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Copyright � 2001 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Pope is seen as too ill to lead response to sex- abuse scandals
Melinda Henneberger The New York Times
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
ROME ROME:Pope John Paul II's silence over the recent explosion of sex abuse
scandals involving U.S. Catholic priests is seen within the Vatican as evidence that
the pontiff is too ill and disengaged from church business to respond, according to
several Vatican officials.
The ailing pope is now incapable of forcefully taking on such a volatile issue, the
sources said. The pope, who is 81 and suffers from Parkinson's disease, has
canceled a number of recent events while nursing an arthritic knee.
While still mentally alert, he is described as weary, struggling, feeble and - despite
official protestations to the contrary - no longer effectively in charge of running the
church he heads.
Those who are in positions of authority have been reluctant to deliver the details of
the recent scandals to the pope, the sources said. And because the pedophilia issue
is politically dangerous, no one has been willing to step into the vacuum and take
responsibility.
The Vatican officials, who provided these accounts on condition that they remain
unidentified, are loyalists who staunchly defend the pope's positions. They said John
Paul did not take much interest in day-to-day operations at the Vatican even when he
was well, and is in fact only now being fully briefed on the problem.
The Vatican's official position is that the pope has already adequately addressed the
issue in a general, one-paragraph apology to victims of sex abuse by clergy - an
apology included in a recently released document on a bishop's conference that was
held several years ago.
John Paul's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, has characterized the pope as
keenly aware of the sex abuse problem, fully in command of church affairs and
deeply saddened by the revelations.
Some midlevel Vatican officials said instead that the pope's inner circle had hesitated
to act because virtually all the bishops and cardinals accused of involvement in the
scandals, or mishandling them, were appointed under John Paul.
As a result, no one has been in charge of addressing what is widely considered the
most serious crisis the American church has ever faced, with what many rank-and-
file Vatican officials consider disastrous results.
Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian cabinet minister who is an old friend of the pope, denied
Monday that he was too ill to react, and he defended his silence.
"Nobody has any doubts on how the Holy Father feels about these things," he said.
"The U.S. bishops are responsible, and they have to take a firm stand."
Also Monday, a senior Vatican official said the pope would directly address the
scandals for the first time later this week, in an annual pre-Easter letter issued
under
his name to priests around the world.
"He can't not mention it" at this point, the senior official said. Yet in the same
breath,
the official lamented that press coverage had given an inflated impression of the
scope of the problem.
What most news stories "have not said," the official said, "is how many of those
accused have actually been found guilty. We are still a long way from fully
investigating this."
This kind of talk angers not only church critics, however, but also some inside the
Vatican. These officials say the real problem is that decision-makers at the Holy See
are still a long way from fully comprehending the scope of the crisis.
These officials are not unhappy with the pope himself and defended him by saying
that he relies more and more on his secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, his
personal Polish secretary, Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Because Ratzinger's office
recently assumed oversight of all reports of sex abuse by priests which until now did
not even have to be reported to Rome, Ratzinger is seen as the most engaged on
the issue.
But because many in the pope's inner circle tend to see the press coverage of these
scandals as essentially anti-Catholic, their natural response to much of the criticism
has been to hunker down.
Some Europeans at the Vatican, who had been writing off the scandals as mostly an
American problem, became fully engaged only relatively recently, some American
priests here allege, when the crisis struck closer to home in the case of a Polish
archbishop accused of sexually abusing young seminarians and priests.
Americans at the Vatican are, without question, taking a leadership role in pushing
for a more forceful response, but say they are up against a number of obstacles,
including the pace of an institution that still thinks in centuries, not news cycles.
Another factor is anger at all levels of the Vatican over the failure of American
church
leaders to prevent such outrages.
It is not the Roman way to publicly berate the church's local leaders, like Cardinal
Bernard Law of Boston, who has been under intense pressure to resign over his
handling of scandals there.
Still, the widespread feeling here seems to be that Law is not doing the church any
favors by hanging on.
While the assumption in the United States is that the American cases were covered
up with the complicity of Rome, officials here insist that the opposite is true. They
argue that the Holy See learned of most of these scandals from news reports.
There is a growing feeling here that the priesthood is in for some major changes,
though there is still no consensus on exactly how to proceed.
The suggestion from American Catholics that the current crisis may reopen the
debate about women's ordination is dismissed outright here, but the idea of a re-
examination of celibate life is not.
Conservatives do feel that homosexuality and the current scandals are linked, not
because gays are any more likely to be pedophiles, but because many of the cases
involve sexual relationships between a priest and a teenage boy.
Recently, the Vatican spokesman, Navarro-Valls, told The New York Times that gays
should not be admitted to the priesthood and that their ordinations might even be
considered invalid.
The church is not considering invalidating any ordinations on those grounds, but the
idea that gays should not be ordained in the first place is hardly new.
Last year, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Vatican's doctrinal
congregation, told the Catholic News Service that while a gay orientation is not in
itself sinful, it "evokes moral concern" as a temptation to actions that are "always in
themselves evil."
"Persons with a homosexual inclination should not be admitted to the seminary,"
Bertone said.
A 1961 Vatican document still in force also says that "those affected by the perverse
inclination to homosexuality or pederasty should be excluded from religious vows
and ordination."
The Vatican is now considering updating the document, officials said, though there is
considerable in- house opposition to the idea.
Last year, the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education finished a study that
looked at gay candidates for the priesthood, but that document has not yet been
made public because there was so much internal dissent over its contents.
Copyright � 2001 The International Herald Tribune
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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