OPINION: Grave hypocrisy of Pope Benedict's attack on the Irish bishops

I HOPE you don’t mind, but I’m going to rant now. In all the years (more than I care to be reminded of) that I have been covering religion in the day job, it is inevitable as rain in the West that I will be driven beyond rage by the latest revelations of cover-up of clerical child sexual abuse by a senior figure in the Catholic Church. Not that I am ever surprised anymore, but it makes no difference. Once it’s confirmed I explode at every latest expose.

People have asked me down the years how I can keep reporting on this area; how I keep dealing with such a subject as the violation of innocent children by those we were taught to believe were above suspicion or reproach. They wonder where I get the energy. The answer is simple. Anger! It may be one of the deadly sins but there is great, great energy in anger. Rage, rage, rage.

And we recently had the daddy of them all. German investigators found it “overwhelmingly likely” that retired Pope Benedict XVI was aware of at least four abusing and paedophile priests during his time as archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982. And he did nothing.

On top of which his former deputy in the archdiocese Vicar General Gerhard Gruber claimed that, when the case of one abusing priest became public in 2010, he (Vicar General) was “pressured” to take sole responsibility for the church’s failure to act, in order “to protect the pope”.

Benedict was Pope from 2005 until he resigned in 2013.

Lawyers in Germany, commissioned by the Catholic archdiocese of Munich and Freising to examine files from 1945 to 2019, identified 497 cases of clerical sexual abuse and 235 perpetrators – but said the true number is likely to be higher. They noted four cases dating from Pope Benedict/Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s time as archbishop in Munich from 1977-1982 and dismissed the 94-year-old former Pope’s claims not to be aware of the cases.

They considered an explanation from Pope Benedict “to be not credible.” The Church in Munich and Freising ignored victims of clerical sexual abuse and saw those it did notice “as a danger for the institution,” the report found. So, what’s new?

Well lots, actually. This is the Pope who in 2010 (while a former deputy covered up for him in Munich) excoriated Ireland’s Catholic bishops for their handling of clerical child sexual abuse allegations. It followed publication of the Ryan Report in May 2009 – which exposed the abuse of children in orphanages, reformatories, and industrial schools – and the Murphy report in November 2009, which exposed the abuse of children by priests in the Dublin archdiocese.

He told Ireland’s Catholics then “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.” Wouldn’t happen in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising!

What happened the Church in Ireland was due to “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal, resulting in failure to apply existing canonical penalties and to safeguard the dignity of every person.” he said in that 2010 letter. Wouldn’t happen in Germany!

Earlier in his pontificate (2006) he recalled how he had “asked the bishops of Ireland, `to establish the truth of what happened in the past, to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent it from occurring again’,” he wrote.

Addressing the Catholic Bishops of Ireland directly in that 2010 letter, he said: “It cannot be denied that some of you and your predecessors failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse. Serious mistakes were made in responding to allegations.” Surely the Irish Bishops had only done what he did in Munich?

He continued: “it must be admitted that grave errors of judgement were made and failures of leadership occurred. All this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness.” And what now of himself and his record?

But the Irish Bishops had done even worse, he wrote. The handling of clerical child sexual abuse allegations by the Irish Church authorities had “obscured the light of the Gospel” in Ireland “to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing,” he said. Yes, it had consequences that were worse than the Penal Laws.

In light of what was confirmed about himself last week, doesn’t all that sound like the gravest hypocrisy on the part of retired Pope Benedict XVI?

On top of that 2010 letter he sent high powered delegations, led by Cardinals, to investigate each of Ireland’s four Catholic Archdioceses, as well as all the seminaries and the religious congregations in Ireland. Are we now to expect a similar papal letter to be sent to the Catholics of Germany with a similar follow-up, rigorous examination of the Church there?

None of which takes from the veracity of what Benedict wrote in 2010 to the Catholics of Ireland about the Irish Bishops and Church leadership generally on this island when it came to the handling of clerical child sexual abuse allegations. Just that he was not the one to write such a letter. His hands weren’t clean.

On top of which this was the man who in 2001, as Dean of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote two secret letters, in Latin, to every Catholic bishop in the world asking that they send him every credible clerical child sex abuse allegation they had on their files. They did, thousands of cases. So much so he was snowed under, and asked that they deal with such allegations locally.

Later, when he was Pope and the Murphy Commission asked the Vatican for access to those letters it was ignored. That happened in two of the Commission’s investigations, - when it was examining the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations in the Dublin archdiocese (report published in 2009) and later when it was investigating Cloyne diocese (report published in 2011).

All about protecting the institution, not the children. And if you think I’m being over-the-top there here is what the 2009 Murphy report into Dublin concluded about the church authorities there, from 1975 to 2004, “….the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important assets – the priests.”

Worse, it said, “….the welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered (my italics] in the early stages” of the period investigated.

Again and again throughout the Catholic world wherever there have been any independent inquiries into the Church’s handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations the findings have been along the exact, same lines - the institution comes first. Above all. Uber alles!

Because that was Church policy in Rome. At a meeting with the Irish bishops in 1997 Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation for Clergy (until 2006), insisted it was Vatican policy to defend the rights of an accused priest above all and so allegations of clerical child sex abuse should not be reported to gardaí or civil authorities in Ireland.

It remained Vatican policy well into the pontificate of Francis.