The Curia and the Pope may not understand the horrendous dimensions of clerical sexual abuse, writes Paddy Agnew from Rome
When Pope John Paul II, in his pre-Easter letter to priests, referred indirectly to the clerical sexual abuse scandals besmirching the Catholic Church, many commentators wrongly suggested that the Pope was breaking "his silence" on a taboo subject.
In reality, the Pope had spoken out against sexual abuse as far back as 1993. In a letter that year to American bishops, he referred to "shocked moral sensibilities" prompted by a wave of disclosures involving US priests, while in August that year in Denver, he addressed an 18,000 strong crowd, condemning the "suffering and and scandal caused by the sins of some ministers on the altar".
More recently, in the November 2001 document, Ecclesia in Oceania, the Pope wrote: "In some parts of Oceania, sexual abuses on the part of priests and members of religious orders have been the cause of tremendous suffering and spiritual damage. Sexual abuse within the church is a profound contradiction of the teaching and witness of Christ".
Sexual abuse, unlike issues such as abortion, divorce, birth control, the North-South divide, poverty, the need for dialogue, etc., does not often feature in statements by the Pope.
The chance to glimpse that current Vatican thinking came two weeks ago at a Vatican news conference where the Pope's Easter letter was presented to the media by Colombian Cardinal Dariò Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Congregation for the Clergy, the Vatican department that supervises priests.
Media attention focused on the paragraph where the Pope said that "as priests, we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mystery of evil at work in the world".
Reporters, many of them American, wanted to know whether or not the Vatican supports a "zero tolerance" policy for priests accused of paedophilia, whether the Pope still has confidence in US Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston (currently caught up in a major scandal) and why the Pope did not mention the clerical sex abuse crisis by name.
Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos's reaction was to go on the defensive, reading a prepared statement and ignoring many of the specific questions.
"With regard to the problem of sexual abuse and paedophilia, let me give you one single answer. In the climate of pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness that has been created in today's world, some priests, men who come out of this culture, have committed the grave crime of sexual abuse.
"I just want to say two things. Firstly, reliable comparative statistics re other professions.are not available. From what we know, from a study by Prof Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania University, it seems that 3 per cent of American priests have a tendency towards sexual abuse of minors, whilst 0.3 per cent are paedophiles. The Church has never ignored the problem of sexual abuse, among its priests, and not only in relation to the faithful in general but above all in relation to minors."
Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos also highlighted the fact that the Vatican itself had last year issued new guidelines for the handling of cases of child abuse by priests. Basic to the new guidelines, issued by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith at the direct behest of the Pope, was the need for bishops (and heads of religious orders) to act quickly, informing Rome immediately if "even a hint" of paedophilia was discovered and launching their own investigation.
Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos's defensive attitude, however, indicates something of Vatican perceptions. Many senior Vatican figures never tire of pointing out the small percentage of priests involved in sexual scandals. Many also suspect that aggressive media coverage may be encouraged by an anti-clerical bias, influenced by hostility to the Pope's illiberal views on abortion, birth control, homosexuality and sexual mores in general.
Furthermore, many church figures, especially with regard to the US, suspect a financial motivation to recent cases taken against the church. In an interview published in a recent edition of the religious monthly, 30 Giorni, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, a senior official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, commented: "There is a well-founded suspicion that some of these charges, which arise well after the events in question, serve only to make money through civil litigation."
Not for the first time the above remark, and the attitude of Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos at that recent news conference, suggest that the Roman Curia has not entirely got the message.
Until there is a significant proof to the contrary (and that means more than a generic mention in the fourth last paragraph of an apostolic letter), the suspicion must remain that the ageing, all-male, celibate and potentially ivory-tower ensconced Curia, and Pope John Paul II himself, simply do not understand the full, horrendous and painful dimensions of the problem of sexual abuse by priests.