Monthly Archives: March 2010

Pope Ratzinger is finished.

In a universe filled with one hundred billion galaxies, in a galaxy which contains one hundred billion stars, a people that judges itself unique among the heavens exhibits not so much arrogance as it does willful ignorance. But down here on Earth, close-up as it were, it’s easy to mistake the two. Easier still when you consider a figure like Ratzinger, figurehead of a religion which has proclaimed him infallible. Despite ponderous evidence to the contrary, religions of all stripes accept as a given that their beliefs comprise a unique universal truth. The Catholic Church, whose cosmology depends upon the proposition that its Pope is incapable of error when addressing issues of faith or morality, provides what may be the best rebuke to that claim.

In 1979, a preist under Ratzinger’s supervision in Munich admitted raping several young boys. Rather than report him to the police, Ratzinger sent him for psychiatric evaluation. Unsurprisingly, the psychiatrist warned that he should not be allowed to work with children. Immediately thereafter, Ratzinger’s deputy returned the man to service in the church, with Ratzinger’s explicit knowledge. The man then went on to continue raping young boys for years to come. He was allowed to continue working in the church until last week – 33 years after the initial offense.

This week we’ve learned that in 1996, then-Cardinal Ratzinger was informed by letter that a priest in Milwaukee had raped as many as 200 boys in his care. His response? Silence. The man was allowed to continue as a priest, working with – and raping – children until his death in 1998. The church – under Pope Ratzinger, fought to keep the letter secret. It was only made public as a result of a lawsuit filed by five of the boys – now adults – who were raped by the priest.

To view these cases as exceptions to the rule – a few bad apples as it were – is to ignore the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence. During the past decade alone, over 3,000 priests have been submitted to the Vatican for accusations of rape – presumably a fraction of a larger number who actually committed the offense. Of these, only about 300 lost their positions as priests. Last Fall, in an almost Freudian slip of statistical ignorance, the Vatican’s UN representative, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, tried to minimize the incidence of child rape within the Catholic clergy by claiming that “‘available research’ showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.” Had he bothered to do the math, he would have realized that he was implicating between 6,000 and 20,000 priests as child rapists.

The church’s self-imposed tradition of defending its reputation before caring for its parishioners – arguably the original sin that allowed the disease of pedophilia to metastasize within its ranks over the years – made their response to this week’s revelations inevitable. Lashing out in the daily Osservatore Romano, the Vatican condemned anyone who might mistake their endemic secrecy for something other than “transparency”:

Transparency, firmness and severity in shedding light on the many cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and clergy: these are the criteria that Benedict XVI has indicated with constancy and serenity to the whole Church. A way of operating — coherent with his personal history and more than two-decade activities as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — that is evidently feared by those who don’t want the truth affirmed and those who would prefer to be able to instrumentalize, without any foundation in fact, horrible episodes and sorrowful events uncovered in some cases from decades ago.

How could Ratzinger be at fault? This all happened so long ago. 1996 is fourteen long years behind us.

But how could the Catholic church claim otherwise? They’ve declared as a first principle that Ratzinger is infallible. If that is true, how could his actions have been wrong?

You could be forgiven for mistaking willful ignorance for arrogance.