“Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel Ethics

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media”

George Weigel Ethics and Public Policy Center

John L. Allen, Jr. National Catholic Reporter

November 2010

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Welcome. George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow and a colleague of mine at Ethics and Public Policy Center. He’s written a definitive book on Pope John Paul II, but now he’s got a new book out called The End and the Beginning: John Paul II — The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy. George, we’re delighted to have you.

GEORGE WEIGEL: Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. My role today is to raise questions about the way in which sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy was and is covered and to suggest some possible new angles of exploration for the future.

This is, of course, a complicated story. Eight years ago in this little book during the Long Lent of 2002, I insisted that “it was a serious mistake for some Catholic leaders and some Catholic traditionalists to argue that the crisis of sexual abuse was created by a media frenzy. It was not. The crisis was and is,” I wrote, “the Church’s crisis.” Moreover, the Church owed the press a debt of gratitude for “forcing to the surface issues that have for far too long been ignored or downplayed by the Church’s American leadership.”

I meant that then and I would mean it now with reference to eight years ago. To be sure that praise in 2002 was not unqualified, some things were gotten wrong. Other things were misinterpreted or skewed. There was perhaps most significantly little or no attempt to locate the problem of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which involved a very small percentage of priests in the broader cultural context of an epic of sexual abuse of the young, which takes place primarily in families and in which there were far higher

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 incidences of abuse in certain professional groups, like public school teachers, whose crimes went virtually unexamined.

However, it would be difficult to say that in quite so unambiguous a way about Scandal Time II, as some of us came to call this past spring. But rather than go through a point by point identification of what seemed to me to be specific errors in reporting or specific errors of demonstrable editorial bias, I would rather look forward. The difference, it seems to me, between Scandal Time I in 2002 and Scandal Time II in 2010 is explained in part by a set of assumptions that skewed the most recent reporting and analysis sometimes rather badly. Left in place, these assumptions will continue to distort coverage of the Catholic Church across the full spectrum of questions in which the Church is engaged, and that would be bad for both journalism and for the Church.

So in good biblical style, let me identify here telegraphically seven problematic assumptions that seem to me to be at work not all the time, but certainly more than once in this latest round of coverage and commentary earlier this year. The first of these is the assumption of the omnicompetence of the papacy or the notion that the Pope is an absolute monarch such that if anything goes wrong in the Catholic Church, the Pope is ultimately responsible.

This is not true in either theory or in practice. During the third period of the Second Vatican Council, when the Council Fathers were completing work on the theological centerpiece of Vatican II’s work, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Paul VI proposed that a sentence be inserted in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church that would read, “The Pope is answerable to the Lord alone,” or, “The Pope is responsible to the Lord alone.”

That papal suggestion was rather sharply rejected by the Council’s Theological Commission which said that the Pope is responsible to any number of things which constrain his ability or capacity to do whatever he might wish to do. He’s constrained by the tradition of the Church. He’s constrained by the sacramental system of the Church. He’s constrained by the rules of logic. He is constrained by the canon law that governs his office, and so forth and so on. So that suggestion by Paul VI did not make it into

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The Pope, in other words, is the servant of an authoritative tradition. He is not the tradition’s master.

This notion of papal omnicompetence is also not true in practice for no matter how competent, insightful, prophetic in the real sense of the term, ability to see things that others don’t see, a given pope may be, his exercise of the office of Peter is circumscribed by any number of human realities.

The first of these, of course, is the competence of his subordinates. A Pope may have a genuinely prophetic capacity to see around corners and look through walls, but the competence of those subordinates nonetheless circumscribes what the Pope can do.

The Pope’s ability to affect the life of the Church is also shaped considerably by the prerogatives of local bishops. It’s quite striking that as the Catholic Church has tried to move away in its own theology and self-understanding from the notion that bishops are simply local branch managers of RC, Inc., and the Catholic Church, you know, the CEO is in Rome, many of us have hung onto that notion that bishops are essentially branch managers or, if you like, platoon leaders in the Marine Corps who, when the Commandant says X, everybody staples a salute to their forehead and proceeds to do what they’re told. This is not the case as, of course, many of you did report this year.

The Pope’s practical capacity to affect the life of the Church is also shaped by his own shrewdness in judging people and in making appointments, and of course, this connects to the first two points, the point about the competence of subordinates and the prerogatives of local bishops. One of the most interesting dynamics of the present pontificate where you have an indisputably world class theological mind operating in the office of Peter, and yet real questions can be raised about Pope Benedict’s shrewdness in the appointment of subordinates, as well as about John Paul II.

So this assumption that the Pope is a kind of absolute monarch or Marine Commandant is problematic in itself. It’s also particularly problematic, it seems to me, because it tended this past spring to deflect attention from where attention needs to be paid, and that is to the functioning of local bishops who in, I would say, the overwhelming majority of cases that have come to the light of public attention since 2002 are where the source of the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 genuine problem, the problem of malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, et cetera, lies.

The second assumption that seems to be at work and needs to be cleared out is the assumption that the higher altitudes of the Roman Curia are led by men of world class competence, including the assumption, the sub-assumption within Assumption No. 2, if you will, that the Vatican runs what’s often called “the world’s best intelligence service” through its Nunciature system. This is simply not true.

The quality of heads of decasteries in the Roman Curia over the past 20, 30, 40 years that I’ve been paying any attention to this does not seem to me necessarily higher than in other countries to which I pay attention or other systems in which I pay attention, like the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, and in some notable instances that competence is quite lower.

As for the information flow, this notion of the great intelligence service, I can tell you from personal experience that John Paul II was literally four months behind the curve of information in the period January to April 2002 because of grossly inadequate reporting from the apostolic nunciature, the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C. We were in the middle of April. He was in early January. This sounds incredible. I assure you it is true.

So throughout all that year, while there was some closing of the gap, there was a serious, serious disengagement between what was happening on the ground in America and the structure of understanding of what was happening there that prevailed not only in the Roman Curia, but in the papal apartment.

These two false assumptions that these guys really know what they’re doing and that they have a fantastic flow of information often lead to a further problematic assumption, namely, they must have a crisis management strategy, which then leads to a determination, sometimes bordering on an obsession to try to figure that out. But there wasn’t any crisis management strategy in 2010, as there wasn’t in 2002.

It’s also wrong to assume that the senior officials of the Roman Curia, say the 20 people at the most who have real weight and real decision making capacity in issues like the ones we’re discussing, live in the same 24-7 communications universe we do. They don’t, and

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 if we assume that they do, then we’re going to make further false assumptions about alleged indifference, or worse, alleged dissembling.

The third difficult or problematic assumption is what I might call a general hermeneutic of suspicion, or in this case the assumption that there is a well formed and institutionalized will to deceive at the highest levels of the Vatican. This assumption which is the product of both centuries of history and recent polemics is often reinforced by the sometimes breathlessly incompetent activities of the current Holy See press office.

Since the change of regime in 2005, I fear we have had a reversion to what remains, I think, the institutionalized default position that is somehow transmitted in the institutional DNA of the Roman Curia. That default position was once given quite striking formulation by the late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, John Paul II’s Secretary of State, the architect of the “Ost Politik” of Pope Paul VI, probably the most competent curialist of his generation, a man firmly on the liberal end of the Catholic spectrum, who nonetheless famously said once, I believe at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, where they train the Vatican diplomats, “We don’t care what they write as long as we can do what we want to do.”

I said at the time, this is perhaps an attitude appropriate to the Congress of Vienna when the diplomats meet under the chandeliers at Schoenborn Palace and clink glasses and get the deals done that way. But it is not an appropriate attitude in the present environment, and yet I think it remains very much present in the Roman Curia where the notion that no story is a good story, where the notion that one could actually go out and engage men and women of the media and try to frame stories in a sensible way is very, very difficult to come by.

To be sure, that in itself is affected by the media environment immediately surrounding the Roman Curia, namely, Italy, where as I have noted on more than one occasion, the borderline between fact and fiction is permeable, and when people don’t have a story, they are given to making up stories.

But nonetheless that remains. That notion that, you know, we don’t really care as long as we can do what we want to do is still in place there. Now, it’s a completely dumb idea because as they ought to have learned by now, what they write, print, broadcast, narrow-

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 cast, podcast, stream live over the Internet, et cetera, has a lot to do with how the Church’s message is perceived and received.

But there it is, and it’s very much part of the situation with which we deal in this crisis of abuse question and with other issues as well. All of this, I think, leads in turn to frequently missing the simplest, truest explanation of what appears to be dissembling, indifference, et cetera, and that is simply that these people were blindsided and scrambled to respond.

Fourth is assumption of institutionalized hypocrisy. It is no secret that the Catholic Church’s sexual ethic and the Catholic Church’s position on a wide range of controverted public policy issues are signs of contradiction to many in the Western world, including many in the Western media. Violations of that sexual ethic, as in the abuse crisis that are not immediately met by draconian public penalties are then assumed to necessarily imply hypocrisy among Church leaders and lead to a kind of “gotcha” reporting and commentary.

Thus, in both 2002 and 2010, it seems to me, there were other truer explanations of the facts that were often missed. For example, the fact that the new 1982 Code of Canon Law was crafted to protect priests from the arbitrary abuses of power by bishops, a real problem in some parts of the world Church in the 20th Century, and that this good intention went awry when bishops concluded that they did not have the canonical or legal means to discipline abusive clergy.

This missing of the facts, I think, also leads, has led to the repetitive and repetitively unimpressive, if I may be candid, questions about the relationship of the abuse problem in the Catholic Church to celibacy, despite the absolutely well established sociological fact that somewhere around 50 to 60 percent of the sexual abuse of the young takes place in families.

This brings us bumping up against the fifth problematic assumption, and that is the assumption that the sexual abuse of the young is a distinctively Catholic problem and, indeed, an institutionalized Catholic problem. Now, that may be true in Ireland. Unfortunately, according to David Quinn and other reliable sources in Dublin and around Ireland, there is no reliable comparative data in Ireland at least David was aware of

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 comparing the incidence of abuse between clergy and other religious professionals and other similarly situated professional groups.

So it may be true in Ireland that this is a distinctively Catholic problem and an institutionalized Catholic problem. But it’s certainly not true in the United States. It’s not a distinctively Catholic problem, and that frequently did not get said. The result was a kind of overkill perhaps more prevalent in 2002 than 2010, but echoes of that overkill were certainly heard this past spring.

In the peak months of coverage of the abuse scandal in 2002, the Catholic Church’s problems with the crime of sexual abuse got 500 percent more coverage than the Martha Stewart scandal and almost twice as much coverage as the D.C. sniper story in a comparable six-month period. There were 44 stories in U.S. newspapers on the abuse of children in Hari Krishna schools from October 2001 to April 2002, and 17,310 stories on Catholic scandals in a comparable six-month period from January 2002 to June 2002.

Perhaps most disturbingly, from the point of view of those of us who are parents and grandparents, the extensive focus on Catholic abuse, crimes and scandals sucks the air out of the much larger story of patterns of child and adolescent sexual abuse throughout society, which is an ongoing and heart rending scandal throughout our country, as indeed it is throughout the world.

The Catholic Church in 2010 is arguably the safest environment for young people and adolescents in the country, but there are many non-safe environments where the reach of public attention that can only be brought by an alert and responsible media has not reached. When these unsafe environments are marginalized or ignored or minimized, it’s not a wonder that some Catholics say, “What’s going on here?” in terms of bias.

Six, the sixth assumption, bad assumption is a kind of lack of skill in reading Church statements and documents that leads to missing real stories. A chief example of this, this past year was what I just mentioned a moment ago, Benedict XVI’s letter to the Church in Ireland, which was, in fact, very tough and began to dig into the real problems of ecclesiastical culture that in the Irish case, at least, abetted an awful pattern of the abuse of the young by both priests and nuns. What was the response to this? In my hometown paper it was to afford an extraordinary amount of space to Sinead O’Connor who

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 befouled the Outlook section of the Washington Post with calumnies and falsehoods running to several thousands of words.

Why was Benedict XVI’s really tough statement to Irish Catholicism so underplayed or distorted? Is it any wonder that when Sinead O’Connor is considered a reliable and thoughtful commentator on a Church she admits having abandoned, serious Catholics seemingly including those most seriously determined to face the real problems that exist and to root them out wonder what is going on and suspect that what is going on may be a filtering out of data that doesn’t fit a predetermined script or, as I am calling them here, a predetermined set of assumptions.

Finally, in the seventh place, rarely in my reading of the coverage were those most bitterly attacking Benedict XVI this past spring identified accurately and their own agendas acknowledged.

I recognize the problem of dealing with so-called Vatican insiders in a kind of media environment of the sort I described where we don’t care what they write as long as we can do what we want to do. But a lot of people who present themselves as Vatican insiders are really low level munchkins who have absolutely no idea of what’s going on, but living in the not altogether Puritanical work environment over there, are happy to spend hours over free cappuccini or Campari and Sodas telling you what they think is going on. This is a constant problem.

For example, there was the rather regular use throughout the American media of Jeff Anderson, an attorney with a direct financial interest in abuse cases, as a source, and indeed as an authoritative source, without the caveats that would, one expects, be applied in any other comparable situation.

So while there is an ongoing and serious work of reform to do in the Church and many of us are grateful for what our friends in the media did in 2002, there is also a case to be made that serious reform is also required in press coverage of the Catholic Church if the coverage of Scandal Time II is representative. And that reform within the house of the fourth estate requires a rigorous questioning of that structure of assumptions that guides coverage of Catholicism, the Vatican, and the Pope.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

Let me conclude with two very brief further thoughts, this time on reform within the Church. The first is that the Vatican communications debacle has to end. You can’t be a church of a new evangelization, as John Paul II and Benedict XVI have called the Catholic Church to be, a Church for whom mission is not one function among many. Mission is the whole raison d’etre of the institution, of the community. You can’t do that with a 19th Century communications apparatus. One key to this at least at the Roman level is a papal press spokesman who has regular contact with the Pope, the kind of contact that gave Navarro Valls a certain authority and a certain ability to coordinate the response of various Vatican organs to a complex set of issues like those in the abuse crisis.

The lack of that relationship between Father Lombardi and Pope Benedict XVI was a significant part of the problem of communications that was driving many of you and, indeed, me somewhat mad this past spring, and this really had to be addressed, if not now, because it’s not terribly easy to imagine an 83 year old man changing his mode of life dramatically, then it has to be addressed in the next conclave, and it has to be addressed by all of us in the run-up to that event.

The second point is that while there remains enormous, strong, emotional, and affective and personal support for priests, there are real questions about the competence of bishops throughout the Church. No matter where I go in the world Church, North America, Europe, Latin America, the single biggest complaint I hear from engaged and intelligent Catholics is about the competence of the local bishop. Some of that is unfair, but a lot of it isn’t, and it speaks to a serious problem that the abuse crisis has brought to the fore.

Let me put that problem in historical terms. In the early 19th Century when the first Catholic bishops were being appointed in the then nascent United States of America, Pope Pius VII had a free right of appointment in perhaps 50 of the then some 600 dioceses in the world. The rest were controlled by governments, by cathedral chapters or other ecclesiastical organizations, but the Church did not have control over the most crucial appointments in its ordained leadership.

One of the great untold stories of the success of Vatican diplomacy over the past 200 years has been to change that situation such that now with what is it, more than 5,012 bishops in the world, and with the sole exceptions of Vietnam and China, the Church has

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 essentially a free right of appointment. So the Church has gathered back to itself after what some of us would consider this period of Babylonian captivity to state power in the appointment of bishops. It has regained the capacity to order its own house according to its own criteria. And, in fact, this has been imbedded in the new code of cannon law, which says that no rights of appointment are to be given in the future to state authorities.

However, if you were going to claim the right to appoint, then you must also in my view own the right to dismiss, and this is perhaps the single biggest management problem in the Catholic Church today, is that we do not have a mechanism in place for dealing with instances of manifest incompetence or worse in the exercise of the local Episcopal office, and that problem in turn explains a large amount, I think, of the dissatisfaction of not marginal Catholics, but serious Catholics, regular Church-going Catholics, major donor Catholics, with local bishops, with the quality of the Episcopate throughout the world Church.

So here is another huge problem that has got to be addressed presumably in the next pontificate. How does the Church get the quality of leadership that the people of the Church deserve, and how does the Church deal with the problem of, frankly, failed appointments? When we get it wrong, how do we deal with this? This has got to be addressed. In the abuse crisis, if one is thinking about this over the long term, it’s the biggest problem that has come to the surface that will have real effect on the life of the Church and the life of the people of the Church for the next 50 to 100 years.

MR. CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, John Allen is a Senior Correspondent, National Catholic Reporter, and according to the London Tablet, the most authoritative Vatican writer in the English language.

MR. ALLEN: What I want to do at the outset is simply to say that I would endorse in broad strokes everything that George has said. I would agree that the coverage in 2002 was superior to the coverage in 2010. I think the seven flawed assumptions that George gave you cover a lot of ground in terms of explaining why that’s the case. I think the central problem was in 2002 American reporters were writing about American bishops. So there was a shared culture that made understanding easier. In 2010, you had American reporters writing about the Vatican, which is a completely different world.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

If you want one window into that, one of my favorite examples would be differing concepts of time in these two cultures. My sound bite form of that usually is to say that America is a microwave culture and Rome is a crock pot culture, by which I mean that, you know, the American model is we want our food now. The Roman model is no, it’s supposed to simmer for a long time, and the idea is if you get the ingredients right it’ll taste better at the end.

That’s often a pretty big if, whether you get the ingredients right, but the point is that the default setting in American culture when faced with a problem is to act and act now. If something happens Tuesday morning, if you don’t have a solution for it by Tuesday afternoon, you’re either in denial or you’re incompetent or you’re complicit in the problem.

You know, the Roman model is the notion that you’re going to have a solution to a complex problem within 12 hours of having heard about it for the first time is just lunacy, and so the default setting is always to wait and to ponder. There’s this beautiful Italian word, which George knows well, “approfondire,” and this is the default Italian setting to any problem. Dobbiamo approfondire il discorso. We have to deepen the conversation. We have to think more, allow things to simmer.

And it’s not that one of these is right or the other is wrong, but that if you impose American assumptions about the lack of aggressive public policy response from the Vatican and interpret it through the lens of denial and incompetence and so on, you’re often going to misdiagnose things. So I think navigating that cultural gap is very important.

The question I would like to add a couple of pieces to try and to answer is the central question that we face about the coverage of 2010--why was the real story about Pope Benedict XVI’s record on the sex abuse crisis so difficult to tell in the American media environment, but that obviously begs the question of what was the real story. So let me try to give it to you in a nutshell.

I think the story is that prior to 2001, which of course, was the year of John Paul’s motu proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, which was this legal document that dumped responsibility for the sex abuse crisis in the office then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Prior to 2001, Joseph Ratzinger, his profile on this issue was utterly indistinguishable from any other senior figure in the power structure of the Catholic Church, that is to say, slow, ambivalent and often arguably in denial, not understanding the magnitude of the problem.

And this, of course, was largely because prior to 2001, Joseph Ratzinger had almost nothing to do with the sexual abuse crisis. I mean, there’s a reason that months and months into this reporting there still are only about four or five cases that have been put on the record where Ratzinger intersected with the sex abuse crisis. I mean, why are those the only cases we’ve heard about? Because these were the very rare instances in which this ever got to Rome. The vast majority of sex abuse cases prior to 2001 were never reported to the Vatican, never handled by the Vatican. They were handled on local levels.

So in 2001, Ratzinger gets responsibility for the problem and begins to read all the case files because from 2001 forward, local bishops were now obligated to send all of the case files to Rome for some kind of adjudication. And so in the congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith, Ratzinger was forced to confront the reality of this problem by roughly 2003. He had read the case files for every priest anywhere in the world who had ever been credibly accused of sexual abuse, meaning that by that stage, he knew more at the level of detail about the nature of this crisis than arguably anyone else on the planet, with the possible exception of Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who was the sort of DA, the lead prosecutor in the Vatican, who was Ratzinger’s right-hand man on this issue.

That experience of having to read the case files and to become aware of the dimension of the problem produced a kind of conversion experience in Ratzinger and in the Congregation for the Doctrine in the Faith. And I will tell you from having covered the Vatican on an up close and personal basis day in and day out during this period, that the Vatican’s response to the crisis from 2001 to 2005 can basically be understood in terms of a conflict between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith led by Ratzinger, which was pushing for an aggressive response, and a number of other dicasteries, that is, Vatican departments, the Secretariat of State, the Congregation for Bishops, the Congregation for Clergy, which would have been the opposition, which would have argued that this crisis is, to some extent, has been overdramatized by sensationalist media

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 coverage, and would have defended the due process rights of accused priests and felt the so-called zero tolerance policy adopted by the American bishops was an overreaction.

And then, of course, from 2005 forward, Ratzinger’s election to the papacy as Benedict, you know, we know his record. So the point is that prior to 2001, I think you can make a credible case, and we now have cases on the record of Ratzinger’s response being less than we today would suggest would have been appropriate.

Post 2001, you can really make an argument that Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, is the great reformer on the sex abuse issue, the only guy at senior levels of the Church who seemed to get it and who seemed to sort of cajole the Church into a more dramatic response.

Why was that story so difficult to tell? Well, I think the seven points George has made are helpful. I just want to add two other pieces to the picture in terms of where things went wrong.

First, I think the Vatican drew a bad hand in the sense that the first bit of truly critical reporting in this most recent cycle about the Pope’s record was the Hullermann case in Munich. In 1980, there was a priest from another German diocese, the Diocese of Essen, named Peter Hullermann who went into Munich for therapy because he had been accused of the sexual abuse of some boys of the parish where he was serving in Essen. Ratzinger was made aware of this. While he was in Munich he got an assignment in another parish where he went on to sexually abuse other young males and for which he was criminally convicted in Germany in 1986.

And this was all reported initially by the Suddeutsche Zeitung on March 12th and then very quickly by the New York Times, which fleshed out the picture and so on. I would argue that to this day, the Hullermann case remains the only truly serious indictment of Benedict XVI’s personal record on this issue.

The Hullermann case was a genuine failure, and of course, the Vatican’s initial response to that both in the Vatican and in the Archdiocese in Munich was to try to insulate the Pope from blame, to argue that he didn’t make this decision. It was made by his Vicar General. Ratzinger didn’t know, and so on. And let me just say I buy that. I mean, knowing

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

Joseph Ratzinger as I do, he very much lives in his mind. I mean, he’s never been interested in the nuts and bolts of ecclesiastical governance. He once famously said, “I do not have the charism of governance.”

So I find it perfectly credible that he did not know, but that, of course, doesn’t solve the problem. I mean, morally speaking the buck stopped in his desk. He was the Archbishop at the time this guy slipped through the cracks. So it’s not enough to say, “I didn’t know.”

Obviously, you have to go on to say, “But I should have known.” And I think had that been the response, had the response been that, you know, “I’m heartsick about this failure. You know, looking at it with the eyes of today, it’s obvious that the right precautions were not taken. I’m going to be reaching out to Father Hullermann’s victims to express my sorrow,” et cetera, et cetera. Had that been the tone, then I think it would have been easier to sort of mount a defense of the Pope’s record on the other cases that came to light.

Unfortunately, since that wasn’t the tone, I think the Vatican helped create an environment in which the script was denial, cover the wagons, insulate the Pope from responsibility. And once that script was in place, once that became the narrative, then I think that dominated the reporting of other cases as they emerged.

The second way in which this went wrong, if you are going to make the argument that Benedict XVI is the reformer on the sex abuse issue, that he is the guy who ten years ago kick-started the Church’s response, then to make it credibly, you have to explain the opposition that he was up against. You have to explain that back in 2001, 2002, 2003 part of the story of Ratzinger’s leadership was that he overcame senior officials, other senior officials in the Vatican power structure.

To explain what Ratzinger did right, you have to be able to explain what other senior Vatican officials did wrong, and the problem is that from the point of view of the corporate communication strategy of the Vatican, they simply do not have a vocabulary for indicting publicly, for publicly indicting the record of senior Vatican officials. There’s nothing in the culture that would sort of give somebody like Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, or other people who communicate publicly for the Holy See; there’s nothing that would sort of allow them to feel authorized to say, “Yes, John Paul

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

II’s Secretary of State made some grotesque mistakes in the handling of the sex abuse crisis.”

In other words, I think part of the reason the Vatican has been unable to tell Benedict’s story is that in order to defend Benedict, you have to indict other people at senior levels of the Church, and they just don’t have a structure. They don’t have the vocabulary for doing that, and I think that’s part of the reform of communication systems that has to happen.

Bottom line to all of this is that my own view would be that the coverage in 2010, particularly as it relates to the Vatican and Benedict XVI, quite often got the facts right but the story wrong. I mean, that is, you know, there really was a Lawrence Murphy case in Wisconsin. There really was a Stephen Kiesle case in Oakland. There really was a Campbell case, and so on.

The bigger picture in which those incidents need to be located was often missing. I do think some flawed assumptions on the media side, a lack of insight into the culture, both the culture of the Southern Mediterranean and the specific culture of the Holy See helped explain some of that.

But I also think responsibility has to be placed to some extent at the doorstep of the Vatican’s communications operation because early on when the Hullermann case broke, I think they had an opportunity to set a different narrative, and they failed. As these other cases played themselves out, they repeatedly had opportunities to change the narrative and they failed because doing so would have meant pointing the finger at people who were still around. You know, Angelo Sodano was still around. He’s still the Dean of the College of Cardinals, and it’s just constitutionally very difficult for them to sort of lay the case, make the case for exonerating one senior official at the expense of another.

So, I mean, in other words, I think the coverage for 2010 was a perfect storm in which you had flawed assumptions and, you know, often inaccurate diagnoses on the side of the media, and you had a singularly dysfunctional communications enterprise on the side of the Vatican. And given that perfect storm, you know, I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that the coverage was as often uneven and in some cases misleading as we saw.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

LAURIE GOODSTEIN, The New York Times: Both of you are sticking to the notions that we had before the reporting this year as though this year told us nothing at that was of use. Do you find there’s, you know, nothing? There’s no revelations in these documents or in what was learned this year that is different from what we knew before?

MR. ALLEN: Sure, we did. I mean, we learned that the response both of Joseph Ratzinger personally and the Vatican corporately to the sex abuse crisis prior to 2001 was inadequate. Now, I don’t think that’s anything we didn’t know before, but I think the reporting obviously fleshed it out. I mean, it showed us how the Murphy case was handled. It showed us how the Kiesle case was handled and so on.

You know, to flesh our out understanding of this case, I think there probably are a couple of other things that ought to be in the mix. I mean, one is that both of those guys had been suspended before the issue of laicization arose. So, I mean, in other words, officially speaking—and that had been the case for decades—neither of them had the authority to continue acting as Catholic priests. I think sometimes in the secular reporting we fail to make the distinction between suspension and laicization as if laicization is an all or nothing game.

The big picture here is, in the rare instances when cases involving sex abuse, and they are rare, usually these were handled administratively. The guy was shipped off for therapy. You know, six months later you get a psych eval. from whoever the counselor was. Bishops made decisions. Rome wasn’t a player. In these rare instances when bishops did want to laicize guys, we know that the procedures were painfully long, uncertain. The response obviously tended to emphasize the due process rights of the accused priest as opposed to the impact on victims in the larger community. And we know that much more clearly, thanks to the document trail that has been laid out.

Did the reporting that we’ve seen this year tell us things we didn’t know? Well, sure, it did, but I don’t think it changes the basic narrative, and the basic narrative is there was a fairly dramatic transition in Ratzinger and in the culture of the Holy See pre and post 2001, which if anything the reporting from this year I think makes it even more clear.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

MS. GOODSTEIN: I want to say in both cases where there was only suspension and not laicization, both those men continued to work as priests and to work with children.

MR. ALLEN: But they didn’t have official permission to do so. The response in both of these cases was completely woefully inadequate, and they should have been kicked out much earlier in the game than they were. However, I think it is also true that sometimes in secular reporting on the Church, we get hung up on this issue of laicization, as if the Church either laicizes somebody or it does nothing, and we sometimes forget that if your issue is you want to make sure that a guy cannot play off his status as a priest in order to sexually abuse kids, suspension when authorities make it stick, okay, when it works, suspension takes care of that. It is not accurate to say that if they that if they haven’t laicized a guy they’ve done nothing.

MR. WEIGEL: I think the overall picture is one of reform. So the intersection of this specific set of problems with the overall problem of the need to reform the institution of the priesthood and the preparation of priests, which had really gone off the rails is something that I had, frankly, not thought about before, and it was this 40 year old thing that brought that to my attention. I think the other thing I have learned is how utterly ill prepared, unwilling perhaps, Cardinal Sodano was, to exercise a kind of prime ministerial role as the king was dying. A stronger Secretary of State from the late 1990s, perhaps after the Jubilee Year on, would have coordinated, I would hope, this response better so that, you know, you don’t have the cardinal prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy blowing off these concerns in Holy Week of 2002 and saying the Pope has got more important things to worry about like peace in the Middle East. I mean, this was really a bad managerial situation.

LAUREN GREEN, Fox News: It seems to me that the Catholic Church has a culture of, you know, we’re in, you’re out. You know, there is this constant tension between assimilation and separation, between the supernatural and, you know, the temporal, theological versus secular justice. I don’t know if there’s a solution to this.

MR. ALLEN: If part of what’s latent in that question is the issue of cooperation between the Church and civil authorities, the cops and prosecutors around the world and so forth, I think for the most part, I think, that problem has been resolved in favor of cooperation.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

Today it is very clear. The Vatican has put out this set of procedures, and the expectation is cooperation.

But the Catholic Church is unique in terms of major world religions because it has its own body of law. It has its own set of courts. It has its own justice system, and there has often been some confusion in terms of interpreting the Church’s own juridical response to the sex abuse crisis as if that was at odds with or excluding civil accountability for priests who abuse.

In other words, the problem with the Church, in terms of its response to the crisis was not that it had bad law. It was that it had bad culture. I mean, we simply had a culture in which these things weren’t talked about, in which we didn’t turn guys over to the cops, in which we didn’t air our dirty laundry in public.

It’s that culture and the cancer in that culture that the crisis has exposed. I mean, in some ways I wish it were as simple as changing Church law. If all you had to do was flip a switch in Rome and make the world different, life would be a lot easier, but unfortunately that’s not the reality.

What the Church has had painfully and in some ways incompletely become aware of is that reliance on internal disciplinary procedures at the core of which are a set of theological assumptions, you know, about we stand before God in our accountability, and so on, that reliance on those procedures has to unfold in tandem with, full cooperation with civil, secular systems of accountability.

One footnote to that is the Pope’s failure to impose a uniform global policy of automatic cooperation with police and with civil prosecutors continues to be one element in the indictment that people will offer in terms of how the Vatican has responded to this, and I think that may be one of the places where looking at the global Catholic situation exclusively through American eyes becomes problematic, because while I think it’s reasonable to suggest that in the main the policy ought to be cooperation, there are places where a binding inflexible policy of automatic cooperation with civil authorities would be a real problem.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

George was talking about how the crisis intersects with larger narratives about the Church. I think this is one, too, that trying to apply Western or American assumptions about the way life works, we have to bear in mind that the Catholic Church is a 1.2 billion strong global church, two-thirds of whose members today live in the southern hemisphere. By mid-century, that’s going to be 75 percent, and therefore, American and Western realities can’t be the exclusive prism through which we handicap the way the Vatican responds to things.

ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times: I wonder if we could talk just a little bit more about Benedict’s relationship to the Curia and sort of what you see as the Pope’s power over the Curia, the Curia’s power over the Pope, and the Pope’s ability to change the Curia. You’ve been talking about how the narrative of Ratzinger/Benedict’s transformation didn’t get the play it perhaps deserves, and I think one of the reasons is because from the point of view of a secular reporter, there isn’t tangible evidence that they lost in terms of their own personal power being reduced.

MR. ALLEN: If your basic point is that in the Vatican it is virtually impossible to get fired, that’s true. Now, there’s a striking gap between insider and outsider perceptions of the Vatican on the best of days.

You asked about Benedict’s relationship with the Curia. The sex abuse crisis that erupted in 2010 is merely the most visible example of a much broader crisis of governance under this papacy. I mean, administratively, managerially, things are adrift and have been for a long time. In terms of having your hand on the rudders of power, okay, it’s just the lights are on but nobody is home in terms of the governance dimension of the Holy See these days.

Benedict XVI I am convinced 200 years from now will be remembered as one of the great teaching Popes of recent centuries. If you look at his encyclicals, if you look at the speeches he gives on his foreign trips, I mean, this magnificent speech he gave in Westminster Hall in the U.K. in September, you know, his books and on and on, I mean, it’s incredibly provocative and powerful stuff.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

But, you know, unfortunately, you don’t live in the world 200 years from now. You live in the world of today, and you know that passion for his teaching comes at a price. He just is not interested in governance. The teaching is good enough that’s what he ought to be doing, but he needs to be surrounded by people obviously who do have the charism of governance.

What everyone would tell you about Benedict XVI before and after his election is that his Achilles heel is that he is often not a good judge of talent. I mean, the people who served him in the Holy Office were of uneven quality, some of them very good, some of them not so hot. Certainly the same thing would be true about the current regime, you know, that’s running the show.

The consequent reality is that from the inside, this looks like a great teaching papacy. From the outside, it looks like a papacy defined by its train wrecks.

MR. WEIGEL: Part of the difficulty that John is describing at least as I observe it from a distance is that this is a man who is incapable except under the direst of circumstances of inflicting pain on someone. This may be an entirely admirable Christian characteristic, but it’s not exactly what you need if you have situation after situation where someone has proven incompetent or malfeasant or whatever.

So there’s something we’ve all learned over the last five years. It turns out he wasn’t this Rottweiler. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of those who were instrumental in electing Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope fully expected that he would take in hand a dramatic reform of the Roman Curia, and that turns out to have been a very inadequate expectation of what he thought he was going to do.

I think he thought he was going to die soon. In the 20-some years I’ve known him, he has always been overly concerned about how frail he is. Seems in pretty good shape to me, but, no, I actually think he thought, “I’m going to do this for three, four years. I will hand over it to someone else. So I’m going to concentrate on what I know how to do and the next guy can do the institutional rebuilding.”

That, and I think the notion that this man at age 78 was suddenly going to become something different than what he was. This was just not part of people’s reflection. He

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 had done such a magnificent job at JP II’s funeral. He had been so good at running the Congregations of Cardinals between the Pope’s death and the funeral. He was, as they say, the elder brother who simply stood head and shoulders above all the rest.

That the question of whether he was personally capable of doing what a lot of people wanted done, which was turning the whole thing upside down and shaking it out and perhaps even redesigning the management structure, was not an unrealistic assumption, and it now has turned out to be the case.

NINA EASTON, Fortune: Did not the Vatican at one point blame sexual abuse on the secularization of society (a), and (b) at another point ranked it right up there with married priests, for priests getting married as a sin in the Catholic Church? With all due respect, doesn’t the buck stop here when it comes to the Pope and those kinds of responses?

MR. WEIGEL: I don’t think it’s fair to say that the way a certain technical adjustment was made in canon law suggests what you suggested at the end here, that, you know, we’re equating certain things here. That was a blunder of communications, but it was not a blunder in understanding.

Does anyone doubt that the current circumstance of a virtual sexual free fire zone in the Western world has something to do with spikes in incidence of child abuse across society? Now, you don’t blame it on that. I mean, part of the problem throughout this whole thing has been, going back eight years, has been the failure to say, “Look. We know this stuff goes on everywhere, but we are holding ourselves to a higher standard and, therefore, we’re not going to use that as an excuse.” That has not been said, it seems to me, sufficiently. It is true that there are by orders of magnitude more incidents of the sexual abuse of the young in American public schools than in American Catholic Churches, but we’re holding ourselves to a different standard, and we can’t use the rest of this as an excuse.

However, if all of us, as people who shape the public conversation, care about this colossally widespread problem, we’re going to take this set of incidences of it and make that the occasion to look at other aspects of it as well, but it’s not for the Church to say that, it seems to me.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

MR. ALLEN: I just want to endorse your point that the Vatican’s communication’s tone deafness, the defensive finger-pointing, wounded image that it often projected and particularly during this most recent period of the crisis, it cemented that narrative I was talking about, that narrative in which defensiveness and denial is the story of the Vatican’s response. All of that, no doubt, was part of why the take-away for the typical person about the Vatican’s response and the Church’s response was so woeful.

I know this is very difficult for people to believe, but there is no communication strategy in the Vatican. I mean, usually when I’m asked what do I think of the Vatican’s communication strategy, my snappy answer is as soon as I see evidence that they’ve got one, I’ll tell you, but you know, they don’t.

I mean, there’s no war room where guys get together at eight o’clock in the morning and decide what today’s message is going to be, you know. So, in other words, this often, you know, ad hoc and off the cuff and unscripted and so on, I wish to God there were a communications strategy, but there isn’t.

My point is that rather than thinking that there was some kind of corporate decision in favor of denial and in favor of, you know, making the problem worse rather than making it better, the practical reality is there is no strategy, you know, for good or for ill.

Do they know that is a problem? The question that begs is who exactly is “they,” right? Here’s the thing. There is often a tendency to think of the Vatican in these kind of mythic terms as an organism that has a central nervous system and thinks only one thought at a time, the Vatican is not an organism. It’s a complex bureaucracy, which means there are lots of different temperaments and outlooks and opinions about things, and there is a tendency sometimes to take a one off isolated comment from an official and treat that as “the Vatican says X,” when in fact, not everyone in the Vatican feels that way at all.

So do they understand the lack of the strategy is a problem. Some do; some don’t. You know, obviously there’s not a sufficient center of gravity yet to rectify it, okay, but there clearly is an understanding there.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

My point simply is that I think sometimes what will happen is that these more spectacular examples of tone deafness sort of carry a weight that is sometimes disproportionate to what most people in the Vatican actually think.

The way the Vatican works, this is a clue, an insider clue. When they want to distance themselves from something, okay, they don’t publicly deny it. What they do is they don’t repeat it. In terms of the internal logic of the Vatican, that business about not repeating it is the way they signal that this doesn’t reflect what we think, you know. Insiders get it, you know, but the vast majority of the rest of the world never does.

What the Pope hasn’t dealt with is the institutional dimension. He thinks, what I am is a teacher, and essentially I’m going to turn the papacy into a global classroom, and I’m going to try to reintroduce Christian orthodoxy to a jaded world. And that’s his project. Which is phenomenal, but it means that he is not personally engaged in the managerial dimension, and he has not surrounded himself with people who have an aptitude for that. In fact, what they have an aptitude for often is making things worse.

The great irony of this papacy is that at one level, you know, its teaching dimension, it is an enormous success story. And if all you had to evaluate Benedict on was his teaching, I think, you know, even many of his critics over the years would say that the teaching has actually been very good. But that story is sort of utterly occluded from public perceptions because you have at the same time this kind of raging management crisis, a crisis of governance that means that in terms of the court of popular opinion, you know, what people see is this papacy at its worst. You know, they see its debacles and its meltdowns and its disasters, which keep replicating themselves. The tragedy of this papacy is you’ve got a world class teacher. Unfortunately nobody is paying any attention because the schoolhouse is on fire, and that’s the practical reality.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: I’d just like to get your sense of whom we should watch as the next potential Pope.

MR. WEIGEL: I think while John and I were naming several possible African Popes, I, frankly, don’t expect to see this in my own lifetime, which is too bad.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

Whenever this question comes up in our planning meetings, I always say it depends on how it happens. If the transition happens as the result of an assassination, then there will be a certain set of dynamics in place to try to resolve the matter of the next Pope very quickly in order to demonstrate continuity, et cetera. And that would begin to favor in- place, respected, experienced managers like, for example, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, the present Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, and the last sostituto or Chief of Staff of John Paul II and the man who announced John Paul II’s death, as many of you will remember.

If this happens in the normal way of an illness followed by a death, there’s not a panic. There’s not a crisis situation, then I think you’re looking at a very long conclave because not only is there not one leading candidate, I don’t think you could come up with three to five leading candidates, and I think it’s going to take quite a while to sort this out, given in part the imperatives we have been talking about today, curial reform, reform of the communications apparatus, somehow nonetheless in the midst of all of that, maintaining this kind of evangelical teaching focus and so forth and so on.

I gave you Sandri. I don’t know that he can make it, but I think Cardinal Ouellet, formerly of Quebec, now the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, is going to get some support particularly from some Americans. The present President of the European Bishops Conference, the Archbishop of Budapest, Esztergom, Peter Erdo, will get a look from some. I’m not sure there’s something there. I would not be surprised if this is three to five years down the line to see people beginning to look at the new Archbishop of Warsaw who will be a cardinal as of Saturday, Kazimierz Nycz. He’s the closest thing to a Wojtyla in the Polish hierarchy, and I think you’d have to put him on that list.

MR. ALLEN: I don’t think we’re going to be faced with this any time soon. I agree that there’s no obvious front runner. I’m telling you the people who understand that the best from the inside out are the cardinals, many of them. Many of them are as frustrated with it, if not more so, than everybody else. I think there is a sense, therefore, that you would not as naturally look to the architects of the managerial dimension of this papacy as the people you want to carry the institution forward.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

The other issue becomes if the voting issue of that Conclave is you want to fix the governance crisis that you associate with the papacy of Benedict XVI, that poses something of a paradox for the electors, doesn’t it? Because on the one hand, they want somebody who has got a demonstrated track record of ability to govern. In other words, it sort of argues for an insider, and yet if you think the insiders are the problem…it pushes you in sort of two opposing directions. It’s hard to come up with somebody who has got that profile, somebody who knows the Roman Curia from within, who you could have reasonable confidence will be able to get his hands around it, but who you would not sort of associate with the crisis that you’re trying to resolve. In terms of people who I think would get a look, I think the people George mentioned are right on the money.

CARL CANNON, PoliticsDaily.com: When you said that the Vatican has no mechanism for exonerating one senior official at the expense of another, it dawned on me that what had happened in the last year was that if you were really going to evaluate what happened, it was the current Pope. If you were going to exonerate him, it was really the previous Pope that had to be left holding the bag. I’m asking you is that true. Is that your perception, not these other functionaries that know American had never heard of the previous Pope. Is that what really was going on and why Ratzinger — why they couldn’t get his story out, as you see his story?

MR. ALLEN: I think the perception in some quarters of the Holy See was that to really tell Ratzinger’s story, to really tell Benedict’s story would end up impugning the legacy of John Paul II because it’s not like these guys, Sodano and Castrillon and so forth were operating in a vacuum. I mean, they were put into those positions by John Paul II, and they were making decisions in his name.

Castrillon was the first to go down. They cut him loose. Now, Sodano is still around. He’s still the Dean of the College of Cardinals, but clearly his star has fallen. I mean, he’s not put out front anymore. So he’s on the brink. That’s the next domino that’s going to go down. I think the fear is that after Sodano, you might get to Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, who had been John Paul’s private secretary, and hard questions might be asked about the role he played, for example, in creating a back door channel for Father Marcial, the founder of the Legionaries with the Pope, et cetera, et cetera.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

And ultimately if that domino goes down, then we end up with the Pope himself. Now, fair, right or wrong is almost independent. That’s the psychology. I mean, in other words, the fear is that ultimately where this is going is end up is that too aggressive an effort to make Benedict look like a reformer means he had something to reform, and responsibility for creating that need of reform would lie with John Paul II.

And I do think that has shaped the kind of ambivalence and the half-heartedness and the mixed message in terms of the Vatican’s public defense of Benedict that we’ve seen.

MR. CANNON: Should the failure to deal with this problem over a generation be a more prominent part of the legacy of the previous Pope, of John Paul II?

MR. WEIGEL: I do discuss this in the new book at some length, and I discuss it in terms of 26 and a half years of the reform of the priesthood. I mean, I think that is the relevant framework for thinking about this, not a framework created by the stories that we’re talking about here. The stories that we’re talking about here fit within that framework, and I think a number of things have to be said there. First of all, charges of sexual impropriety were a standard part of the Communist assault on the Catholic clergy in central and eastern Europe from the Second World War till the day Wojtyla got on the plane to Rome for the Conclave that elected him Pope. So that’s the personal experience he brings to this, and that obviously was a problem. I mean, it was a problem in creating a set of assumptions about how one responds to those sorts of charges.

Secondly, he was the legislator of the 1982 Code of Cannon Law. That had been started during the previous regime, but he’s the guy that drove that through to a conclusion, and I think they really believed they had given local bishops the competence to deal with these things, and they had given priests protection against the arbitrary use of power by bishops who may not have liked a guy, et cetera.

That turns out to have been wrong, but I think that’s exactly what they thought. On the Marcial case, I don’t see any other explanation, except that the Pope was badly deceived, and that’s exactly what I say in the book. Marcial happens to have been a master deceiver. He deceived an awful lot of very smart people, including some of the richest people in the world. The Pope failed to read this guy accurately.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

So I don’t think it’s fair to say that he was at fault in all of this in the sense that John is suggesting the dominos fall. It’s certainly the way they think over there, and that’s part of what has to be changed. I mean, part of what remains to be changed is this assumption of, this is the way this will play out.

No, we all know that the appropriate response to serious screw-up is to get it all out quick and acknowledge responsibility, et cetera, and I would add to that find a mechanism for quickly dealing with the people who you are reasonably certain did not deal with this the way they should or who have made utterly embarrassing public statements that do not reflect the mind of the Church or the mind of either of these two Popes.

CLARE DUFFY, NBC News: I wanted to go back to what Michael asked about the communications arm of this. Is there any sense that this is going to change any time soon? Have we discovered the Internet? I realize culturally, yes, they don’t exist in our 24-7 universe, which I’m not here to argue its merits either, but at the same time this is a 1.2 billion strong institution. This is not the Amish. There has to be more direction from this office. There can’t then be, well, you know, the coverage in 2010 was so biased. Is there any sense that is a priority for anyone, that it’s going to move at all?

MR. ALLEN: No. Let me just give you a very brief education of Vatican politics because the problem, honest to God, is not the press office. The paradox is you’ve got a spokesperson who— I have more contact with the Pope, who Lombardi is speaking on behalf of, than he does.

Now, why is that? It is because Lombardi is controlled by and responsible to the Secretariat of State. I think every institution has a built in tension between the communicators and what you might call the civil service. And the civil service’s instinct is if we’ve got a problem, we’ll get back to you in three weeks after we’ve consulted 27 experts and, you know, blah, blah, blah, whereas the communicator’s instinct is, no, we need to do this and we need to do it now.

Under John Paul II that tension was resolved in favor of the communicator, Navarro Valls. Navarro Valls had direct and unmediated access to the Pope. He bypassed the Secretariat of State. That was a running source of tension for the Secretariat of State which hated the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 press office and hated Navarro Valls because they felt they should be the ones making these decisions, not Navarro Valls, but John Paul backed him up.

Under Benedict XVI, the situation has flip-flopped, and the Secretariat of State has reasserted its traditional control over messaging and so on, which means that Lombardi doesn’t work for the Pope. Lombardi works for Cardinal Bertone, and unfortunately, you’ve got a guy in Bertone, wonderful Salesian, pastoral heart and all that, but you know, communicating in a 24-7 global village just is not in his wheelhouse.

Lombardi can’t open his mail without Bertone’s permission. In other words, it’s not as simple as saying, oh, we’ve got a bad spokesperson. So it’s a structural problem that needs a structural fix. So I do think there is a frisson, that there’s an awareness of a problem. However, I think married to that awareness of the problem is a kind of resignation that it’s not going to be fixed under this papacy, that Benedict XVI basically has indicated in every way he possibly can that he is joined at the hip to Cardinal Bertone, and as long as Bertone and his regime and Secretariat of State are still in place, this structural problem is not going to be fixed. There’s diagnosis, but there isn’t cure.

MR. WEIGEL: I’ve had many similar conversations with people who really want to know, how do we get this right. And I think you’ve now got throughout the Roman Curia, and it’s not just Americans, a cadre of high second and third tier people who really want this to change, who want to go out and engage, but because this remains, this really pyramidal structure here, they have no capacity to give effect to that except to try to push it from within and to get the website up with all of the statements and to get things done in languages that people actually understand.

But John is exactly right that as long as the present cast of characters at the top of the pyramid remains what it is we are going to have these problems. The further paradox of this is that the Pope is his own best spokesman.

DR. WILLIAM GALSTON, The Brookings Institution: As just a casual reader and follower, it has been my impression that especially under John Paul II, there was a real effort to centralize the appointment of bishops, that is, to take more direct personal oversight over those appointments. If that’s correct, then George’s indictment of the weakness of the

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 bishops would also seem to be an indictment of the man who appointed most of them, but maybe I’m missing something.

Here’s my second question. We all know there’s some things that are sins in the eyes of the Church that are not crimes in the eyes of secular law, but there are some things that are sins that are also crimes. And with regard to the latter category, it is not my understanding that your actions can be optional in those situations. If you come into possession of evidence of a serious crime in the eyes of secular law and you withhold that, technically speaking you’re acting to obstruct justice. Now, whatever gave anyone the idea that if there’s credible evidence of something that is regarded as a crime in the eyes of the secular law having been committed, that there is discretionary authority to withhold that information?

MR. WEIGEL: On the question of the appointment of bishops, the Pope cannot possibly even if it were 26 and a half years, have an intimate knowledge of the more than what was it, 3,000 bishops he appointed? He is in some sense the prisoner of the system which relies heavily on the Vatican Ambassador or Nuncio in a particular country to develop these so-called “turnas” or lists of candidates.

MR. ALLEN: On the legal thing, it is now the Vatican’s official policy that where bishops are mandatory reporters, that is, where they are obligated by law to report incidents of sexual abuse, they must comply with that civil law. Where they are not obligated by civil law to do that, in the ordinary course of circumstances they should do so unless there is some compelling reason.

Where did the idea come from that they didn’t have to do that, you know, up until very recently? I think there was a kind of widespread cultural thing that wasn’t just restricted to bishops not reporting priests who were guilty of sexual abuse. I think it was in the water, in the kind of bloodstream of the Church.

It’s not like bishops are the only guys who knew this was going on. I mean, I think you could go into any diocese in America and you can find other clergy probably who knew that so-and-so was doing stuff. You could probably find laity.

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010

What is painfully clear today is that (a) for a variety of different reasons the Church wasn’t capable of cleaning up its own mess, and therefore, this has to be entrusted to the civil system, and (b), the Church shouldn’t get special treatment; that when it comes to criminal and civil law, priests stand before the law like every other kind of citizen. That awareness took an awful long time to arrive, but I think, you know, the good news is in the main, it’s there today.

CATHY GROSSMAN,USA Today: On the 19th, the Pope has called all of the cardinals in to talk about the sex abuse crisis. What do you expect will happen on the 19th?

E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: I’m wondering if this is not a communications problem as such. One, if a lot of these folks get up there and say the same stuff over and over again, maybe they are actually communicating exactly what they want to communicate. Secondly, it’s a structural problem. You made the great point, John, that they didn’t want to say this guy and failed in order to defend Benedict, but that’s not a communications problem. I think there is a problem where the modern media, particularly the American media, are rooted in a certain democratic sensibility and a form of democratic accountability and clearly that democratic spirit is not what the Vatican is about. So I think it does raise more profound issues about the Church and the structure of the Vatican. I’d love you to comment on that.

The second quick point on appointments. George, our point is Rome can hire them, Rome can fire them, but there is a long tradition in the Church of local churches through almost quasi or pre-democratic structures having much more control over bishops, and maybe the problem is excessive centralization, and it’s an issue, I think, the Church needs to grapple with.

The third point. Wasn’t the Church’s reaction in 2010 the same as in 2001, which is a great deal of self-protection? And wasn’t Laurie’s reporting important and changed the nature of the discussion because before she reported this, it was possible to put almost all responsibility on local bishops?

MR. ALLEN: What should we expect from November 19th? Virtually nothing. I mean, bear in mind the Pope has not called the cardinals in the room to talk about the sex abuse

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 crisis. They’re coming because there’s a consistory. Under John Paul, the Vatican adopted this custom of scheduling a business meeting for the cardinals the day before the consistory because it’s really the only time other than a Conclave they’re all together.

There are five items on that agenda. Sex abuse is one of three things they’re going to try to do between five and seven o’clock in the afternoon, which means they’re going to talk about it for maybe a half hour. If you’re expecting some breathtaking new policy initiative to result, I’ve got some land in, you know, a swamp I’d like to try to sell you. So nothing.

David, your point about this not being just a communications problem, of course, it’s not. All I was suggesting, it is at least a communications problem and that while we might not be able to resolve some of the deeper kind of psycho-structural factors that you were trying to sketch, I think there is at least at the moment some realistic hope of putting a dent on the communications front, not so much in terms of it happening in this papacy, but I do think there is a new critical awareness of the importance of doing that. My point simply is that there is a new kind of awareness, I think, of the intolerability of that kind of thing which would suggest there’s some momentum to eventually doing something about it.

Finally, E.J., your point about the reporting being valuable that we’ve seen, Laurie’s and others, because you’ve brought this home to the Vatican. At one level I would enthusiastically endorse that. I mean, you are right that there was a kind of tendency particularly inside the Vatican pre-2010 to suggest that the responsibility for this was exclusively at the lower level of the Church, and that is to say, oh, isn’t it too bad. We had these bishops who shirked their responsibilities and didn’t do what they should have done, and there was a failure to kind of take some measure of ownership for the problem because, I mean, the truth is structurally, as you know, a bishop is accountable only to the Pope.

So I do think that was a contribution. On the other hand, I think packaged with that I would go back to where I began, that there was also, I think, a failure at times to tell the full story of what Rome’s role in the crisis had been and, in a particular way, what the Pope’s role in the crisis had been. I think that was one part, a kind of cultural gap, you

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr.  November 2010 know, that separates Americans from Italians, the secular media from the world of the Catholic Church and on and on.

I think it was another part, spectacular failures on the part of the Vatican to tell that story adequately. So the reporting was valuable because it did put the Vatican into the mix, I think at a cost sometimes, however, of misdiagnosing what both the past the present of the Vatican’s role has been.

MR. WEIGEL: E.J., dioceses should absolutely be consulted on the appointment of bishops. This remains to be fixed. I think ultimately you don’t want the state involved in this, which is what Pius VII’s situation was, but I think you are going to get a much better answer to the question what kind of man do you think you need for your shepherd in this particular location by consulting widely with engaged laity and priests than the present form seems to allow.

David, I would deepen again your comment simply by saying it’s true. It’s not just a communications problem. It’s an ecclesiological problem. It’s a problem of how you think of the Church. If the Church is an institution to be maintained, then there is a certain kind of weird logic even in what appears to us to be this Keystone Cops communications operation. You’re just trying to get through to the next thing. If the Church is a mission, if it doesn’t have a mission as one function among others, if it is a mission, and if the mission is being fundamentally impeded by this inability to be self-disciplined, et cetera, then that’s not just a communications problem. I mean, that’s a problem to really understand the distinctive nature of this community and the one thing that it exists to do, the one thing that it exists to do.

MR. CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking both of our speakers.

 END 

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]