The Popes Letter is Not Enough… Where Were The Millstones?

3/20/10-by Paula Brooks
Today Pope Benedict issued his long-awaited pastoral letter to Irish Catholics regarding the child abuse scandal in that country.

“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated,” the pope told Irish victims and their families.

“Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen. Those of you who were abused in residential institutions must have felt that there was no escape for your sufferings,” he continued.

“It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church,” Benedict continued. “In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel.”

However, in his letter today, Pope Benedict XVI essentially went on to blame the faithful of Ireland for allowing the church to fall into secularization, while taking no responsibility for any Vatican role in the scandal or offering up any consequences for the clergy or bishops who have not upheld canon or civil law.

“I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way church authorities in Ireland dealt with them,” is all he said.

However, adding in recent decades the Church in Ireland “has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society,” Benedict told the faithful, “Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected.”

With this, Pope Benedict put the onus of blame upon the faithful and not upon the priests who abused and molested children by noting in his letter that during this time of change and weak faith, apparently priest and Church leaders became confused and did not know it was not OK to sexually assault children.

“Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel,” said Benedict.

Benedict then tried to shift the blame to the church reforms of the 60’s, “The program of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings.”

Benedict said that, notwithstanding the fact many others say the problem of the cover –ups were deepened by confusion over the interpretation of a 2001 directive by Benedict, then a cardinal, calling for a strict requirement for secrecy in handling abuse cases and The Vatican’s apparent complicity in the cover ups or for that matter, in his homeland of Germany, this scandal has raised questions about the pope’s own past role in these cover-ups.

This week the German church suspended a priest who had been permitted by Pope Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, to return to his pastoral vocation and work with children for nearly 30 years after a German court convicted him of molesting children, showing us Benedict’s hands are not clean in any of this.

And for many Catholic Faithful, it was hoped the Vatican would have called more definitely for an end the culture of secrecy and cover-up permeating its cloistered hierarchy, and offer a real accountability for the problem of child sexual abuse. Instead he said those who committed the abuse must “answer for it before Almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals” urging them to pray for forgiveness, “submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God’s mercy.”

However Benedict did not say what nature those tribunals should take, nor more then likely he was not talking about the ones that will cost the church millions in settlement dollars to the victims.

The Roman Catholic child molestation and abuse scandal has done what 400 years of imperialist thuggery, human rights abuses and starvation in Ireland never managed to accomplish- people are leaving the Roman Catholic Church in droves and they are leaving in large part because of the lack of accountability within the Catholic Church leadership.

But it is not just the faithful in Ireland who have been betrayed and the Popes letter was not enough.

It did not address the fact the betrayal the faithful by Church leaders in this systematic institutional cover-up that has long typified this scandal, occurred not only in Ireland, but everyplace the Roman Catholic Church operates globally and it did not shed light on hidden truths the church has tried so hard to keep undisclosed, nor it did not even begin to spell out any discipline for the wrongdoers.

Jesus said, “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”

In the Popes letter, I saw no millstones being recommended for anyone involved in this scandal. Nonetheless, the letter, which Benedict signed on Friday, is to be read out in churches across Ireland on Sunday and no place else where the innocents have been victims of the Church.

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