The Vatican: Was the pope’s apology enough?

Irish victims of predatory priests have finally gotten their apology, said the Irish Independent. In a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics last week, Pope Benedict XVI expressed the church’s “shame and remorse” for the “sinful and criminal” sexual abuse of thousands of Irish children at the hands of the priests they trusted over the past six decades. He also denounced “the grave errors of judgment” that led Irish bishops to cover up the abuses by transferring pedophile priests to other parishes, where they found new victims. But the pope’s apology is seriously lacking. It doesn’t say what should be done with the church leaders—notably Cardinal Sean Brady, primate of Ireland—who specifically ordered young rape victims to remain silent about their ordeals. Worse, “it throws no light on an overwhelmingly important issue, the systematic concealment of serious crimes from the police.”

The pope is shamelessly trying to pass the buck, said The Irish Times. He argues that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s created a culture of “secularization” that encouraged laxness. In truth, the worst abuses in the Irish church occurred before Vatican II, and the abusive priests were not “the liberals against whom the pope rails regularly.” The pope is treating the problem as one of individual sins by errant priests and individual mistakes by the misguided bishops who covered for them. But it’s clear that the failure was “systemic, rooted in the nature of the church, its structures and internal culture, in Ireland and globally.” Simply put, church policy held that protecting priests was more important than protecting children.

“The entire letter comes off as if the church as an institution has nothing to do with the affair,” said Stephan Hebel

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in Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau. There is absolutely no inquiry, for instance, into how the celibacy requirement for priests may have contributed to the problem, by attracting to the priesthood men who have sexual propensities they wish to suppress. Most glaring, though, is the pope’s failure to acknowledge any personal responsibility for this gut-wrenching scandal. “For all the various formulations of regret throughout the letter, one decisive sentence is absent: I beg your forgiveness.”

That is a grave omission indeed, said Catholic theologian Hans Küng in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, because Pope Benedict has “more direct experience with abuse cases than any other single person in the church.” The two cases of abusive priests transferred under him when he was a German archbishop are just the beginning. As a top Vatican official for decades, he handled countless abuse cases involving priests from all over the world, and he’s the one who ordered the strict secrecy. “Truth requires that the man who for decades has had primary responsibility for the global coverup, Joseph Ratzinger, speak his own mea culpa.”

He may yet do so, said Gernot Facius in Germany’s Die Welt. The revelations about abuses and coverups in Germany only emerged recently. After German bishops report the findings of their own investigations, the pope could issue another pastoral letter, this time to Germany. Until then, he has ordered German bishops to comply with all police investigations into alleged abuses. “For the victims, at least, that’s a start.”