Pedophile priests, the lies of the BBC video

The video presents a fully public document as “confidential”. And it attempts to oppose John Paul II to Ratzinger by Massimo Introvigne (published on Avvenire on May 30, 2007)

Only the secularist rage accounts for the sudden circulation over the internet of the BBC documentary “Sex Crimes and the Vatican”, dating back to October 2006, with Italian subtitles and for the frenzy of Michele Santoro (Italian anchorman) and the likes. The document is indeed damaged goods: when it first came out, it was immediately torn to pieces by the specialists in Roman law, given that it confuses Roman Catholic law with State law. The Church has also its own criminal law, which, among other things, deals with the offences committed by priests and with related sanctions, ranging from a divinis to . These penalties have nothing to do with the State, even if a priest guilty of a crime falling under civil laws may be brought to trial twice: by the Church, which will reduce him to lay status, and by the State, which will send him to prison.

On April 30, 2001, John Paul II (1920-2005) published the apostolic letter Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, which contains a set of provisions establishing which canonical criminal trials fall under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and which ones under the jurisdiction of other Vatican or diocesan tribunals. The letter , signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on May 18, 2001 – the one presented by the BBC as a secret document, whilst it was immediately published on the journal of the and it is posted on the Vatican’s website – contains directives for the practical implementation of the rules established by John Paul II.

In this regard, the documentary contains three lies: (a) it presents a fully public and well-known document as confidential; (b) given that in the documentary the “villain” must be the current Pontiff, Benedict XVI (according to secularists, the “good” Pope is always the dead one), it does not explain that the letter De delictis gravioribus, signed by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on May 18, 2001, is simply aimed at implementing the regulations promulgated with the apostolic letter Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela of April 30 by John Paul II; (c) it leads the naive spectator to believe that, by stating that the trials for certain delicta graviora (“more serious crimes”), among which some sex crimes, fall under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church wants to instruct Bishops to avoid the State jurisdiction and to hide them. On the contrary, it is absolutely evident that these documents deal with the issue, once ecclesiastical proceedings have been instituted, of which tribunal is competent by Roman , i.e. whether it is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which in these cases acts “as the apostolic tribunal” (as stated in the Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela), or some other ecclesiastical tribunal. These documents do not deal at all – nor they could, given their nature – with the decisions and sanctions of State tribunals.

Anyone knowing something about the functioning of the Roman will clearly understand that, when the two documents state that “these crimes fall under the exclusive competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, the word “exclusive” means “excluding the competence of other ecclesiastical tribunals”, not – as the documentary wants us to believe – “excluding the competence of State tribunals, to which we will hide these events, even if the crimes are provided for and punished by State laws”. No one is questioning this or that episode of conflict between States and the Church. The two letters clarify from the very beginning their scope, i.e. to regulate issues of competence within the canonical legal system. They simply have nothing to do with the legal systems of States.

Note 3 of the letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – but, as a matter of fact, also the text of the previous letter by John Paul II – mentions the , issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was then called the Holy Office, on March 16, 1962, during the pontificate of Blessed John XXIII (1881-1963), well before the arrival of Ratzinger himself to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (therefore, he clearly has nothing to do with the decree; at the time he was a professor of theology in Germany).

This forgotten decree, “discovered” in 2001 only thanks to the new documents and today no longer in force, was not meant to deal with , but with the old problem of priests abusing the sacrament of to have sexual relationships with their penitents. It is true that, after dealing in the first seventy paragraphs with the case of penitent women having sexual relationships with their confessors, in four paragraphs, from 70 to 74, the Crimen sollicitationis establishes the applicability of the same procedure to the crimen pessimus (“worst crime”), i.e. the sexual relationship of a priest “with a person of the same sex”, and, in paragraph 73 – by analogy with the crimen pessimus – also to the cases (quod Deus avertat, “God forbid”) in which a cleric has relationships with prepubescent youths (cum impuberibus). Paragraph 73 of the document is the only one shown in the documentary, which makes spectators believe that child abuse is the main subject of the document, whereas the problem was not on the agenda in 1962 and the decree devotes exactly half a line to it.

The documentary contains another enormous lie when it states that the Crimen sollicitationis was aimed at covering up abuses by throwing such a blanket of secrecy over them that “breaking that oath (of secrecy) means instant banishment from the Catholic Church – excommunication”. It is exactly the opposite: paragraph 16 obliges the victim of abuses to denounce them “within a month”, based on a provision dating back to 1741. Paragraph 17 extends the obligation of denunciation to any Catholic faithful having a “certain knowledge” of the abuses. Paragraph 18 specifies that the faithful who disregards the obligation of denunciation established in paragraphs 16 and 17 “falls into an excommunication”. Therefore, the penalty of excommunication is not for the ones who denounce the abuses, but, on the contrary, for the ones who do not denounce them.

The decree also provides that trials must take place in chambers, in order to protect the privacy of victims, of witnesses, as well as of defendants, all the more so if they are innocent. This is clearly not the only case of trials in chambers, neither in the ecclesiastical nor in the state legal systems. As for the “secret” nature of the document, mentioned in the text, it is a “secret” justified by the delicacy of the matter, and it is actually a very relative secret, given that the document was sent to all the Bishops around the world. Be that as it may, today the document is no longer secret, given that – after reading the documents of 2001 – lawyers involved in suits against priests accused of pedophilia in the United States asked to file the document in the acts of trials which became public. Those lawyers were hoping to find in the Crimen sollicitationis material for increasing their claims for damages, which already amounted to several million dollars: but they did not find anything. Indeed, not even the Crimen sollicitationis has anything to do with the issue whether any illegal act committed by priests through the abuse of the sacrament of confession shall be reported by anyone learning about it to the civil authorities.

The Crimen sollicitationis only concerns the procedural aspects for the prosecution of these crimes under the Roman canon law, with the aim to impose canonical sanctions on guilty clerics. Even Tom Doyle, a former army chaplain appearing in the documentary, stated in a letter, dated October 13, 2006 addressed to John L. Allen, who is probably the best known Vatican correspondent in the United States, that “although I was a consultant to the producers of the documentary I am afraid that some of the distinctions I have made about the 1962 document have been lost. I do not believe now nor have I ever believed it to be proof of an explicit conspiracy, in the conventional sense, engineered by top Vatican , to cover up cases of clergy ”.

Tom Doyle still remains strongly opposed to the “drastically wrong culture” he sees in the Church of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. However, he also realizes that the arguments of the documentary on the Crimen sollicitationis are untenable and he prudently tries to distance himself from it, though with a language which remains ambiguous.

Another trick of the documentary consists in maintaining that the letter De delictis gravioribus, signed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001, represents the “successor” to the Crimen sollicitationis, “overarching secrecy with a threat of excommunication”. In fact, the letter of 2001 does not even mention the word “excommunication” once. It certainly repeats that the procedures for the delicta graviora are “subject to the ”, i.e. they must take place in chambers and in a confidential way. But there is nothing new in it, nor is the secret applied only to the cases of sexual abuse. The documentary maliciously confuses secrecy of the trial and secrecy of the crime, both with respect to the De delictis gravioribus and to the Crimen sollicitationis. The crime is not at all bounded to remain secret; on the contrary, the two documents state that people are obliged to report it under the penalty of excommunication. On the other hand, the trial is destined to remain secret, in order to protect – as stated above – all the parties to the case.

It is this secrecy of the trial which is protected under the threat of excommunication to the judges, the officials, and to the accused cleric himself, in paragraphs 12 and 13 of the Crimen sollicitationis (as for the victims and the witnesses, they are asked to swear the secret, but are subject to no religious penalty, unless explicitly imposed by the judge during their depositions). If there is anything new in the De delictis gravioribus in comparison with the previous regulations on sexual abuses, it is the fact that the letter introduces stricter rules in the case of abuses on minors. Indeed, the De delictis gravioribus makes this kind of abuse prosecutable beyond the normal time limits, i.e. until the persons stating they were abused when they were minors turn 28 (and not 18, as some have written: indeed, the time limit is ten years, but in the crime perpetrated by a cleric against a minor, decurrere incipit a die quo minor duodevicesimum aetatis annum explevit, i.e. “it begins on the day in which the minor turns 18 years old” and from that date it lasts for ten years, until the victim turns 28).

To give a very concrete example, this means that if a 4-year-old child is abused in 2007, the crime is statute-barred only in 2031, which clearly shows that the Church is willing to prosecute these offences even many years after they occurred and well beyond the common time limits. With these new provisions, the severity of the Church towards priests accused of pedophilia has significantly increased under Benedict XVI. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that, when in doubt, the Church has decided to take precautionary measures, even in cases in which there was no evidence of abuses allegedly committed many years ago. Another significant proof of the increased strictness of the Church is the appointment of the American Cardinal William Joseph Levada, who is well- known for his severity towards pedophile priests, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Once again, all these regulations pertain to the canon law, i.e. the suspensions and for priests guilty of sexual abuse. They have nothing to do with the State law, nor with the general principle according to which – without prejudice to the secret of confession only – any Church member learning of a crime rightly punished by State laws is obliged to report it to the competent authorities. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the civil authorities have a right to the “loyal collaboration” of citizens (par. 2238); “fraud and other subterfuges, by which some people evade the constraints of the law and the prescriptions of societal obligation, must be firmly condemned because they are incompatible with the requirements of justice” (par. 1916).

The citizen is no longer obliged to “loyal collaboration” with the civil authorities only when their directives “are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel” (par. 2242): if this limitation did not exist, then one would conclude that the Catholic citizens should have offered their “loyal collaboration” also to the Third Reich and that they should have reported any violation to the racial laws they would have learned of to the Gestapo. Instead, given that the laws protecting minors from abuse are not at all “contrary to the demands of the moral order”, the obligation to “loyal collaboration” prescribed by the Catechism is enforced and the “fraud and other subterfuges” by which one tries to evade these laws are “firmly condemned”.

It is certainly true that in the past these indications have not always been followed (but abusus non tollit usum, wrong use does not preclude proper use). The legitimate desire to protect innocent, unfairly slandered priests (there were, and there are, many of them) has sometimes been confused with an excessively tolerant attitude which has obstructed legitimate State investigations. Benedict XVI has stigmatized more than once this excessive tolerance (see for instance his speech to the Irish Bishops in his visit ad limina Apostolorum of October 28, 2006): and in fact, the transfer of competence from the dioceses, where the judges may often have friendly relationships with the accused persons, to Rome was aimed from the very beginning at guaranteeing more rigor and severity.

As regards the secondary – but not too much – aspects of the controversy, two clichés shall be mentioned. The first one consists in blaming the Church for maintaining celibacy for rite priests: celibacy would indeed be at least the remote cause of the episodes of pedophilia. The second cliché makes many believe that there are “tens of thousands” of pedophile priests. Before discussing statistics on this point, and related exaggerations, it is important to be clear: even one single case of pedophilia among clerics would be one too many, towards which the civil and religious authorities not only have the right, but the duty to take forceful action. However, it is not irrelevant to establish the number of pedophile Catholic priests and clerics. Statistics can hardly describe the individual tragedies, but the statistical framework can help understand whether this is a question of isolated cases or of epidemics, and whether there is something in the lifestyle of Catholic clerics which makes these episodes more likely to happen than, for instance, among protestant pastors or among duly married, lay school teachers.

Is it really true that there is an out-of-control epidemic? It is often stated that, at least in North America – given that the reported cases, though not irrelevant, are fewer in Europe and elsewhere – the Catholic Church comprises a high percentage of pedophiles, which is unparalleled by the other religious groups having ordained ministers and educational activities. The statistics which are often circulated, without worrying too much about their sources, speak of thousands or even tens of thousands of cases. For instance, it has often been stated during some American talk shows that five or six per cent of American priests are “pedophiles”.

Some talk shows studied by the renowned sociologist Philip Jenkins (who is not Catholic) in two books on the issue (the fundamental Pedophiles and Priests. Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York, 1996; and Moral Panic. Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America, Yale University Press, New Haven-London, 1998; while in The New Anti-Catholicism. The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York, 2003, the same author studies the context of anti-Catholicism, the last socially acceptable prejudice, as a culture medium in which manifestly false statements acquire an appearance of credibility) freewheelingly mentioned pseudo-statistics and figures, according to which the number of American “pedophile priests” would result to be higher than the total number of Catholic priests in the United States. At least these statistics are certainly false, and they are a warning not to take all the data presented on TV as “statistical” or “scientific” as gospel truth.

In the last thirty years, the cases of Catholic priests or clerics convicted of sexual abuse on children in the United States and in Canada are slightly more than a hundred. An author very critical of the Catholic Church on this issue, the sociologist Anson D. Shupe (author of In the Name of All That’s Holy. A Theory of Clergy Malfeasance, Praeger, Westport, 1995; Wolves within the Fold. Religious Leadership and Abuses of Power, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick-London, 1998; and – with William A. Stacey and Susan E. Darnell – Bad Pastors. Clergy Misconduct in Modern America, New York University Press, New York-London, 2000), maintained that, in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, the cases of North American pedophile priests may have been more than a thousand, maybe reaching a few thousands. Shupe concedes that statistics are difficult because, starting from few convictions, it is necessary to extrapolate and speculate, on the basis of surveys, about the number of cases which do not get to a conviction, either because they are not reported (which, as the author admits, today happens less frequently than in the past), or because the two parties have reached an agreement.

Moreover, it must be clarified that it is not correct to include in statistics on “pedophilia” the cases of sexual relationships involving, for instance, a 25-year-old priest and a 16 or 17-year-old girl. This case certainly represents a violation of the canon law (and in some countries it is also considered as a crime), but it does not correspond to any medical or legal definition of “pedophilia”. According to the most widespread diagnostic and statistical manual used by psychiatrists, the D-SM-IV, “pedophilia” is defined as “recurrent sexual activity with a prepubescent child”. At present, there is a heated discussion concerning the statistical issue: in any case, we are far from the “tens of thousands” of cases evoked by talk shows.

On the basis of few certain data and, much more, on the basis of hypothetical data, the idea that the cause of the problem is celibacy (or the vow of chastity of clerics) – no longer tolerable in contemporary society – has spread. On the occasion of a meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, some activists against celibacy demonstrated against the alleged explosion of pedophilia among clergymen, with such slogans as “The Church is the real pedophile”. In fact, the use of homogenous statistics, i.e. produced by the same researchers or institutes or with the same criteria, shows that in the United States, in some Protestant denominations, whose ministers are not obliged to celibacy or which do not even have ordained “ministers”, the percentages of ministers or educators (considering the total number of pastors or elderly of their congregations) convicted and indicted for pedophilia do not differ much from the ones of the Catholic Church. The same holds true for lay teachers in public schools and in nurseries (of course, also in all these cases indictments and charges may be unfair).

If the decisive element were celibacy, the ministers and pastors who can get married – not to mention the lay teachers – should have significantly lower risk percentages than the Catholic Church. Jenkins then notes a point which may not be politically correct, but which is fundamental: more than ninety per cent of convictions of pedophile Catholic priests relate to abuses on little boys, not girls. Given that we are thus talking about, like it or not, homosexuals, and that the alternative to celibacy – unless the term acquires new meanings, at a time of laws on unmarried couples and homosexual marriages – consists in marrying a woman, giving Latin rite priests the right to (heterosexual) marriage would not solve their cases.

It is also true, as stated in the scientific literature, that smaller religious communities, or communities without a nationally-organized hierarchical structure – for instance the Pentecostal denominations – have had lower percentages of pedophile ministers and pastors, even if they have also had to face some scandals. This fact shows that the decisive factor is not celibacy, but the structural and economic aspects.

On the one hand, it is true that a real pedophile may “hide” better and escape vigilance more easily inside a big structure. But it is also true that the law firms specialized in this field – which abound in the United States – and the big insurance companies, which often determine the outcome of lawsuits (sometimes they prefer to pay and increase the policy premium, even when the accused person is presumably innocent), are more willing to attack the State, in the case of public school teachers, or the Catholic Church and other religious communities with a national and hierarchical organization. In the latter case, it is possible to draw on the rich resources of dioceses (beyond parishes) for damages, whereas in the smaller denominations, or where there is not a hierarchical structure and each local community is independent, law firms and insurance companies cannot hope to obtain more than what is enough to empty the often meager coffers of a local congregation.

The fact that suing the Catholic Church, claiming compensation for the alleged abuses by “pedophile” priests, is a potential bargain clearly does not reduce the gravity of real and ascertained cases of pedophilia. However, it is a warning to be vigilant about deliberately blown up or false cases, which are anything but infrequent in the United States, and which are perhaps being “imported” also in Italy. Due to a latent anti-Catholicism in important sectors of society, to social workers and therapists convinced that all that their patients or beneficiaries, especially if children, say is always and necessarily true – several court rulings show that this is not always the case: children easily absorb their therapists’ ideas, or therapists press and confuse them with leading questions – and due to a mentality according to which celibacy or vows are not politically correct, allegations which are later proven false in tribunal are initially taken seriously.

Once again, all this certainly does not deny the presence of painful cases, whose causes are rightly being investigated and pondered by the Church. For instance, one may wonder why in the United States – where criticism to the teachings on sexual morality of the Magisterium is stronger, and where some theologians teaching in seminars are more tolerant of homosexuality – the problem of pedophile priests is, beyond all statistical exaggerations, more widespread than in Europe. At the risk of repeating the obvious, it must be immediately clarified that it would be foolish to maintain that all homosexual priests, not to mention homosexuals who are not priests, are pedophiles; it is instead statistically demonstrated that most convicted pedophile priests are homosexual. From this point of view, the beginning of the documentary with a pedophile speaking of “girls” is in its turn misleading (and the Italian subtitles of the first version posted on the Internet make things worse, given that, while the English documentary speaks of “a former Catholic priest”, the subtitle presents the rather unpleasant pedophile as “a Catholic priest”, thus forgetting the “former”, which is not exactly the same thing).

Vigilance in this very delicate field must certainly continue: but it cannot be separated from parallel vigilance against any form of secularist disinformation and from the careful analysis of every single case. If for culprits in this field it is right to speak of “zero tolerance”, severity cannot be separated from firm defense of unfairly accused persons, keeping in mind that each accusation, all the more so when it is serious and shameful, must be adequately proven.

Anyway, the measures taken within the limits of the Roman canon law to prosecute clerics guilty of sex crimes and the reporting of molesters to the State authorities are two completely different things. The confusion, created on purpose to sling mud at the Pope, is just the result of prejudice and ignorance.

There is (deliberate?) confusion on time limits too, given that the crimes can be prosecuted until the victim turns 28, and not 18

Even Tom Doyle, one of the witnesses interviewed by the BBC – though not defending the Church – has later distanced himself from the documentary