Do These Recent Vatican Overtures Really Signal A Change?

This actually has more relevance to some comments from a couple of days ago, but sometimes I wonder how many cookie crumbs have to be found before the Vatican and Pope Benedict will admit they have been eating the same cookies as Hoyos, Sodano, and other Vatican Cardinals.

Cardinal hailed bishop for hiding predator priest: report
Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor - Reuters - VATICAN CITY - Thu Apr 15, 2010

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - A Vatican cardinal in charge of clergy around the world congratulated a French bishop in a 2001 letter for not denouncing a sexually abusive priest to the police, according to a French website on Thursday.

The letter posted by Golias, a critical lay Roman Catholic magazine based in Lyon, is the most explicit of a wave of recently published internal church documents in showing past Vatican encouragement to cover up sexual abuse by priests.

In the letter dated Sept 8, 2001, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos backed French Bishop Pierre Pican's decision not to denounce a priest who was later sentenced to 18 years in jail for repeated rape of a boy and sexual assaults on 10 others.

Under fire in recent weeks for its secretive handling of abuse cases, the Vatican has insisted the fact that other published documents did not explicitly instruct bishops to inform police of abuse did not prove it told them to hide it.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi did not dispute the letter's content but said it confirmed "how opportune it was to centralize treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors by clerics under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith." (Lombardi is getting better at offering alternative explanations.)

The then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, instructed Catholic bishops around the world on May 18, 2001 to report all case of clerical sexual abuse of minors to the Congregation, the top Vatican doctrinal office that he headed.

Pican, who received a suspended three-month jail sentence for not denouncing sexual abuse of minors, admitted in court he had kept Rev. Rene Bissey in parish work despite the fact the priest had privately admitted committing pedophile acts.

The case shocked France and prompted its bishops to declare that all abuse cases must be reported to civil authorities. (Catholicism would still be shuffling it's predator priests around if it weren't for the evil press.)

"I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration," Castrillon Hoyos said. "You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest."

BISHOPS NOT REQUIRED TO INFORM POLICE

In it, the cardinal said relations between bishops and priests were not simply professional but had "very special links of spiritual paternity." Bishops therefore had no obligation to testify against "a direct relative," he stated. (Seems the Institution used whatever legal strategy it could, whether it was family law, corporate law, or constitutional law to avoid dealing with victims or predator priests.)

The letter cited Vatican documents and an epistle of Saint Paul to bolster its argument about special bishop-priest links.

"To encourage brothers in the episcopate in this delicate domain, this Congregation will send copies of this letter to all bishops' conferences," Castrillon Hoyos wrote. (I thought we were told the Vatican never sent any letter which specifically encouraged bishops not to report priests to civil authorities.)

A staunch conservative from Colombia, the cardinal headed the Vatican department for priests from 1996 to 2006. From 2000 to 2009, he also ran a commission dealing with traditionalist rebels who broke from Rome in 1988 and were excommunicated.

He conducted the talks that led to the January 2009 decision to readmit the four banned bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X to the Church, which caused an uproar when it emerged that one of them, Richard Williamson, had denied the Holocaust. (It is conceivable that Cardinal Hoyos never met an anti semite 'clerical brother' he didn't like.)

The controversy was highly embarrassing to Pope Benedict, who said he did not know about Williamson's views, even though they could easily be found on the internet.

Two months after the incident, Benedict folded Castrillon Hoyos's commission into the Congregation and the cardinal retired.

On Thursday the pope said the church had to do penance for its sins, in a rare public reference to the pedophilia scandal.

Yes, the Pope did address the abuse scandal yesterday:

Abuse scandal painful, pope says
By Cindy Woodenn - Catholic News Service - 4/15/2010

VATICAN CITY -- Recognizing the sins of priests who have sexually abused children, performing penance and asking for forgiveness, the Catholic Church trusts that God will purify and transform the church, Pope Benedict XVI said. (But again, there is no mention of the bishops who protected and transferred these priests.)

"I must say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word 'penance,' which seemed too harsh to us. Now, under the attacks of the world that speaks to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace," the pope said April 15 in a homily during a Mass with members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. ('we Christians' had very little to do with your cover ups.)

"We see how it is necessary to do penance, that is, to recognize what is mistaken in our life," he said during the morning Mass in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace.

Audio clips and a transcript of part the pope's homily, delivered without a prepared text, were posted on the Vatican Radio Web site.

The pope said Christians know that "to open oneself to forgiveness, to prepare oneself for forgiveness, to allow oneself to be transformed, the pain of penance -- that is to say of purification and of transformation -- this pain is grace, because it is renewal, and it is the work of divine mercy." (Interesting that this is being translated as Benedict using the term 'Christians' and not Catholics. Is this purposeful generalization or just a purposeful mistranslation.)

In his homily, the pope also spoke about the liberating effect of obeying God, even in a world that likes to pretend that freedom means doing whatever the individual wants to do, but still insists on everyone conforming to what the majority believes and does. (Or the institution in some cases.)

Without a reference to God and to God's will for his creation, the final arbiter of right and wrong becomes majority rule or the dictates of the most powerful, he said. (When 'we' all know it is supposed to be the Vatican which is the final arbiter of God's will.)

"The Nazi dictatorship, the Marxist dictatorship" in the 1900s were examples of regimes that could not stand the idea of God's primacy, he said. (You might want to add the Vatican dictatorship to this list. Oh, I forgot, it isn't a dictatorship it's God's will.)

Fortunately, he said, such dictatorships do not exist today, but there are subtle forms of pressure on people to conform to a worldly opinion and not to God's will.

"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.

The reason Christians are called to obey God is because they want to enjoy eternal life, the pope said. Unfortunately today, Christians seem embarrassed to talk about the final judgment and eternal life, so instead they focus on the good works and solidarity faith inspires, he said. (This is the statement that negates this entire spin. Ultimately this talk is not about penance for sins, it is an excuse to yank the hell chain and remind everyone what the Church is really selling. Not good works and solidarity, but get out of hell cards.

The promise of eternal life is also the reason why it is a grace to be able to recognize one's sins, perform penance, ask pardon and know that God will bring forgiveness and healing, Pope Benedict said. (Only through the office of the priesthood.)

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It does appear to me that the strategy being used by the Vatican is to flip bad news into an opportunity to recast Pope Benedict as the hero and at the same time underscore the specialness of the priesthood for our salvation from hell. We will undoubtedly continue to hear a lot more about hell and how the Church can keep us out of it. We will hear very little about the hell that the Church has created for the victims of abuse on Earth--or women or gays.

I am not impressed that the Vatican has cast Cardinal Hoyos adrift. The facts once again show this act was prompted not from newly found transparency but from newly found letters exposed by the press. Hoyos is retired. Nothing was done about Hoyos or his views until he publicly embarrassed Pope Benedict with the SSPX fiasco. So what's the lesson here: Pay backs are a bitch?

The Holy Spirit seems to have the bit in her teeth. On Monday the Vatican published it's sexual abuse policy on it's brand new blog site. Prominently given it's own paragraph is the sentence which mandates reporting to civil authorities. We are told it's really always been that way. Thursday the Holy Spirit counters by producing a letter from a relevant dicastery which completely contradicts that assertion. Apparently meaningful penance can not be accomplished through lies and disingenuous statements.

The exposing of the abuse crisis and the corruption and self service of the Vatican 'reform of the reformers' will continue until Benedict is left defending a circle of one. Himself. And don't kid yourself, it won't be about defending the Papacy or the Church, it will be about defending himself, his theology, and his exalted vision of his own priesthood. That has been his historic pattern and that will not change without a massive personal conversion.

For another example of defending the exalted role of the priest the new Vatican blog has an article about Benedict's ad limina meeting with Brazilian Archbishops whose dioceses include the Amazon. The bishops concern is the social and ecological disaster the Amazon is facing and it's global consequences. Benedict spoke to them about his central vision of the priest led Eucharistic celebration and the need to focus on it's sacrificial nature and not it's communal aspects. Not one word about the Amazon or the social upheaval it's economic exploitation is causing to the bishops' indigenous people. Maybe because a large part of that exploitation is in human sexual trafficking.