Was Pope Benedict XVI proactive in the pedophile priest clergy sex scandal?
Unfortunately, the pedophile priest sex scandal dominated his pontificate, with many news media proclaiming that this was a stain on his pontificate. The real question is, Could Pope Benedict XVI have done more to resolve this issue?
The first question to reflect on is: Why was the problem of pedophile priests allowed to fester so long? Was the hierarchy of the church truly ignorant that these scandals were developing?
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One culprit is, in the Sixties we had a misplaced confidence in psychology and the tendency to use psychology to explain away sinfulness. Too many people thought that pedophile priests could be “cured” simply by enrolling them in counseling and group therapy sessions which time would reveal were nearly always futile. People involved in any kind of addictive behaviors are incredibly good liars, and everyone, which is nearly all of us, who has been involved in an intimate relationship knows that they wish to keep their personal life from prying eyes. Even today, when a priest is accused of being a pedophile, one primary piece of evidence is how many people come forward to accuse him.
The other main culprit was that when totalitarian regimes battled the Catholic Church in World War II and afterwards, they always attacked them in their most vulnerable spots. In David Kertzer’s book, The Pope at War, he describes the discussions that took place between Pope Pius XII and Ribbentrop, the Nazi Minister of Foreign Affairs. Kertzer quotes Ribbentrop, as saying that “Hitler believed settling their differences ‘was quite possible’ but depended on first ensuring ‘that the Catholic clergy in Germany abandon any kind of political activity,’ that is, not offer any criticism, explicit or implicit, of government policies.”
Ribbentrop noted that Hitler “had quashed no fewer than 7,000 indictments of Catholic clergymen, charged with a variety of financial and sexual crimes,” and was continuing the government’s policy of subsidizing the church, including paying the clerical salaries. The pope responded by saying that much “was also being taken away from the church, including its educational institutions and its properties.” [1]
The issue of pedophile priest sex crimes was a charge made both by Hitler, and after the war, by Communist authorities in Poland, home of the future Pope John Paul II, and other communist leaders, and this discredited the accusation for many decades after the war.
Were Hitler’s accusations that many priests were pedophiles true? When David Kertzer wrote the book, Pope and Mussolini, which accessed the Vatican archives of Pope Pius XI, he gave Pope Pius XII the benefit of the doubt.
But in the Pope at War, which was written after the Vatican archives of Pope Pius XII, the wartime pope, were opened to scholars by Pope Francis, Kertzer saw correspondence that changed his mind about the culpability of the wartime pope. He asked the very poignant question, Were many of these allegations of sexual misconduct by clergy true?
Before examining Pope Benedict’s role in this controversy, we first need to establish a timeline:
1927: Birth of Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.
1951: Ordained as a priest, served mostly as a theology professor.
1977: Appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising.
1982: Started serving in the Vatican, one of his posts was Prefect of CDF, which is short for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
2001: As the pedophile priest scandal develops, the CDF assumes primary jurisdiction for these matters. Previously, these matters were handled locally in the individual dioceses.
2013: Pope Benedict XVI resigns the papacy; he died in 2022.
An excellent summary was provided when NPR asked Catholic Jesuit priest Thomas Reese with Religion News Service: How did Pope Benedict XVI handle the sex abuse scandal?
“REESE: Well, nobody in the church handled the sex abuse crisis well. Certainly, when Ratzinger, the future pope, was archbishop of Munich, he did not do it very well. My guess is that he delegated the issue to his subordinates and didn’t really pay much attention to it. But the good thing about Benedict was he grew in his understanding of the sex abuse crisis. And when he was in the Vatican, he was the first official to really take it seriously, much more seriously than Pope John Paul II did. And as head of the CDF, he was the guy who had to read the files. And he read the files, and he said, this guy’s got to go, and threw hundreds of priests out of the priesthood and realized that there was just no place in the Catholic Church for priests who had abused children.”
Dr Wikipedia tells us that “in 2001, Ratzinger convinced John Paul II to put the CDF in charge of all sexual abuse investigations. According to John Allen, writing for the National Catholic Reporter, Ratzinger in the following years “acquired a familiarity with the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic Church can claim.” Disgusted by what he would “later refer to as ‘filth’ in the Church, Ratzinger seems to have undergone something of a ‘conversion experience’ throughout 2003–04. From that point forward, he and his CDF staff seemed driven by a convert’s zeal to clean up the mess.”[2]
George Weigel wrote his biography of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 before the scandal had really exploded, he only mentions it briefly, but the scandal is mentioned more prominently in the recent biography written by Guerriero, which is blessed by a Forward by Pope Francis.
When in 2001 the CDF assumed ultimate responsibility, providing global oversight over the pedophile priest problem, the rules were tightened, in particular the church was quicker to defrock offending priests. Whoever becomes aware of sexual abuse is now compelled to report it, they cannot keep it secret. Any bishop who becomes aware of a credible accusation is now compelled to conduct a preliminary investigation and then he must inform the CDF. The statute of limitations under canon law was extended to ten years after the victim turned eighteen.
The biggest change was that now victims of abuse, encouraged that perhaps their complaints would not be ignored, turn to doctors, lawyers, public prosecutors, and journalists to expose the guilty priests. In the first year alone, three thousand cases were investigated, mostly from America. Initially, dioceses settled out of court, but the number of cases were so overwhelming that many went to trial, and eventually some dioceses were forced to declare bankruptcy. Before this, guilty priests were simply quietly assigned to a distant parish, that became increasingly impossible.[3]
The first phase of the scandal mostly involved the United States, but it was Ireland’s turn in 2006.[4] The full scope of Irish problem was not realized until 2009, nearly fifty pedophile priests had been protected or gone unpunished by their bishops, who moved them secretly from parish to parish. In addition, over 2,500 orphaned children were abused by priests and others working for the church. All Irish bishops were summoned to Rome, all Irish bishops were compelled to face the Pope and the Curia, and the offending priests were tried by church tribunals. Pope Benedict XVI directly addressed the victims and the parents, acknowledging that the Church committed “grave errors of judgment.”
Germany was next. Investigative journalists identified close to a hundred pedophile priests, thirty had already been convicted, ten of these were being tried in court. There were suspicions that Ratzinger himself was involved, but then it was discovered the pedophile priest in his diocese was exposed after Ratzinger was promoted to the Vatican. His biography details some individual fantastic cases of prominent clergy found guilty of sexual crimes, against both men and women, sometimes exposing secret wives and children, you can read those at your leisure.
Pope Benedict XVI broke precedent by personally meeting with many abuse victims, “asking for their forgiveness, expressing the closeness of the Church to their sufferings, promising justice and solidarity. Almost as if to compensate for the lack of courage on the part of bishops and others in ecclesiastical authority, the pope put himself on the front line, listening to victims, weeping with them.”
Penance is what Christians do; Christians repent. Unfortunately, many secular media interpreted these gestures by Pope Benedict as an admission of personal guilt.
During this time Cardinal Ratzinger confessed, “The greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without but arises from sin within the Church.” “The Church has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice.”
The media can be unfair at times. Pope Benedict XVI said that “we must be grateful for every disclosure. The truth, combined with love rightly understood, is primary. The media could not have reported these incidents had there not been evil in the Church herself.”[5]
Dr Wikipedia states that “in February 2022, Benedict admitted that errors were made in the treating of sexual abuse cases when he was Archbishop of Munich. According to the letter released by the Vatican, he asked forgiveness for any ‘grievous fault’ but denied personal wrongdoing. Benedict stated, quoting from the BBC: ‘I have had great responsibilities in the Catholic Church. All the greater is my pain for the abuses and the errors that occurred in those different places during the time of my mandate.’”[6]
Will sexual abuse stop? It will never stop, people will always be people, and secret affairs will always happen, though DNA tracking may decrease sexual assault somewhat. Worldwide, there are over four hundred thousand priests, so it would be impossible to totally eliminate the problem.
People often have no idea how prevalent sexual assault and cheating are. I have been involved in divorce support and single parent groups where I have gotten to know many young mothers, and based on my personal experience I think that over ten percent of women experience sexual assault, a rough statistic that is confirmed elsewhere.[7] When doctors perform DNA tests for medical reasons, they discover that roughly one in twenty children have misattributed paternity, which means their biological father differs.[8] Our family was involved in the swim scene many years ago, I personally know of two coaches who were fooling around with the girls they were coaching. There were likely more, the swim scene is notorious for sexual abuse, since the programs are run year-round.
Plus, we must also keep in mind that one reason why Catholic parishes seem to have a great problem with sexual scandals is that the Catholic Church is guilty of keeping national centralized personnel files. Evangelical churches seem to have fewer sexual abuse cases, though they do occasionally generate scandals, because they are congregational, which means each congregation maintains its own personnel records, the centralized office mainly holds conventions, runs the seminaries, and sells books. It has nothing to do with the member churches.
We will return to the main question. In hindsight, Could Pope Benedict XVI have done more for the victims of clerical abuse?
Of course, in hindsight, Pope Benedict XVI could have done more. We know he did do more once he realized the scope and severity of the problem. The question reminds me of the closing scene of Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List, when the good Nazi businessman Oscar Schindler, now nearly broke from trying to save as many Jews as he could, breaks down in tears before the rabbi, whose life he saved, as well as many other Jews in his factory. “We could have saved more! Why didn’t we save more Jews?”[9]
[1] David Kertzer, The Pope at War, pp. 112-116.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI#Sexual_abuse_in_the_Catholic_Church
[3] Elio Guerriero, Benedict XVI, His Life and Thought, translated by William J Melcher (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016, 2018), pp. 444-446.
[4] Elio Guerriero, Benedict XVI, His Life and Thought, p. 507.
[5] Elio Guerriero, Benedict XVI, His Life and Thought, p. 591-602.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI#Sexual_abuse_in_the_Catholic_Church
[7] https://www.wcsap.org/help/about-sexual-assault/how-often-does-it-happen and https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence ; google “what percent of females have been sexually assaulted”
[8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event and https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-paternity-myth-the-rarity-of-cuckoldry , google “misattributed paternity”
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