Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [45]
Another Curia member echoed Castrillón and Bertone: Cardinal James Francis Stafford, the former archbishop of Denver. He wanted the press communiqué on the crisis to endorse the 1968 papal encyclical on birth control16—obedience to papal teaching was paramount. But international news had shown an ailing pope with a shaky voice, unable to account for an embedded culture of sexual deviants nor up to the task of commanding an investigation. The Vatican cardinals and archbishops washed their hands by shifting blame to the lower clergy. John Paul, so brilliant a moral force against dictatorships and Soviet Communism, had stood back from the escalating priest abuse cases in the 1990s when he was healthy. He failed to ask why a celibate culture tolerated such harm to children or to ask his cardinals what to do beyond apologies.
Italians dominated the Roman Curia. Their window on the world came from the press that gave textured coverage of the Vatican: Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale, the newsweekly L’Espresso, La Repubblica, among others. But Italy’s legal system had few of the surgical discovery procedures available to attorneys in America, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, which shared the taproot of British common law. As judges ordered bishops to release their files on accused priests to victims’ lawyers, the depth charges from a clergy sexual underground rocked the English-language media. Italian journalists with few documents to cite found only scattered cases. The Curia and other cardinals saw “the scandal” as a product of America’s odd legal system and anti-Catholic news media.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did not share his thoughts about the 2002 cardinals’ meeting with reporters, as others that day did. Alone among the Curial cardinals gathered there, Ratzinger had set himself on a course to confront the crisis. The American bishops had been stymied in their early efforts to contain the damage. In 1989 the U.S. bishops had canonists seek permission from the Vatican to defrock priests proven to be severe abusers. That authority lay with the pope. And John Paul said no. As a cardinal in Poland he knew the Communist police tapped phones and targeted priests for blackmail. The Polish church was the opposition party. His sense of the priesthood as a beleaguered, heroic counterforce seeded a denial, as pope, on a criminal sexual subculture in the priesthood. Vatican canonists, meanwhile, took the U.S. bishops’ request as encroaching on their turf.
“In America the conference on bishops had a machine signing off on [marriage] dispensations,” a prominent canon lawyer in Rome—interviewed on background—told me with exasperation on a sunny autumn day in 2002. “This was highly criticized in Rome by various respondents in these [annulment] cases … That experience of dealing with American bishops set up a resistance to special norms for pedophiles. We see what you’ve done with special norms on annulments. What are you going to do with these pedophilia cases?” To this priest, it was all so clear. “The attitude here in 1989, at the Holy See, was that you have legal provisions. Use them!”17 He meant that bishops should hold secret canonical trials of predators and send the results to the Vatican for a final decision. Church defense lawyers shrank from the idea of creating a documentary record of a church court, only to wait years to get permission to defrock the perpetrator.
The bishops also wanted the five-year statute of limitations on abuse of children, as stated in canon law, expanded—again, so they could kick