(With Apologies to 'The Critic') Tears for God's Own Monster
(With Apologies to 'The Critic') Tears for God's Own Monster
A response to sickly eulogies for and spurious defences of Joseph Ratzinger
I knew that when Joseph Ratzinger, AKA Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, died, there would inevitably appear a slew of dewy news items and obituaries. In my attack on Ratzinger for OnlySky in April last year, I wrote: “He will likely live out the rest of his life in the peaceful environs of the Vatican and be mourned with nauseating sweetness and conformity when he dies.” And so it has proved.
But perhaps even worse is the sheer banality of much of the coverage, wherein the dark aspects of Ratzinger’s life and career were elided in the way that ‘balanced’ news coverage always demonstrates its cowardice. That is to say, his culpability in the rape of thousands of children was all too often relegated to just one ‘controversial’ episode in a long life. In flattening discourse like this, our compliant media uses the shroud of ‘objectivity’ to obscure the truth. See, for example, the announcements of Ratzinger’s death by the BBC and the Financial Times, wherein the ‘controversy’ is barely mentioned (indeed, the BBC gave it two short paragraphs at the very end of a long and credulous piece). Voice of America went one better with the headline “Pope Emeritus Benedict, Known for Conservative Views, Dies at 95”. I suppose he was known for his conservatism, but come on.
The news pieces should have begun: “Benedict XVI, who knowingly perpetuated the systematic rape of children and the covering up of said rape, has died.” ‘Balanced’? Maybe not. True and utterly to the point? Absolutely. When someone responsible for such appalling, flagrant evil croaks it, their crimes should not be smothered under trite journalese. Imagine reading “Ratko Mladić, controversial military leader, dies” rather than “Ratko Mladić, perpetrator of genocide, dies”. That would indicate not balance but euphemism, if not outright untruth. It would imply that there is a legitimate argument to be had over Mladić’s crimes, rather than the truth, which is that they were crimes and they did happen.
(To pre-empt a likely reply: note that I am using “crime” in its general sense here. It makes no difference whether someone was ever convicted of a crime in the legal sense if all the evidence shows they are guilty of heinous actions—or inactions, as the case may be. Replace Mladić with the name of any other monster, convicted in a court of law or not, and the point remains. Slobodan Milošević himself was never actually convicted of anything and was even cleared of direct involvement in genocide by the International Court of Justice. If that prevents you from morally convicting him as the author of the crime, there is really no help for you.
Ratzinger certainly should have been brought to trial in my view, but whether the legal threshold for doing so, never mind getting a conviction, would have been attainable is not my main point here—though I will note that Geoffrey Robertson’s 2010 The Case of the Pope gives a pretty convincing case for prosecution in the literal sense.)
Between the vapidity of the news coverage and the nauseatingly respectful obituaries, all seems hopeless. In one particularly silly piece, written by Katherine Bayford in The Critic on January 2, Ratzinger’s death is taken as the starting point for a meditation on the treatment of the elderly, the sanctity of life, and Christian theology. All well and good, if theology is your thing, and I agree with Bayford that we should treat the elderly with respect (still, hardly a daring moral observation—how did we get along without it?) but is this really all she could muster in response to Ratzinger’s death?
Not a single mention of the abuse scandal is to be found anywhere in Bayford’s piece. Not one! She does mention that Ratzinger “greatly suffered in life”, but I doubt that this is a reference to the immense pressure he must have felt as the vileness of the system he so devotedly upheld and perpetuated became very publicly apparent. And then there is this astonishing paragraph:
Joseph Ratzinger was once a boy who suffered under Nazi domination, and rose to become one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, a spiritual leader of over a billion, and the head of the largest religion on earth. None of that had any bearing whatsoever on whether he, lying as an old, ill man, deserved dignity and love.
Well, quite. But operating a system which encouraged the rape of children and protected the rapists might, just might, have some bearing. Then again, I am not a Christian, and I leave it to the consciences of the faithful as to whether dignity and love are due to expiring creatures of that sort. (I wonder—would Jimmy Saville have received the same indulgence from Bayford? And yes, I know that Ratzinger himself was not a child rapist, but—again—that is not my point.)
As for “one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century”, I confess that I was unable to repress a snort of disdain the first time I read it. In fairness, plenty of other fools and knaves have also been proposed as “one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century”, so the club is not very exclusive, but I suspect that Bayford does not mean to place Ratzinger in the same category as Foucault or Derrida. Still, if postmodern claptrap is nourishing intellectual fare for some, then maybe it is only reasonable that the same indulgence be applied to those who value platitudinous dogmatism and reactionary ravings. (Before I take leave of Bayford, why was Ratzinger “the head of the largest religion on earth” but only “a spiritual leader of over a billion”?)
Ah, but I have not provided any proof of Ratzinger’s wrongdoing—am I not merely demonstrating my very own brand of (anti-Catholic) dogmatism here? The reason I have restrained myself from going into detail on this is that I have already done so in the OnlySky piece I mentioned above, so I recommend reading that for the full story. In that piece, I reference Robertson’s The Case of the Pope and Daniel Gawthrop’s excoriating 2013 book The Trial of Pope Benedict, both of which I recommend (and do so much more heartily than I recommend my own slim effort) to the apologists and the encomium writers. I would be surprised if anyone’s faith in Joseph Ratzinger survives the encounter.
Having said that, I would be remiss not to restate the case. The best way to do this here might be to turn to one of the apologists. I do not mean to pick on The Critic, but on January 5 they published as good a defence as any of Ratzinger, by one Paul Sapper. Before tearing into this lousy and lazy apologia, I should say that I very slightly know Sapper from the Battle of Ideas festival. He was pleasant enough during our very brief interactions when I attended the festival in 2021, so I have no personal grudge here.
It is just that his defence of Joseph Ratzinger consists of the thinnest of stuff. It is full of omissions (if “full of” is the right phrase here), evinces an extraordinary credulity towards the Church and its authority figures, and does not bother to deal with the substance of the critique of Ratzinger. But then, it is also full of near disgust at the Enlightenment, whose thinkers so brilliantly and irreversibly undermined the authority of the Church, and what can one expect from someone who seems to yearn for the good old days of dogma and obedience and ignorance?
In a tweet about his article, Sapper put it thus: “Pope Benedict heroically stood against the Enlightenment revolution, which is the root of today's cultural decay. That's why some on the left hate him.” Well, there you go: Ratzinger must be defended because he represented the contemporary counter-Enlightenment. I mean, how dare David Hume upset the certainties of the little people? And what, after all, has the Enlightenment ever done for us? Sapper’s nostalgia for the firm hand of religious authority is probably at the root of his laboured and unconvincing defence.
(If I may recommend a different path for Sapper, he might like to embrace the blood-soaked ayatollahs of Iran or their Sunni brethren; I imagine that fundamentalist Islam would suit his anti-modernist yearnings. Indeed, many on the right, including some on the very far right, have begun thinking this way—better a manly, robust, militant faith of whatever kind than the limpness and decadence and degeneracy of secularism and liberalism.)
Anyway, on to the article itself, as I promised. I shall take Sapper’s points in turn, which will allow me to reiterate the anti-Ratzinger argument.
First, I must thank Sapper for making one of my points for me, for he opens his defence with an appreciation of the fawning coverage of Ratzinger’s death:
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by much of the British media’s coverage of his passing. (Granted, the bar was not set very high.)
It’s no secret that Benedict, who embodied Catholic tradition and orthodoxy in a way which the modern world saw as anachronistic, was no media darling in life. But in death, he almost seems beyond reproach by serious-minded people. Two of the nation’s most reputable papers, The Telegraph and Times, wrote particularly moving pieces about the great man.
Note the question-begging here: “serious-minded people” could not possibly have anything bad to say about Ratzinger. Well, who counts as “serious-minded”? Presumably not Geoffrey Robertson, one of the most intelligent and principled lawyers, not to mention one of the foremost champions of human rights (including those of persecuted Catholics), in the world.
Sapper then takes aim at Daily Mirror Associate Editor Kevin Maguire for tweeting critically about Ratzinger. And this is the only critic of Ratzinger he can summon the energy to take on, and even then, it is only on the basis of a tweet. This is not, I must say, very “serious-minded” of Sapper, when so many substantial critiques of Ratzinger are readily available. (Will Sapper please take my advice and read Robertson and Gawthrop at least?) It is easy to mount a defence on this basis, but it is not serious argumentation. Question-begging and cynical, manipulative straw-manning already, and we are only about four paragraphs in!
I shall skip over Sapper’s defence of Ratzinger’s alleged Nazi past because this is one of the very few things he is correct about. Let me just note that “serious-minded” critics do not make this argument, but Sapper, as we have seen, would prefer to ignore those critics: all the easier for him to portray the critique of Ratzinger as sloppy and ignorant.
Throughout his piece, Sapper credulously cites Ratzinger’s apologies for and condemnations of abuse in the Church, as if guilty people have never shed crocodile tears. Who cares if Ratzinger wept when meeting victims if he was largely responsible for what they had gone through? Sapper’s willingness to take papal PR at face value is unsurprising given his allegiance to the Church, but it is disappointing in someone whom I believed, on however slight an acquaintance, to possess some integrity.
And as it happens, it took rather a long time to elicit any apologies from the Church in the first place: at first, the scurrilous media (and often the Jewish journalists in the media, perhaps not-so-incidentally) was blamed for exposing the abuse, and then ‘gay culture’ among priests was at fault. Anybody and anything but the Church itself, until the exposure and pressure made criticism impossible to ignore. Only then were apologies made. And even these apologies did not address the root causes of the abuse crisis: clerical celibacy and the arrogance of the Church as enshrined in Canon Law, which demanded absolute secrecy when abuse allegations were made against priests.
The use of Canon Law, which banned victims and clergy from reporting allegations to the civil authorities, amounted to the operation of a parallel legal system worldwide. In other words, the Church flagrantly undermined the sovereignty of many nations while brandishing its own spurious sovereignty as a shield against investigation and prosecution.
And Joseph Ratzinger was the overseer and enforcer of this fetid system, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF; formerly the Inquisition) between 1981 and 2005 and as Pope from 2005 until 2013. Allow me to quote at length from my OnlySky piece, rather than pointlessly rewording what I have already said:
Very well, a defender of the Church might say, this is all awful, but it can’t be pinned on Joseph Ratzinger directly. Alas, this defense fails too. As head of the CDF, Ratzinger upheld the Crimen Sollicitationis, a secret 1962 document approved by Pope John XXIII which detailed the worst crimes it was possible to commit under Canon Law, including child sex abuse (though homosexual acts were regarded as “the foulest crime”), and how to deal with them. As Gawthrop puts it, “The Crimen contained virtually no investigation process, no acknowledgment of child abuse as a serious crime, and thus, no suggestion that the police should be involved.” That Ratzinger presided over this system for thirty years makes him directly responsible for the systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Catholic priests.
In 2001, Ratzinger updated Crimen to state that all sexual abuse cases must be referred to the CDF, still under absolute secrecy (“no snitching to the civil authorities,” paraphrases Gawthrop). By 2010, with all the revelations about pedophile priests that had come out in the last few years and decades, one might have thought that Ratzinger, now Pope, would be ready to put his house in order. In July of that year, he released another update of the Crimen. This extended the Canon Law version of the statute of limitations by 10 years and allowed priests to be defrocked without a hearing, but essentially reinforced the same, rotten system. Absolute secrecy was once more reasserted and there was still to be “no snitching.” Thankfully, the Pope was just as focused on the serious stuff: now, attempting to ordinate women as priests was made an offense as “grave” as child sex abuse!
Sapper mentions none of this, instead concentrating on a few select cases where he can speciously mount a defence. This verges on dishonesty, given that the systematic nature of the abuse is the main problem here—and who else can be held responsible for this other than the man who oversaw the system, in one form or another, for over three decades? Ratzinger had every opportunity to overhaul this system and chose not to, instead reinforcing it whenever he could. (This also neatly dispenses with those who would redirect the blame onto Pope John Paul II, as if his chief enforcer were innocent and helpless during all those years under him.)
But, says Sapper, “[in] the last two full years of his pontificate, he [Ratzinger] defrocked nearly 400 alleged child abuser priests.” Never mind that this is another fig leaf (why not report them to the police and hand over all the relevant records in addition to defrocking them?) but note the rearguard defensiveness of Ratzinger’s actions here. Only when it became necessary to look as if he were doing something remotely serious about the problem did he actually do anything. In any case, 400 defrockings is a paltry response to the systematic nature of the crisis, redolent of a corrupt politician sacking his (also corrupt) subordinates to deflect from his own failures. (Note also Ratzinger’s longstanding trigger-happiness when it came to defrocking—so long as the defrocked were liberal theologians who opposed dictatorship in South America or thought that gay people deserved at least some recognition of their humanity, anyway.)
Did Ratzinger at least have the decency and fortitude to punish some individual abusers? Yes, actually. Sapper mentions one case where Ratzinger should be given some credit:
In 2010 it was revealed that in 1995, Ratzinger — then a cardinal — had pushed for a full investigation into accusations of abuse against former Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër. The investigation was reportedly blocked and Groër died denying the accusations and was never charged.
Indeed, this is one of the times John Paul can be blamed while Ratzinger did the right thing, for it was Ratzinger who ensured Groër’s sacking as Archbishop of Vienna and John Paul who allowed Groër to retire unpunished. Still, if Ratzinger was serious about punishing abuse, he would have protested this leniency and demanded a criminal investigation. But of course, that would be incompatible with the system of secrecy he superintended.
And the argument that Ratzinger was ready and willing to punish abusers is utterly undermined by those cases where he waved their crimes away. The Groër case is an exception—and one very far away from the rule at that. It also shows that he knew clerical sex abuse was wrong, and yet, Groër aside, did little or nothing about it, whether in other individual cases or systematically. Put another way, Sapper’s only real score actually disproves his overall argument.
Sapper cites the case of Marcial Maciel, “a prominent Mexican priest and fundraiser who it emerged had abused minors.” This rather (and clumsily—“who it emerged”?) understates the vileness of Maciel, who not only abused boys in the seminaries but also raped his own sons. Oh, yes, he fathered children—and he was a bigamist to boot. But he also raised lots of money and, as a woman-hating reactionary, was an ideological comrade of John Paul and Ratzinger.
It is true that Ratzinger did “[remove] from active ministry” this sick freak, but Sapper conveniently omits that Maciel was reported to the CDF in 1998 and that Ratzinger procrastinated over doing anything about him. In 2004, Maciel was blessed by John Paul in the Vatican—without a single word of protest from Ratzinger, who also knew of his crimes. Then, as Pope, in 2006, Ratzinger sacked him and packed him off to a monastery for “a reserved life of prayer and penance.” Such is the swift and sure justice meted out by the Church to child rapists. (If you are wondering, Maciel died a free man, as so many other abusers did, in Florida in 2008.) No wonder Sapper refrains from going into detail on this case—the full story does not exactly show Ratzinger as the noble crusader against child abuse that Sapper wishes to convince us he was.
Sapper’s final, valiant, doomed attempt to rescue his reactionary hero is a defence of Ratzinger’s tenure as Archbishop of Munich and Freising. I’ll quote Sapper at length here:
The accusation against Benedict most recently in the media came in the year of his death, when he was accused in a report commissioned by the German Church of “misconduct” in dealing with four cases of abuse when he was Archbishop of Munich between 1977-1982.
The report alleges that Benedict failed to take appropriate action against the priests under his authority who had committed abuse. In two of the cases, priests committed abuse while Benedict was in office and continued to perform pastoral duties, without canonical action being taken against them. They were later criminally sanctioned. In a third, a priest who was convicted of abuse abroad was transferred to the diocese.
One of the report’s lawyers, Martin Pusch, alleged that Benedict knew about this priest’s past, but this has been vehemently denied. The fourth is that of Peter Hullermann.
Benedict admitted to accidentally saying he had not attended a meeting in 1980 where Hullermann, a priest who had committed sexual abuse, was discussed. According to the minutes of the meeting, they spoke about granting Hullermann accommodation in Munich during his therapeutic treatment there, which was approved.
Hullermann had been transferred from the diocese of Essen after not denying allegations that he had abused a child there. He was later reassigned to pastoral ministry by another priest in Munich, Fr Gerard Gruber, who did not consult Benedict about the decision. Horrifyingly, Hullermann was convicted of committing further abuse in 1986.
Fr Gruber took full responsibility for the decision to reassign Hullermann, and Benedict denied any knowledge of the accusations or decision to re-admit.
When he gave the mistaken testimony, the Pope Emeritus was 94 years old, had gone through 8,000 pages of documents with the help of advisers, and wrongly answered, due to what these advisers say was a “transcription error”, one answer in his 82 page statement about a meeting which had occurred more than 40 years prior. A meeting which he was already known to have attended. That is hardly evidence of a cover-up.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that he knew this priest, or any of the other priests he is accused of “misconduct” in regard to, were accused of abuse. Many have conveniently forgotten about the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”.
Interesting that Sapper skips over three (or perhaps two and a half) of the Munich/Freising cases, but never mind. As for Hullermann, the “mistaken testimony” is irrelevant, so let us turn to the facts of the case. Forgive me for quoting myself again and for the lengthy Gawthrop quote within my quote, but I can put it no better than I (and Gawthrop) already have:
[A]s Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Ratzinger chaired a meeting that approved the transfer of a known pedophile priest, Peter Hullermann, to his archdiocese. Hullermann was then assigned to another parish where he abused boys for another six years before his arrest. He was given a suspended sentence and continued to work in church posts where he went on abusing children.
It should be said that Ratzinger approved Hullermann’s initial transfer to Munich for treatment, but not his transfer to work in a new parish (this was the decision of his deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber). But, as Gawthrop’s fictional prosecutor [note: Gawthrop uses the interesting device of imagining Ratzinger in the dock at various points in his book] asks Ratzinger, “does this fact absolve you of responsibility? … Why, as Cardinal of Munich, did you approve Father Hullermann’s transfer to your jurisdiction, rather than defrocking him? Why, when you knew that he was a serial abuser? When you should have foreseen that, should he continue his ministry, there was a strong possibility—indeed a likelihood—that he would abuse again, as subsequently proved to be the case? Why did you allow the vicar general to determine Father Hullermann’s future, instead of taking the file yourself, thus failing to protect the young and innocent in your archdiocese? Why, Your Holiness? Why?”
So who cares if Gruber took full responsibility? Claiming such responsibility is not at all the same as actually bearing it, and Ratzinger quite clearly bears a good chunk of the load here (this does not exempt Gruber from blame, I should say1). As for the invocation of the legalese “innocent until proven guilty”—see above. And anyway, Sapper seems to think not that one is innocent until proven guilty, but that one (now in the sense of one specific person) is innocent no matter what.
Sapper claims that there was no cover-up of abuse in the Church***. I invite you to read his piece and mine in full and see if you can agree with this conclusion of his:
A cover-up is the deliberate attempt to prevent people from discovering the truth about a crime. Can any honest person say that Benedict’s actions fit into that category? He did not hide abuse in the Church — he exposed it. That there is more he may have been able to do at various points just shows that he was like the rest of us: a limited, imperfect human being.
That last sentence is unintentionally funny. Yes, yes, okay, Pope Benedict was chosen by God to lead the one true faith, and oh, if you say so, yes, he presided over a system wherein absolute secrecy (and does that really constitute a cover-up?) was the guiding principle, but, hey, we all make mistakes, man!
And indeed, Sapper is quite correct to say that we are all limited and imperfect, but I do not think it arrogant to claim that I would never act as Ratzinger did in his position, and nor, I think, would Sapper. No person in possession of even a scintilla of decency would. But for Sapper to admit this would also be to admit to the most servile of special pleading on behalf of Ratzinger.
You might be wondering if lovely old Pope Francis has changed things. Alas for such charming (or perhaps disturbing) naivete, he has not. I have taken rather a lot of space and am not quite finished yet, so I will not go into Francis’ record on the abuse crisis. I discuss it in my OnlySky piece, so please refer to that. I will only say that the upshot is that the Church has not changed at all.
In the end, if this is the best Sapper can mount, I would recommend, if he were still alive and if he were to be brought to trial, that Joseph Ratzinger employ somebody else for his defence—hell, anybody else, including me! Sapper’s omissions and credulity could only come from someone blinded by dogmatic allegiance to their faith, which only shows that faith can rot the moral sense as well as the intellect. It certainly cannot move mountains, or at least not the mountain of evidence against Ratzinger and the Catholic Church in the matter of child abuse.
For OnlySky, I discussed various other cases not addressed by Sapper, but there are many, many more besides. I look forward to reading, for example, his tortuous defence of John Paul and Ratzinger’s harbouring of Cardinal Bernard Law in Rome. Law protected around 250 abuser priests as Archbishop of Boston and fled to the safety of the Vatican before he could be prosecuted. Like Ratzinger, Law rarely left the confines of the Vatican in his latter years, probably fearful of prosecution outside of this ‘sovereign’ state.2 He died peacefully in 2017, having lived comfortably through Ratzinger’s entire papal reign. The disgust I feel at these monsters getting away with it is something I simply cannot convey in words.
Sapper ends his piece with a tiresome rant against the Enlightenment and liberalism, mangling the philosophies of Hume and Descartes as he does so, and lamenting the Enlightenment legacy of doubt and scepticism. Once more, it is apparent that Sapper prefers dogmatic certainty to reason and argument. This may be why he can so uncritically cite the supposedly contrite but actually self-serving words of Ratzinger and other churchmen as proof that Ratzinger did nothing wrong—after all, they have tradition and authority behind them!
I wonder: can Sapper really be in favour of free speech, as his attendance at the Battle of Ideas and his affiliation with GB News might suggest? Or would he defend free speech only, as Waugh’s Mr Salter might put it, “up to a point”? And where would that point be? On the evidence of his reflexive and visceral hatred of the Enlightenment, one could be forgiven for thinking that Sapper would quite like, or at least would not mind seeing, a revived Inquisition to define the limits of inquiry and argument.
(And how bold is that, anyway, if you will allow me a digression? I am myself, up to, as it were, a point, associated with the ‘free speech crowd’, but I cannot deny that more than a few in that crowd, notwithstanding its general intellectual diversity and tolerance, seem to be little more than reactionaries looking for an excuse to rage against modernity—some sincerely, some not. I will, of course, always defend their right to be idiots, but I shall offer some advice. First, if you are one of the insincere, please know that being anti-Enlightenment is not very original or daring, so stop pretending it is either: you are as much a slave to the fashionable as any of the ‘woke’—vogue reactionism is so old hat. Second, if you actually do have principles, stop pretending you are a champion of free speech. If you want to turn back the gains of the Enlightenment and liberalism, say so with full-throated conviction rather than hiding behind a false commitment to free speech. I should clarify here that beyond what I explicitly speculate elsewhere, I make no comment on how, or whether, Sapper fits into these categories.)
So to the question posed by Sapper’s title—‘Why they hated Benedict’—Sapper’s answer is that “they” (which includes me) hated him because of his unyielding conservatism. Perhaps. Or could it have anything to do with Ratzinger’s role as enabler and protector of child rapists? Who knows?
I shall concede a point here: frankly, I would have detested the nasty old reactionary just for his being, well, a nasty old reactionary. And Ratzinger’s malign influence is not limited to child abuse. Opposition to condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa; hatred of women and gays; persecution of priests and nuns who did not share his hidebound views (what’s that about cancel culture?)—even disregarding the abuse crisis, he has immiserated countless of his fellow human beings.
But Ratzinger’s crimes against children make all his other iniquities seem utterly irrelevant. To make matters worse, the record shows just how keen and quick Ratzinger was to wield the weapons of modern ecclesiastical punishment (however weak) against his ideological enemies, yet how long did it take him to defrock abuser priests?
Everyone, including all the very many decent Catholics (whether conservative or liberal), should despise Ratzinger with the very core of their beings for these crimes, and should lament with me that he died before he could be tried. So shame on the media for their cowardice in failing to say so, and even more shame on those who shed tears for and seek to defend a man who must count as one of the evilest people to have ever walked the Earth.
***UPDATE AND CORRECTION
On January 7, Paul Sapper replied to my piece on Twitter. See the screenshot below.
I thank Paul for taking the time to respond, and it is entirely up to him whether he finds my piece convincing, of course. Naturally, I have some thoughts in response to Paul, but here I would like only to apologise for misrepresenting his position very slightly. Paul is quite right: he did not deny a cover-up in the Church tout court. Rather, he argued that Joseph Ratzinger had little or no responsibility for any cover-up.
Having said that, and as I’m sure Paul would allow, my slip-up consists of just one sentence, and that sentence could easily be edited to read “Sapper claims that Ratzinger was not responsible for the cover-up of abuse in the Church”, which is, indeed, the real argument that my piece deals with.
Anyway, I don’t think I should edit the piece itself, so I have kept it as is. I have, however, added some asterisks at the relevant point to direct people to this update/correction. Needless to say, perhaps, but I’ll say anyway that I stand by the rest of the piece.
(Also, I don’t think it’s necessary to add any asterisks regarding my acquaintance with Paul—we may well have first met at Living Freedom rather than the Battle of Ideas festival, but my main recollection is from the festival. I’ll take this opportunity to return Paul’s compliment and to say that I would be more than happy to engage further on this issue—including in person, should we ever meet again. Meanwhile, it’s up to readers to compare our pieces and make their own minds up.)
Once more—apologies to Paul for the misrepresentation in that sentence, and thanks to him for pointing it out. Mea culpa, as they say.
This seems a good point to interject that, by condemning Ratzinger as the primary wrongdoer, I do not mean to let off all the others responsible for any of this, whether individual paedophile priests or those who covered for the abusers. As I have tried to emphasize, the problem lies in the Church system itself, and Ratzinger, while singularly culpable for what has happened under it, is far from the only person who should be blamed. Until the system itself is overhauled, there shall never be an end to the abuse perpetrated by the Church. I predict we will see more ‘revelations’ in the coming years, and not just because of continuing abuse allowed by the system, but also because there are poorer parts of the globe, such as Africa, whose historic victims have not had so much attention shone on them as yet.
And another predictable response occurs to me now: no, the Church’s charity work does not excuse or compensate for its crimes against children, just as Jimmy Saville’s did not.
And yet another predictable response also occurs: no, the Church is not just ‘one among many’ institutions rife with abuse—it is one where abuse is quantitively and qualitatively much, much worse than any other (see my OnlySky piece).
The statehood of the Vatican, and thus the claim of Ratzinger to have been a head of state with diplomatic immunity, is as spurious as Sapper’s defence of Ratzinger’s conduct. It originates in an opportunistic accommodation with Mussolini and fails to meet the criteria of the most widely accepted international definition of statehood, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. It is shameful that we allow the Church the privileges this status provides. For more on this, see Robertson’s book. And allow me to quote from my OnlySky piece once more:
I suspect, alas, that there is little chance of the Church giving up such power voluntarily, in the name of decency and reason. Fine. It should be thrown out of the club of states and its status at the UN as a permanent observer state should be revoked, without ceremony or compunction. It should also be forced to open its archives to scrutiny. But all this, too, is unlikely to happen: a shameful reminder of international pusillanimity in the face of faith.