POPE BENEDICT XVI sets out this afternoon on a two-day pastoral visit to Malta which, among other things, will commemorate the 1,950th anniversary of St Paul’s shipwreck as he travelled to Rome and an eventual beheading.
Such a fate hardly awaits Benedict, but he might nonetheless be forgiven for approaching this weekend’s trip with no small amount of apprehension.
The Acts of the Apostlesrelates how, after the prisoner Paul's shipwreck off "the island called Melita", he and his fellow survivors lit a fire around which to dry themselves. As Paul fixed the fire, he was bitten by a viper. As soon as "the barbarous people" of Melita realised that the viper's poison had no effect on Paul, they concluded that he truly was a man of God.
The viper threatening to bite Benedict this weekend, of course, is the ongoing sex abuse crisis, a trauma which may yet shipwreck his pontificate.
Dissident Swiss theologian Hans Küng reiterated in this newspaper yesterday some of the numerous international criticisms levelled at Benedict in recent weeks, when he argued that in his previous role as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Benedict had “engineered” the Catholic Church’s “worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes”.
In a sense, Benedict is entitled to be disappointed by such criticism. With regard to at least two controversial cases during the pontificate of John Paul II – namely the paedophile cardinal of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer, and the dissolute founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado – the then Cardinal Ratzinger had wanted to prosecute both but had been blocked by, among others, the then secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano.
Many Vatican commentators have claimed that, in truth, Benedict really is a “zero tolerance” guy. Days before his election as pope, he spoke of the “filth” in the church during an infamous Via Crucis meditation in 2005, and within a month of his election he had banned charismatic Italian priest Fr Gino Burresi, a man accused of various sex abuse offences with seminarians.
One year later, he moved against Fr Maciel, sentencing him to a “retired life of prayer and penitence”. Furthermore, Benedict ordered a papal visitation to the Legionaries of Christ, a visitation which may shortly prompt a radical Holy See intervention against the order. Even if there had been accusations against both Fr Maciel and Fr Burresi for 30 and 18 years respectively, this was at least some form of action.
Many argue that no Holy See figure knows more about clerical sex abuse than Benedict. From the moment in 2001 that a motu propriofrom John Paul II assigned judicial responsibility for certain "grave" crimes (including child sex abuse) to the CDF, the future Benedict was launched on a serious learning curve.
It is in this context that he has been willing to meet victims of clerical sex abuse in Australia, the US and in the Vatican. Furthermore, as his pastoral letter to the Irish underlines, he is willing to meet victims in the future.
To some extent, this defence of Benedict, however accurate and genuine, may miss a crucial point. This is that the “universal” mishandling of clerical sex abuse in the church is not the failure of particular local bishops (as is claimed in the letter to the Irish), but the expression of a sick “company culture” back at HQ.
Who created the culture which saw bishops instinctively cover up? How come the former prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, Colombian cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, could in September 2001 write a letter to French bishop Pierre Pican congratulating him for not reporting an abuser to the police? (The Vatican on Thursday appeared to acknowledge that this had indeed been a major error of judgment by Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos).
It is well documented that for much of his pontificate, John Paul II was happy to leave the day-to-day running of the church to his most trusted advisers. Among those, two senior cardinals stood out – Cardinal Ratzinger, his “doctrinal watchdog”, and Cardinal Sodano, his astute, politically savvy prime minister.
If the Catholic Church for much of the last 30 years has gone down a road that limits the role of women and of the laity, and that vehemently defends a celibate and secretive priesthood (all initiatives which did nothing to help confront the sex abuse issue), then both Benedict and Cardinal Sodano must bear some responsibility.
It is in this sense, and not for his mishandling of particular cases, that Benedict might have good reason to worry about the “shipwrecking” of his pontificate.