For late Easter reading I recommend Pope emeritus Benedict’s essay on the Church and the Scandal of Sex Abuse, recently published by a small Catholic magazine in Germany. No seriously, it’s great stuff. In very clear language the former 91 year old Cardinal Josef Ratzinger who was – and apparently still is – the greatest authority on Church doctrine during the reigns of four popes, has given his verdict on the great clerical sex abuse scandal that has so damaged the Roman Catholic Church. His uncompromisingly traditional diagnosis appears to put him at odds with his successor Pope Francis who, let’s face it as we saw clearly in Dublin, is struggling to offer something to everybody and is satisfying nobody. Francis’s authority is now being questioned as the criticisms of traditionalist cardinals grow louder and louder while at the same time cardinal after cardinal ends up in disgrace and worse.
We’re seeing the familiar relativist v absolutist struggle being acted out – or danced around – by two popes at once. Basically Francis says unchecked clerical authority was mainly responsible for so much abuse. Benedict insists it was about the abdication of authority beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Benedict’s critics say that as the first pope emeritus he’s abusing his position to undermine his successor. Benedict denies that utterly, claiming the only hope for the church is to restore its authority in the way he explains, and his purpose is only to help his successor. The sexual revolution was to blame and he links abuse to violence and – a real howler – to homosexual practice, The argument is familiar but some of Benedict’s examples are really weird:
The mental collapse ( as he calls the sexual revolution), was also linked to a propensity for violence. That is why sex films were no longer allowed on airplanes because violence would break out among the small community of passengers. And since the clothing of that time equally provoked aggression, school principals also made attempts at introducing school uniforms with a view to facilitating a climate of learning (banning miniskirts?)
In many parts of the Church, conciliar (post Vatican 2) attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behaviour contrary to the faith.
This is a deeply flawed analysis. As critics point out abusers were priests along the ideological spectrum, the abuse predated the 1960s, it is a global and not simply western problem, and homosexuality is emphatically not the issue in paedophilia.
Benedict presents a classic defence of the traditional church authority that has all but vanished and he’s scathing about its replacement.
.. the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus. One speaks of it almost exclusively in political categories, and this applies even to bishops, who formulate their conception of the church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms. The crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope..
Today, the accusation against God is, above all, about characterizing His Church as entirely bad, and thus dissuading us from it. The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God, through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped. No, even today the Church is not just made up of bad fish and weeds. The Church of God also exists today, and today it is the very instrument through which God saves us.
To be fair to Benedict, he defrocked hundreds of priests after the Vatican took over responsibility for dealing with abuse. This was not done – as he says, anticipating the obvious criticism – to hide it more effectively for the sake of the church’s reputation, but to ensure that the laws of the church were fully complied with. In other words, Ratzinger would have hit many more of them harder and earlier. He freely admits that the Church was overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis, but amazingly blames post Vatican 2 attitudes for giving perpetrators too much of the benefit of the doubt. He could have commended the order for church officers to report abuse to the police immediately but he neglected to do so here.
His reading of authority is fascinating. It is founded in “natural law.” This is a concept at the basis of western thought. You have to start somewhere, with a working hypothesis. But to Benedict the Catholic traditionalist, natural law is about natural authority from God vested in the Church. It is expressed in church teaching, the magisterium, and canon law. In a conclusion that will make some Protestant hackles rise (although entirely reasonable in itself ), he insists that a reading of the Bible is not enough; it must be accompanied by interpretation from the magisterium under the authority of the Church.
But there is enormous gap in both Popes’ understanding. Women are still ecclesiastically inferior. Both of them deny that compulsory celibacy limits their ability to understand the nature of human attraction. For his solution extending far beyond the abuse scandal, the intellectual Benedict sees the crisis in authority as a problem of moral theology and goes back to first principles to solve it. His view might have greater impact if it was accompanied by a greater understanding of human nature. Despite the self confidence shown by this remarkable elderly man, he will surely fail to restore clerical authority to its old pre-eminence. For we are all protestants now.
Out of a more spontaneous humanity Francis is trying to make the sceptical church establishment surrounding him to accept his newly acquired intuitions about human nature and turn them into church practice. Right now, confusion reigns.
Whatever their differences, both old men will have long ago suppressed part of their nature and relegated sex to the necessary act of procreation for others, while for themselves, sex is an unacceptable choice between giving in to powerful temptation and betraying their vocation.
If you deny human nature and don’t even attempt to understand it, you compromise your ability to govern it in yourself and so you’re a sucker for falling for the devil’s temptations. This is surely fundamental to the abuse scandal. Perhaps it has also something to do with the nature of religious conviction. Belief in God is a matter of faith and as such it can fall prey to the worst sort of delusion. You may think that it’s God forgiving you as you excuse yourself from a vile crime. The continuing suppression of self and evidence of child abuse show how far the Roman Catholic Church still has to go to reach the state of full awareness.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
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