NEW POPE FACES LONG-STANDING ABUSE PROBLEM
May 16, 2005

            No one is better informed than current Pope Benedict XVI regarding sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, or better qualified to punish the perpetrators and prevent  any future recurrence of these crimes.  The question is, will Joseph Ratzinger have the courage and moral decisiveness to do so?  This is a new Pope who is facing an abuse problem that is nothing new.

            As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then-Cardinal Ratzinger initiated in 2001 a review and investigation of all the sexual abuse cases involving the Catholic Church.  As reported by The New York Times, every Friday morning, Ratzinger could be found reviewing sex abuse cases directed to him by bishops from all over the world.  It was, as he called it, his “Friday penance.”

            However, that “penance” was done in secret.  The cases were reviewed in strict confidence and very few made it to the public arena.  That is, not until 2002, with the eruption of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in the United States.

            To contend with the crisis, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops formed an investigative panel which made a discovery of monstrous proportions:  Since 1950 and up to that time, no less than 4,392 priests had raped and sexually abused 10,667 children and adolescents.

            Once the scandal had broken in the news media worldwide, Cardinal Ratzinger opted for attacking the U.S. press, rather than championing the victims.

             “In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less that 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type,” Ratzinger said in a 2002 visit to Spain. “Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated - that there is a desire to discredit the Church.”

            Ratzinger, however, was mistaken.  Release of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ report brought out that fully four percent of all priests—and not the 1 percent referred to by Ratzinger—had been involved in one type or another of sex abuse against minors.  The current Pope neither apologized for, nor did he publicly retract his accusations against the U.S. press.   

            Moreover, rather than going public with the names of all the criminal priests and handing them over to the law, Ratzinger made the decision to keep them under wraps.  Large numbers of these priests, far from ending up in jail, were instead transferred to other parishes, with no warning to those communities of their menace.  It would seem that for the Vatican, protecting its priests was paramount to protecting the victims of their abuse.

            The danger posed by such a systematic lack of disclosure is that it may have extended as well to sex abuse cases in other parts of the world.   Two incidences in Latin America merit our attention.

   Enrique Delgado, a Catholic priest acclaimed for sermons televised throughout Costa Rica, was sentenced to 21 years in jail for sexually abusing children in the Parish of Alajuela, not far from the Costa Rican capital of San José.  Why did the Church not report this case on its own, waiting instead for the Costa Rican justice system to bring the charges? 

            The second case involves Legion of Christ founder Marcial Maciel.  At the beginning of December 2004 and predating the death of Pope John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger made the decision to open an investigation into accusations that Father Maciel had sexually abused at least eight students over a period of two decades, dating back to 1943. Because the matter is being handled in the utmost secrecy, there is no way of reckoning what the outcome will be of this investigation of the 85-year-old priest, now living in Rome. However, Alejandro Espinosa’s The Legionnaire, published in Spanish in 2003 by Grijalbo, provides a telling account of some of the abuse that is under investigation.

            The cases of Father Delgado and Father Maciel beg the question as to whether or not sexual abuse by priests in Latin America is more prevalent than what the Catholic Church has already acknowledged to the public.  If 4 percent of all priests in the U.S. have been involved in sexual abuse cases over the last half-century, are the numbers similar in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa?   There is no way for us to tell.  But the new Pope does know, and were he willing to do so, Pope Benedict XVI would be the one to say.

            To Joseph Ratzinger accrues the solemn burden of ridding the Catholic Church of criminals lurking under cover of the cassock.  He is privy to the names of all those priests who have violated and sexually abused children in whatever part of the world they may be.  If he is to set out on his papacy on the right foot and restore to the Church the credibility it lost as a result of this scandal, Benedict XVI can make the good example of puting all these rapists behind bars.  But will he?

Postscript:  The Vatican has set up an e-mail address for well-wishers to send messages to the new Pope.  It also serves as an excellent means for the Spanish-speaking world to apprise Pope Benedict XVI as to what we think of sexual abuse by priests in Latin America.  The address is benedictoxvi@vatican.va