We All Tend to Concentrate on the Wrong Things

In my mind, I had always given Pope-Emeritus Benedict some credit regarding the issue of clerical abuse of children. I had the impression – from somewhere – that the then Cardinal Ratzinger had tried in vain to persuade St John Paul II that the Church really needed to do something about it but that his efforts had foundered on the rock of the pontiff’s disbelief that anything much was wrong. When Ratzinger became Pope himself, he did at least begin the process of facing up to what had been happening. But his latest intervention is jaw-dropping. It’s a blank rewriting of history so barefaced you wonder what can be going on in his mind.

The letter, or essay, was written, says Benedict, as a result of thinking what, as former Pope, he ‘could contribute to a new beginning’, and with the approval of the Vatican was published in Klerusblatt, a newsletter for mainly Bavarian clergy, a little while ago. Translations then appeared on Catholic websites.

Now, Benedict’s mental background is profoundly affected by the 1960s: as a seminary professor he at first welcomed the signs of change in society and religion and then saw them, as he judged, go sour and malign. His entire subsequent career can be seen as a response to that experience of being wrong. So it is not unnatural that when considering the history of clerical sexual abuse of children he assigns a key role to that epoch: ‘Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms. The mental collapse was also linked to a propensity for violence … Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that paedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.’ At the same time, Benedict avers, Catholic teaching suffered its own ‘moral collapse’ that rendered it incapable of responding to these challenges. The Second Vatican Council and the movement around it tried to dispense of natural law as the basis for Catholic morality and instead attempted to rely only on Scripture, an understandable but doomed mission which took decades to be reversed. The attacks on the authority of the Church over moral matters, Benedict goes on, forced it ‘to remain silent precisely where the boundary between truth and lies is at stake’. Finally, he describes how he and Pope John Paul tried to reform a Canon Law whose ambiguities previously allowed liberal bishops in the US to resist attempts to discipline clerical child abusers, recasting the crime as one against the Faith itself as well as about the harm of individuals. He doesn’t allege that those liberal bishops were being unco-operative because they approved of criminal priests, but suggests they were committed to a ‘conciliar’ model of Church authority, and therefore resented intervention by the Vatican.

The story allows the Pope-Emeritus to swipe at his favourite targets, ones shared by many other conservative Catholics. I can’t comment much about the accuracy of his characterisation of the trends of Catholic theology and canon law over fifty years, but a mere glance at the wider history is probably sufficient. And a mere glance is all that’s required to lead to the facile but telling point that clerical and societal abuse of children goes back a long way before 1968. Benedict is not a stupid man, and we must presume not an insincere one, either: therefore that he argues along these lines suggests that, despite what he says, he just hasn’t been paying attention all these years. And while it is true that there were voices raised in support of, for instance, the abolition of the age of sexual consent in the UK, they were only ever marginal voices. The rest of society remained convinced that sexual acts between adults and children were wrong: the general reaction to the UK Paedophile Information Exchange demonstrates that well enough. For Benedict to claim, without any qualification, that paedophilia was generally considered ‘allowed and appropriate’ from the 1960s onwards, is quite breathtaking. He wants us to accept that somehow all the things he complains about affecting the Catholic hierarchy – doctrinal confusion, faulty process, epistemological inexactitude – meant that the Church of Jesus Christ found itself incapable of dealing with a thing that society, wicked, devilish, fallen society, a society Benedict says had turned away from God, still managed to regard as wrong. In the real world, of course, the world outside the ex-Pope's head, the Church knew it was wrong too, it just didn’t do anything about it. Society at large didn’t do anything about it either, probably for the same sorts of reasons - disbelief, not regarding the problem as serious enough, unwillingness to face the consequences of exposure. To these the Church added its own convoluted excuses, none of which had anything to do with the matters Benedict discusses. I suppose a theologian and philosopher is naturally biased towards seeing theology and philosophy as the cause of every issue, rather than political or institutional factors, or even sin.

Half the article is not about the past at all, but a thoughtful attempt to rescue the idea of ‘the Church’ from the damage it has done itself, to restate the possibility of love, truth and holiness notwithstanding what has happened. ‘The devil wants to prove that there are no righteous people, that all righteousness is only displayed on the outside’, says the Pope-Emeritus, and the task of Christian people, and of all human beings, is not to despair because of human sinfulness. ‘I live in a house’, Benedict goes on, ‘in a small community of people who discover such witnesses of the living God again and again in everyday life and who joyfully point this out to me as well. To see and find the living Church is a wonderful task which strengthens us and makes us joyful in our Faith time and again.’ There is a humility in this, recognising that the Church is inextricably connected to institutions and structures, but that they are not its essence: the Church subsists essentially in human experience and interaction. Benedict’s attempt to say, basically, ‘it wasn’t our fault’ shows that he doesn’t understand the past, but we would do better to excise that analysis, and concentrate on his hope for the future.