Politics Daily (politicsdaily.co)
16 April 2010
David Gibson
VATICAN CITY — In a yet another revelation in the clergy sex abuse scandal, a French Catholic news service has published a 2001 letter from a top Vatican official praising a French bishop who covered up for a priest he knew had molested numerous boys.
In October 2000, Father René Bissey was sentenced to 18 years in jail for sexually abusing 11 boys between 1989 and 1996. Bissey’s bishop, Pierre Pican of the Diocese of Bayeux-Lisieux, had known of the abuse but refused to report Bissey to French authorities and instead sent him for psychiatric treatment.
Pican’s actions resulted in his own conviction in 2001 for “failure to report a sex crime against a minor younger than 15 years old.” The bishop was sentenced to three months in prison.
That sentence led Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, then head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy — the department overseeing Catholic clergy policies around the world — to write Bishop Pican a letter effusively praising his actions in shielding the abusive priest. At the time, Castrillon Hoyos was a colleague of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI.
“I congratulate you on not having reported a priest to the civil authorities,” Castrillon Hoyos wrote to Pican on Sept. 8, 2001. “You have done well, and I rejoice at having an associate in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the others bishops of the world, will have chosen prison rather than speaking out against his priest-son.”
Castrillon Hoyos added that he would send a copy of the letter to all the bishops’ conferences “to encourage the brothers in the episcopate in this very delicate area.”
The French online magazine Golias published the letter on March 30, but it began making waves on Thursday, prompting a late evening statement from the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi. Lombardi said the letter from Castrillon Hoyos underscored how important it was that earlier in 2001 all clergy abuse cases were ordered to come under the jurisdiction of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, which was then headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, who was elected pope five years ago this month.
Lombardi took the unusual step of effectively throwing Castrillon Hoyos — a once-influential prelate who retired from his last senior Vatican position in 2009 — under the bus to highlight Benedict’s actions.
The Castrillon Hoyos letter praising Bishop Pican “is another confirmation of how timely was the unification of the treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors on the part of members of the clergy under the competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” said the Vatican statement in a translation by National Catholic Reporter. That move assured “a rigorous and coherent management” of abuse cases, the statement said.
As a wave of revelations of past abuses swept Europe in recent weeks, Ratzinger’s track record on cracking down on abusers has come in for sharp scrutiny, with reports suggesting that he was slow to move against abusers when cases came before him from 1980 up through the early 2000s.
Many of the pope’s defenders in the hierarchy, especially here in the Roman Curia, have denounced such claims, and the Vatican has pointed to the late Pope John Paul II’s decision to consolidate all abuse cases under Ratzinger as evidence of Ratzinger’s effectiveness on the issue. They say that since his election as pope on April 19, 2005, Benedict has continued to be vigilant.
The Vatican has been scrambling to get ahead of a cycle of bad press that has raised serious questions about how it has dealt with abuse cases around the world, and what it plans to do in the future.
Earlier this week, the Vatican published on its Web site a list of papal statements and documents aimed at showing that the church has been active in ferreting out abusers. The documents included a guide to understanding Vatican procedures on dealing with abusive priests that for the first time explicitly stated that abusers who have committed crimes should be reported to the civil authorities.
The phrase on reporting was a last-minute addition to the list, and it was unclear how much weight the Vatican intended to give to the guidelines, though officials insist the church has always encouraged bishops to follow relevant civil and criminal laws on reporting.
But the Castrillon Hoyos letter on the French case shows that not everyone got the memo.
Whether Ratzinger himself was on board with mandatory reporting to authorities is also unclear.
In February 2002, Ratzinger’s top lieutenant at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, said new internal church norms he and Ratzinger just completed to help bishops deal with abusers would not compel them to hand over molesters.
“It seems to me that there is no basis for demanding that a bishop, for example, be obliged to turn to civil magistrates and denounce a priest that has confided in him to have committed the crime of pedophilia,” Bertone told the Italian Catholic monthly, 30 Giorni.
After Ratzinger was elected pope, he made Bertone a cardinal and named him his secretary of state, basically the second-in-command at the Vatican. But Bertone has continued to create more controversy, such as this week when he argued that homosexuality is a cause of pedophilia.
In a related development Thursday, Benedict himself seemed to signal a softer line as he delivered a homily at a Mass in the Vatican in which he said the church must do penance because it leads to purification:
“I must say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word ‘penance,’ which seemed too harsh to us,” the pope said. “Now, under the attacks of the world that speak to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace.
“We see how it is necessary to do penance, that is, to recognize what is mistaken in our life.”
Benedict’s words, delivered without notes in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, were the closest he has come to addressing the scandal. And it was the most conciliatory note struck by a senior Vatican official of late.
Yet the pope also had some tough words for the church’s critics, saying that while the Nazi and Marxist dictatorships no longer exist as they did in the last century, there are other pressures on people to conform to a single worldview:
“A conformism under which it becomes obligatory to think as everyone thinks, to act as everyone acts, and the subtle or not so subtle aggression against the church demonstrate that this conformism really can become a real dictatorship,” he said.
………
sarah
4:50PM Apr 16th 2010
If they also think that being gay is being a pedophile, then isn’t the opposite true, being a pedophile means your gay!! Then I guess the whole !@#$ing Catholic Church is GAY! BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL PEDOPHILES!!
AND NO, I’M NOT GAY, just thought that was an unusual comment coming from men you have sex with little boys…CUT OFF THEIR PECKERS..ALL OF THEM!!
dd666
1:04AM Apr 16th 2010
Now THAT is the pot calling the kettle black!
rothomaha
7:31AM Apr 16th 2010
Peggy B
4:40PM Apr 16th 2010
Richard
7:50AM Apr 16th 2010
The only way to handle these people is put them in prison. We in the US have done a much better job of prosecuting these people than other countries. Ultimately it will be the parishioners who finally tire of these sexual predators that will bring about change or leave the corrupt institution. I think a lot of Catholics are living in denial at this time.
rothomaha
7:57AM Apr 16th 2010
SMPTURLISH
8:57AM Apr 16th 2010
HOLDING CLERGY AND CHURCH LEADERS ACCOUNTABLE BEFORE THE LAW
Professor Marci Hamilton and Sister Maureen Paul Turlish on NPR’s Radio Times on WHYY Philadelphia 04/12/2010
Sister Maureen Paul Turlish
Victims’ Advocate
New Castle, Delaware
maureenpaulturlish@yahoo.com
tim08
12:48PM Apr 16th 2010
byjack007
1:04PM Apr 16th 2010
The media keeps smearing the Pope for what other European priests did.
bobby
4:43PM Apr 16th 2010
cashmanat2493
1:36PM Apr 16th 2010
rltballer
3:50PM Apr 16th 2010
asmilepro1
3:56PM Apr 16th 2010
vbookish7
3:56PM Apr 16th 2010
MICHAEL
3:57PM Apr 16th 2010
mepsell
4:00PM Apr 16th 2010
KEITH
4:08PM Apr 16th 2010
FEsrigoHL
4:11PM Apr 16th 2010
David
4:21PM Apr 16th 2010
Brent
4:25PM Apr 16th 2010
Then again what can one say about an institution that expects its members to defy the natural order of life and the continued existence of its species? Look at the prison system – lock a bunch of guys up together, what happens (Bubba)? Look at the military – 6 month tour at sea, what happens (dont ask don’t tell) ? Does anyone else see the pattern?
nomadic1961
4:26PM Apr 16th 2010
Tight Scotswoman
4:27PM Apr 16th 2010
I wonder just how many really ‘felt’ God calling them to the ministry?
From the looks of it, not too many. The creeps and perverts are crawling out of the woodwork, left and right.
Tena
4:34PM Apr 16th 2010
I have not lost my faith, but am slowly losing my faith in the leaders of my church.
Ian
4:45PM Apr 16th 2010
Georgie Boy
4:56PM Apr 16th 2010
Victoria
5:35PM Apr 16th 2010
Laura
9:02PM Apr 16th 2010
Since you misread my comment the rest of your blurb is null and void but I’d just like to point out that there are plenty of white people who are thieves, thugs and gang members and many who are terrorists as well, so why bring race into it?
phimi
4:56PM Apr 16th 2010
If the cleric is “openly” accused by another to the bishop or another cleric, the matter is now public and should be turned over to legal civil authorities.
Multiple accusations or suspicions, especially over time, should terminate the cleric’s activities, even if cleared in an internal investigation.
PERIOD…
Jim
6:55PM Apr 16th 2010
Laura
5:08PM Apr 16th 2010
I feel sick to my stomach reading that letter; sure there are good priests, but how are we supposed to know who they are? Like many people I look at them all with suspicion now. And that’s the Vatican’s fault for not dealing with the abusers when they should have. The good and the bad are tarnished with the same brush….
dmfischetti
5:17PM Apr 16th 2010
tharksketler
5:23PM Apr 16th 2010
lindavegan
5:24PM Apr 16th 2010
jb
5:40PM Apr 16th 2010
BILLY
5:45PM Apr 16th 2010
We live in more superstitious times than Galileo did.