole business is just a bit too slippery to support a charge of obstruction of justice.
The Wikipedia account gives the following interpretation of the secrecy involved in Crimen:
This may be so, but the suggestion of secrecy extending to a time 10 years from the date of a minor’s 18th birthday suggests otherwise. The whole rigamarole is so weighed down by the ponderous weight of ecceliastical double-talk, reserving any exceptions to the Supreme Pontiff himself, that it is hard to think that a young person would feel at liberty to reveal publicly anything that was locked and double locked with such a pall of secrecy.
And it is not at all clear that church authorities have given in to the temptation to reveal such things to the authorities, and the majesty of the church is so great to the young mind, that it is doubtful if they would be able to do so without unusual courage. And being so damaged will make it very unllikely that they will have this courage. The fact that most revelations come when lives are all ready well into their adult course is prima facie evidence that this is true, and the aura of secrecy and the majesty of the institution is sufficient, in most cases, I suspect, to maintain secrecy until well after most statutes of limitations have been exceeded.
What Crimen spells out in some detail is the lack of care and compassion of the church for those who are victimised by church officers. It is much more concerned with appearances than with reality, with protecting the church from scandal than with compassion for those whose trust has been violated and whose lives have been warped by men (and women too) who are supposed to be holy. Until people get it through their heads that the church is as human, as fallible and as self-seeking as any other human institution, this kind of thing will repeat itself time and again, until the church is a quaint memory. May that day come soon.
It simply boggles my mind that we actually have to have this debate in the 21st century. Imagine if such a document were leaked from the Microsoft Corporation, and it turned out that a bunch of their employees were molesting children, and the company knew about it, and was trying to hush it up.
We’d be giving them the Enron treatment. We’d have them in court–both civil and criminal–taking them apart piece by piece. The fact that whether or not we should do exactly the same thing for the Catholic church is even an issue just goes to show how much undue power and respect they have.
Yes, judging them by their actions is very right and proper, and it’s also interesting and revealing to discover what the theory is. The theory deserves horror and contempt along with the actions.
Another aspect that occurs to me is that even in 1962, ‘homosexuality’ as such wasn’t routinely treated as a civil crime in the way that child rape and molestation were. Whatever was on the statute books, it wasn’t commonplace to hunt down and prosecute purely private gay sex (as opposed to busting gay bars or patrolling rest rooms and the like). I don’t know the stats, and I’m not claiming it never happened, but it wasn’t just normal. Consensual gay sex wasn’t seen as the same kind of thing as preying on children.
So by making ‘homosexuality’ the paradigm, the Vatican must have conveyed the idea that preying on children was the same kind of thing and thus not really an urgent criminal matter in the way that assault or murder were even (one hopes…) in the minds of Catholic priests.
This of course along with the fact that clearly to them ‘homosexuality’ is a very deadly sin indeed. It’s just that it’s not much of a crime.
Oy.
The wording almost makes it seem as though engaging in “homosexual acts” is somehow worse than sexually abusing children (but that they’ll nonetheless be treated equivalently by the church). There’s compassion for you.
The Pope is coming to England soon, to tell us all how to be moral…
How far can good, honest people legally go to show their contempt for this man and everything he stands for? I mean, dressing up as giant condoms and running alongside the Papal Panzer just doesn’t seem serious enough, now.
Crimen is just a smoke screen. It was designed to deflect attention from the actions of the rcc. It was deliberately written in the densest, most obfusticated language possible (not to mention a dead one at that) with the intention of wasting time and energy trying to make sense of it. It was meant to be released to the public despite rcc claims that it is an internal, private document.
Imagine if a multi-national corporation that ran day care centers put out a similar internal memo in response to investigations into child abuse by employees. The CEO of this organization would be extradited to so many jurisdictions that they would have to take numbers to keep track (thanks to Bill Maher for this analogy).
It is important not to play the game by the rules that the rcc sets but to treat them like any other multi-national criminal organization.
The only thing that Crimen shows is that the rcc was aware of priestly pedophilia and tried to cover it up.
Of course, Eric. I meant to point out the link to you, but didn’t get around to it. Your letters to the ABC are very important documents.
Steve, I think Crimen shows a good deal more than that – for instance that the church cares a lot about priests and not at all about everyone else.
I suspect that they (the hierarchy) really do think that priests (which of course includes them) are a special class, who have a special relationship with ‘God,’ and that the state of their ‘souls’ is vastly more important than the mere worldly well-being of the rest of the population.
In fact saying I suspect that is rather conservative – Crimen makes it unpleasantly (but usefully) obvious.
In other words – it’s all about Them.
Re: ‘special class”
http://www.catholictradition.org/Priests/priesthhod1-12.htm
Opening lines in last link.
“JESUS CHRIST has instituted two orders in His Church: one, of the simple faithful; the other, of ecclesiastics: but with this difference, that the former are disciples and sheep, the latter are masters and shepherds, “
‘Simple faithful” indeed — to be used and abused by some of its superior princes
As no-one else has mentioned this part of the same page, I’ll bite. Under Purpose of the Secrecy, it says:
“These matters are confidential only to the procedures within the Church, but do not preclude in any way for these matters to be brought to civil authorities for proper legal adjudication. The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People of June, 2002, approved by the Vatican, requires that credible allegations of sexual abuse of children be reported to legal authorities.”
Apart from its late date (2002), that sounds reasonable to me. Am I missing something? It may be that Ratty’s failure to say anything about this in 2001 is due to the following: the approval of that charter would already have been under consideration in 2001, therefore he would not have wanted to do something related to a different block of law which was in the pipeline.
(Of course I agree with earlier posters that he could simply have reminded bishops that they must, or may, involve the secular authorities.)
Stephen, what same page? The Wikipedia page? (I ask because I hadn’t seen that.)
That charter is a creation of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, not the Vatican. I haven’t found it or read it yet, but even if it’s reasonable I’m not sure the Vatican’s mere approval of it lets Ratzinger off the hook.
The Wikipedia entry will of course have been written by Catholics as well as by critics – in short by people with various agendas.
Yes, it’s from the Wikipedia page. Stephen, it’s a quote from a US bishop – so it’s not exactly a disinterested source. He might be telling the truth, but he also might be attempting to cover the church’s ass, as usual. The ass-covering and self-interested self-protection is just what is at issue here, so we need more impartial sources than Catholic bishops. In fact Catholic bishops are the very last people we should take at their word on this subject.