Vatican May Resist US Court Order

This article comes from the National Catholic Reporter.
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Vatican may resist judge's order for documents
A ruling on Thursday from a federal judge in Oregon marks the first time that an American court has ever issued an order requiring the Vatican to hand over documents in a sex abuse case.
Whether that actually happens, however, depends on how the Vatican responds, including whether it tries to persuade either the Oregon judge or an appeals court that it shouldn’t have to comply.

U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman on Thursday granted a limited number of requests for discovery put forward by attorney Jeffrey Anderson, representing a man who says he was abused by Andrew Ronan, a former Servite priest who was laicized in 1966 and who died in 1992.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the main advocacy group in the United States for victims of clerical abuse, hailed the order as a “historic achievement.”

“Many clergy sex abuse victims are distraught that thousands of Catholic officials who ignore and conceal heinous crimes escape any consequences for their corruption,” said a statement from Joelle Casteix of Newport Beach, California, the western regional director of SNAP.

“We are confident that this court ruling will give many victims some sorely-needed hope,” she said.

Since the core issue in the Oregon case is whether Ronan was an “employee” or “agent” of the Vatican, Mosman limited the requests to documents related to the Vatican’s laicization process, its policies regarding sexual abuse and its regulation of priests’ conduct, as they relate specifically to Ronan.

By granting only those requests, Mosman effectively rejected other requests from Anderson, including the idea of taking depositions from senior Vatican personnel, up to and including Pope Benedict XVI.

Attorney Jeffrey Lena, who represents the Holy See in American civil litigation, released a brief statement Thursday night in response to Mosman’s order.

“As a factual matter, Ronan was not a Holy See employee, and the Holy See was not aware of Ronan's misconduct until after Ronan had abused the plaintiff,” Lena said.

Beyond that, Lena declined to comment on what the Vatican’s strategy might be. In general, the Vatican has resisted such demands for discovery, both on First Amendment grounds and because of its status under international law as a sovereign state. Mosman’s ruling on Thursday didn’t directly address those arguments.

In that light, most observers believe it’s unlikely that the Vatican will simply hand over the requested documents. Instead, it’s likely that the Vatican will either file an objection with Mosman, or perhaps appeal the ruling to a higher court.

In the past, Vatican spokespersons have insisted that their reluctance to turn over documents is a matter of principle. In reality, they say, any documents in their possession would show that Ronan was never supervised by the Vatican and that Rome became aware of the charges against him only after the fact.

In comments to the Associated Press, Anderson nevertheless insisted the ruling is a breakthrough.

“It’s the first time anyone's laid a glove on them to the extent they had to turn documents over,” Anderson said.

A "Fundamental Moral Consensus"?

The Pope had many things to say in his speech to the Roman Curia today.  The following is my brief analysis. 

Benedict began by citing a Latin prayer drawn from the Advent liturgy (translated as "Stir up your power, O Lord, and come").  He suggested that this prayer may have originated during the last days of the Roman Empire, when distressed Catholics looked out over the cultural darkness engulfing their world.  

The Pope explained that he has been repeating this prayer often throughout the past year, especially after the shocking revelations that arose in the sex abuse scandal.  He admitted that the Church is "stained with dust" and that her "garment is torn."  Using a mystical allusion to a vision of St. Hildegard, Benedict seemed to confess before the entire world that the Catholic Church had been found soiled and sinful.

Yet immediately afterward Benedict provided a way out.  "The real culprit," he seemed to say, "is this secular world."  While Catholics had faced an onslaught of darkness during the decline of the Roman Empire, this darkness was not due to any fault of the Church.  "The disintegration of the key principles of law and of the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning them burst open the dams which until that time had protected peaceful coexistence among peoples. The sun was setting over an entire world...There was no power in sight that could put a stop to this decline."   

Similarly, the darkness present in the Catholic Church today is not really attributable to the Church's own inherent corruption.  "We [cannot] remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light," Benedict said.  Therefore, it is the context of world culture, he inferred, and not the Church itself that needs to be fixed.r "For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world['s] moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function...[and] the forces mobilized for the defence of such structures seem doomed to failure."   

And what is that context that gives rise to all our problems?  The secular and national world order, of course.

And what is the alternative?  

Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, the Pope provided the answer: worldwide "fundamental moral consensus."   His vision is unclear, but it seems obvious that we are talking about a global system based on religious, cultural, and social unification.

And what would the consensus be based on?  

You guessed it -- the "Christian [i.e,. Catholic] heritage" available exclusively from the Roman Catholic Pontiff and his universal kingdom.

Benedict implores his curia to pray for strength so that together they may "order justly the affairs of the world."  Later, he explains the mission of the Vatican in today's world: "To resist this eclipse of reason [i.e., the influence of secularism] and to preserve its [reason's] capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will."  Benedict ends by assuring his audience that nothing less than "the very future of the world is at stake."

Some questions need to be asked here: What exactly is Benedict advocating for?  Is his speech simply a spiritual message, or is he trying to encourage the establishment of a revolutionary new global order? 

I leave it to the reader to decide.

This speech comes from the Vatican website.
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ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

ON THE OCCASION OF CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

TO THE ROMAN CURIA

Sala Regia

Monday, 20 December 2010

Dear Cardinals, Brother Bishops and Priests,

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

It gives me great pleasure to be here with you, dear Members of the College of Cardinals and Representatives of the Roman Curia and the Governatorato, for this traditional gathering. I extend a cordial greeting to each one of you, beginning with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, whom I thank for his sentiments of devotion and communion and for the warm good wishes that he expressed to me on behalf of all of you. Prope est jam Dominus, venite, adoremus! As one family let us contemplate the mystery of Emmanuel, God-with-us, as the Cardinal Dean has said. I gladly reciprocate his good wishes and I would like to thank all of you most sincerely, including the Papal Representatives all over the world, for the able and generous contribution that each of you makes to the Vicar of Christ and to the Church.


Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni. Repeatedly during the season of Advent the Church’s liturgy prays in these or similar words. They are invocations that were probably formulated as the Roman Empire was in decline. The disintegration of the key principles of law and of the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning them burst open the dams which until that time had protected peaceful coexistence among peoples. The sun was setting over an entire world. Frequent natural disasters further increased this sense of insecurity. There was no power in sight that could put a stop to this decline. All the more insistent, then, was the invocation of the power of God: the plea that he might come and protect his people from all these threats.


Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni. Today too, we have many reasons to associate ourselves with this Advent prayer of the Church. For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function. Consequently the forces mobilized for the defence of such structures seem doomed to failure.


Excita – the prayer recalls the cry addressed to the Lord who was sleeping in the disciples’ storm-tossed boat as it was close to sinking. When his powerful word had calmed the storm, he rebuked the disciples for their little faith (cf. Mt 8:26 et par.). He wanted to say: it was your faith that was sleeping. He will say the same thing to us. Our faith too is often asleep. Let us ask him, then, to wake us from the sleep of a faith grown tired, and to restore to that faith the power to move mountains – that is, to order justly the affairs of the world.


Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni: amid the great tribulations to which we have been exposed during the past year, this Advent prayer has frequently been in my mind and on my lips. We had begun the Year for Priests with great joy and, thank God, we were also able to conclude it with great gratitude, despite the fact that it unfolded so differently from the way we had expected. Among us priests and among the lay faithful, especially the young, there was a renewed awareness of what a great gift the Lord has entrusted to us in the priesthood of the Catholic Church. We realized afresh how beautiful it is that human beings are fully authorized to pronounce in God’s name the word of forgiveness, and are thus able to change the world, to change life; we realized how beautiful it is that human beings may utter the words of consecration, through which the Lord draws a part of the world into himself, and so transforms it at one point in its very substance; we realized how beautiful it is to be able, with the Lord’s strength, to be close to people in their joys and sufferings, in the important moments of their lives and in their dark times; how beautiful it is to have as one’s life task not this or that, but simply human life itself – helping people to open themselves to God and to live from God. We were all the more dismayed, then, when in this year of all years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis, and under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime.

In this context, a vision of Saint Hildegard of Bingen came to my mind, a vision which describes in a shocking way what we have lived through this past year. “In the year of our Lord’s incarnation 1170, I had been lying on my sick-bed for a long time when, fully conscious in body and in mind, I had a vision of a woman of such beauty that the human mind is unable to comprehend. She stretched in height from earth to heaven. Her face shone with exceeding brightness and her gaze was fixed on heaven. She was dressed in a dazzling robe of white silk and draped in a cloak, adorned with stones of great price. On her feet she wore shoes of onyx. But her face was stained with dust, her robe was ripped down the right side, her cloak had lost its sheen of beauty and her shoes had been blackened. And she herself, in a voice loud with sorrow, was calling to the heights of heaven, saying, ‘Hear, heaven, how my face is sullied; mourn, earth, that my robe is torn; tremble, abyss, because my shoes are blackened!’


And she continued: ‘I lay hidden in the heart of the Father until the Son of Man, who was conceived and born in virginity, poured out his blood. With that same blood as his dowry, he made me his betrothed.


For my Bridegroom’s wounds remain fresh and open as long as the wounds of men’s sins continue to gape. And Christ’s wounds remain open because of the sins of priests. They tear my robe, since they are violators of the Law, the Gospel and their own priesthood; they darken my cloak by neglecting, in every way, the precepts which they are meant to uphold; my shoes too are blackened, since priests do not keep to the straight paths of justice, which are hard and rugged, or set good examples to those beneath them. Nevertheless, in some of them I find the splendour of truth.’


And I heard a voice from heaven which said: ‘This image represents the Church. For this reason, O you who see all this and who listen to the word of lament, proclaim it to the priests who are destined to offer guidance and instruction to God’s people and to whom, as to the apostles, it was said: go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation’ (Mk 16:15)” (Letter to Werner von Kirchheim and his Priestly Community: PL 197, 269ff.).


In the vision of Saint Hildegard, the face of the Church is stained with dust, and this is how we have seen it. Her garment is torn – by the sins of priests. The way she saw and expressed it is the way we have experienced it this year. We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal. Only the truth saves. We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred. We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen. We must discover a new resoluteness in faith and in doing good. We must be capable of doing penance. We must be determined to make every possible effort in priestly formation to prevent anything of the kind from happening again. This is also the moment to offer heartfelt thanks to all those who work to help victims and to restore their trust in the Church, their capacity to believe her message. In my meetings with victims of this sin, I have also always found people who, with great dedication, stand alongside those who suffer and have been damaged. This is also the occasion to thank the many good priests who act as channels of the Lord’s goodness in humility and fidelity and, amid the devastations, bear witness to the unforfeited beauty of the priesthood.

We are well aware of the particular gravity of this sin committed by priests and of our corresponding responsibility. But neither can we remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light. There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society. The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times. From Bishops of developing countries I hear again and again how sexual tourism threatens an entire generation and damages its freedom and its human dignity. The Book of Revelation includes among the great sins of Babylon – the symbol of the world’s great irreligious cities – the fact that it trades with bodies and souls and treats them as commodities (cf. Rev 18:13). In this context, the problem of drugs also rears its head, and with increasing force extends its octopus tentacles around the entire world – an eloquent expression of the tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind. No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it.


In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than”. Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today. Against them, Pope John Paul II, in his 1993 Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, indicated with prophetic force in the great rational tradition of Christian ethos the essential and permanent foundations of moral action. Today, attention must be focused anew on this text as a path in the formation of conscience. It is our responsibility to make these criteria audible and intelligible once more for people today as paths of true humanity, in the context of our paramount concern for mankind.


As my second point, I should like to say a word about the Synod of the Churches of the Middle East. This began with my journey to Cyprus, where I was able to consign the Instrumentum Laboris of the Synod to the Bishops of those countries who were assembled there. The hospitality of the Orthodox Church was unforgettable, and we experienced it with great gratitude. Even if full communion is not yet granted to us, we have nevertheless established with joy that the basic form of the ancient Church unites us profoundly with one another: the sacramental office of Bishops as the bearer of apostolic tradition, the reading of Scripture according to the hermeneutic of the Regula fidei, the understanding of Scripture in its manifold unity centred on Christ, developed under divine inspiration, and finally, our faith in the central place of the Eucharist in the Church’s life. Thus we experienced a living encounter with the riches of the rites of the ancient Church that are also found within the Catholic Church. We celebrated the liturgy with Maronites and with Melchites, we celebrated in the Latin rite, we experienced moments of ecumenical prayer with the Orthodox, and we witnessed impressive manifestations of the rich Christian culture of the Christian East. But we also saw the problem of the divided country. The wrongs and the deep wounds of the past were all too evident, but so too was the desire for the peace and communion that had existed before. Everyone knows that violence does not bring progress – indeed, it gave rise to the present situation. Only in a spirit of compromise and mutual understanding can unity be re-established. To prepare the people for this attitude of peace is an essential task of pastoral ministry.


During the Synod itself, our gaze was extended over the whole of the Middle East, where the followers of different religions – as well as a variety of traditions and distinct rites – live together. As far as Christians are concerned, there are Pre-Chalcedonian as well as Chalcedonian churches; there are churches in communion with Rome and others that are outside that communion; in both cases, multiple rites exist alongside one another. In the turmoil of recent years, the tradition of peaceful coexistence has been shattered and tensions and divisions have grown, with the result that we witness with increasing alarm acts of violence in which there is no longer any respect for what the other holds sacred, in which on the contrary the most elementary rules of humanity collapse. In the present situation, Christians are the most oppressed and tormented minority. For centuries they lived peacefully together with their Jewish and Muslim neighbours. During the Synod we listened to wise words from the Counsellor of the Mufti of the Republic of Lebanon against acts of violence targeting Christians. He said: when Christians are wounded, we ourselves are wounded. Unfortunately, though, this and similar voices of reason, for which we are profoundly grateful, are too weak. Here too we come up against an unholy alliance between greed for profit and ideological blindness. On the basis of the spirit of faith and its rationality, the Synod developed a grand concept of dialogue, forgiveness and mutual acceptance, a concept that we now want to proclaim to the world. The human being is one, and humanity is one. Whatever damage is done to another in any one place, ends up by damaging everyone. Thus the words and ideas of the Synod must be a clarion call, addressed to all people with political or religious responsibility, to put a stop to Christianophobia; to rise up in defence of refugees and all who are suffering, and to revitalize the spirit of reconciliation. In the final analysis, healing can only come from deep faith in God’s reconciling love. Strengthening this faith, nourishing it and causing it to shine forth is the Church’s principal task at this hour.


I would willingly speak in some detail of my unforgettable journey to the United Kingdom, but I will limit myself to two points that are connected with the theme of the responsibility of Christians at this time and with the Church’s task to proclaim the Gospel. My thoughts go first of all to the encounter with the world of culture in Westminster Hall, an encounter in which awareness of shared responsibility at this moment in history created great attention which, in the final analysis, was directed to the question of truth and faith itself. It was evident to all that the Church has to make her own contribution to this debate. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone. Only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function. This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by the purely instrumental rationality of which I spoke earlier. In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.


Finally I should like to recall once more the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. Why was he beatified? What does he have to say to us? Many responses could be given to these questions, which were explored in the context of the beatification. I would like to highlight just two aspects which belong together and which, in the final analysis, express the same thing. The first is that we must learn from Newman’s three conversions, because they were steps along a spiritual path that concerns us all. Here I would like to emphasize just the first conversion: to faith in the living God. Until that moment, Newman thought like the average men of his time and indeed like the average men of today, who do not simply exclude the existence of God, but consider it as something uncertain, something with no essential role to play in their lives. What appeared genuinely real to him, as to the men of his and our day, is the empirical, matter that can be grasped. This is the “reality” according to which one finds one’s bearings. The “real” is what can be grasped, it is the things that can be calculated and taken in one’s hand. In his conversion, Newman recognized that it is exactly the other way round: that God and the soul, man’s spiritual identity, constitute what is genuinely real, what counts. These are much more real than objects that can be grasped. This conversion was a Copernican revolution. What had previously seemed unreal and secondary was now revealed to be the genuinely decisive element. Where such a conversion takes place, it is not just a person’s theory that changes: the fundamental shape of life changes. We are all in constant need of such conversion: then we are on the right path.

The driving force that impelled Newman along the path of conversion was conscience. But what does this mean? In modern thinking, the word “conscience” signifies that for moral and religious questions, it is the subjective dimension, the individual, that constitutes the final authority for decision. The world is divided into the realms of the objective and the subjective. To the objective realm belong things that can be calculated and verified by experiment. Religion and morals fall outside the scope of these methods and are therefore considered to lie within the subjective realm. Here, it is said, there are in the final analysis no objective criteria. The ultimate instance that can decide here is therefore the subject alone, and precisely this is what the word “conscience” expresses: in this realm only the individual, with his intuitions and experiences, can decide. Newman’s understanding of conscience is diametrically opposed to this. For him, “conscience” means man’s capacity for truth: the capacity to recognize precisely in the decision-making areas of his life – religion and morals – a truth, the truth. At the same time, conscience – man’s capacity to recognize truth – thereby imposes on him the obligation to set out along the path towards truth, to seek it and to submit to it wherever he finds it. Conscience is both capacity for truth and obedience to the truth which manifests itself to anyone who seeks it with an open heart. The path of Newman’s conversions is a path of conscience – not a path of self-asserting subjectivity but, on the contrary, a path of obedience to the truth that was gradually opening up to him. His third conversion, to Catholicism, required him to give up almost everything that was dear and precious to him: possessions, profession, academic rank, family ties and many friends. The sacrifice demanded of him by obedience to the truth, by his conscience, went further still. Newman had always been aware of having a mission for England. But in the Catholic theology of his time, his voice could hardly make itself heard. It was too foreign in the context of the prevailing form of theological thought and devotion. In January 1863 he wrote in his diary these distressing words: “As a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary, but not my life - but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion”. He had not yet arrived at the hour when he would be an influential figure. In the humility and darkness of obedience, he had to wait until his message was taken up and understood. In support of the claim that Newman’s concept of conscience matched the modern subjective understanding, people often quote a letter in which he said – should he have to propose a toast – that he would drink first to conscience and then to the Pope. But in this statement, “conscience” does not signify the ultimately binding quality of subjective intuition. It is an expression of the accessibility and the binding force of truth: on this its primacy is based. The second toast can be dedicated to the Pope because it is his task to demand obedience to the truth.

I must refrain from speaking of my remarkable journeys to Malta, Portugal and Spain. In these it once again became evident that the faith is not a thing of the past, but an encounter with the God who lives and acts now. He challenges us and he opposes our indolence, but precisely in this way he opens the path towards true joy.
Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni. We set out from this plea for the presence of God’s power in our time and from the experience of his apparent absence. If we keep our eyes open as we look back over the year that is coming to an end, we can see clearly that God’s power and goodness are also present today in many different ways. So we all have reason to thank him. Along with thanks to the Lord I renew my thanks to all my co-workers. May God grant to all of us a holy Christmas and may he accompany us with his blessings in the coming year.



I entrust these prayerful sentiments to the intercession of the Holy Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer, and I impart to all of you and to the great family of the Roman Curia a heartfelt Apostolic Blessing. Happy Christmas!



© Copyright 2010 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Irish Investigators: Vatican Protected Rapist

This article comes from the Irish Times.
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Scale of Walsh cover-up by church breathtaking

Mary Raftery


THE SCALE of the cover-up by the Catholic Church of the crimes of Fr Tony Walsh, as finally revealed in chapter 19 of the Murphy report, is breathtaking. It is more extensive than any other single case dealt with in the main body of the report.

Archbishops, bishops, chancellors, vicars general, parish priests – the list of senior clerics who knew of Walsh’s serial sexual abuse of children is virtually endless. From the very first complaints brought to the archdiocese, a bare two days after Walsh’s ordination in 1978, and for the succeeding 17 years, these pillars of the church sat on their detailed knowledge of Walsh’s abominable predations on children, shielding him from the law, deliberately deciding to keep his crimes hidden from the civil authorities. In the course of those 17 years, until the archdiocese finally decided in 1995 to co-operate with Garda investigations, Walsh abused well over 100 children according to the chapter published yesterday. Here we find out that archbishops Dermot Ryan, Kevin McNamara and Desmond Connell all had detailed knowledge of Walsh’s criminal activities.

Chapter 19 is full of references to discussions about Walsh at the monthly meetings of the Dublin bishops – during the years in question, they include auxiliary bishops Donal Murray, Dermot O’Mahony, James Kavanagh and Eamonn Walsh, together with Brendan Comiskey, Laurence Forristal, James Moriarty, Joseph Carroll, Patrick Dunne and Desmond Williams.
Of these, most are retired or deceased. bishops Murray and Moriarty resigned on foot of the publication of the substantive Murphy report last year. In fact, the only one still in office is Bishop Eamonn Walsh.

He and fellow auxiliary Ray Field famously tendered their resignations – with great reluctance – on Christmas Eve 2009. It emerged several months later the Vatican had refused to accept them and the two bishops remain in situ.

Bishop Walsh defended himself last December by claiming that “as far back as 1990, I wasn’t a month in the job as a bishop, and I stood up at a meeting and I said that not alone should the police, who were already informed about an individual, but we should say where he was living and the number of his car, because I felt he was a danger”.

That individual was Tony Walsh and this incident does indeed appear in chapter 19 of the Murphy report, where it is described as “the first time that the possibility of reporting to the gardaí was raised”. The suggestion was shot down by the archdiocese’s leading canon lawyer at the time, Msgr Gerard Sheehy, who described it as “an outrageous suggestion”. Also present at that meeting were archbishop Connell and bishops Kavanagh, O’Mahony and Murray.

Two key points emerge: first, that Bishop Eamonn Walsh (a trained barrister, incidentally) was sufficiently well-aware of the criminal nature of Walsh’s activities to know that he should be reported to the Garda; and second, that Bishop Walsh did not report him, and nor of course did any of his fellow bishops. It consequently shows an extraordinary detachment from reality for Bishop Walsh to have claimed last year that merely suggesting that gardaí be informed of crimes committed in some way excuses or exonerates him from responsibility for his part in the culture of cover-up in the Dublin archdiocese. The only other serving bishop involved in the Walsh case is John McAreavey of Dromore. While still a priest, he was one of the judges who sat on the internal tribunal in 1992 which decided to laicise Walsh.

Neither he nor his fellow judge, the now retired bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh, saw fit to report to gardaí their knowledge of the crimes of Walsh.

Although Bishop McAreavey is not specifically named or criticised in chapter 19, it will be interesting to see if he can continue to maintain his stony silence on the matter.

And what are we to make of another senior cleric’s matter-of-fact reporting that he “evaded” questions from a garda? This was the chancellor or chief administrator of the archdiocese, Msgr Alex Stenson, recording his conversation with a garda about Walsh in 1991. A parent had contacted the garda, concerned about Walsh but with no hard evidence of a crime committed. Msgr Stenson had heard that the garda was asking around and rang him to find out how much he knew. In the course of the conversation, the garda asked Msgr Stenson if Walsh had a past record. “I evaded that,” recorded Msgr Stenson in his 1991 memo.

The chancellor’s evasion meant that the Garda Síochána remained in the dark about Walsh and his crimes. There is at the very least an argument to be made that this amounts to an obstruction of justice.

After all, who knows better than a cleric that a sin of omission is every bit as serious as one of commission? And lying (by omission) to the police should rank high on anyone’s scale of wrongdoing, even more so where the safety of children is concerned.

The gardaí themselves also stand condemned in chapter 19 for their failure to pursue investigations of Walsh in 1991 and 1992 on foot of concerns expressed by parents about contact between the priest and their children. In their defence, the Murphy report points out that there was no specific evidence of crime brought to their attention at this stage, and further that the archdiocese did not share any of its extensive information on Walsh.

Nonetheless, it is profoundly disturbing to read, for instance, that Msgr Stenson records in 1991 that a garda “assured me that there was ‘no question of prosecution’ ”. This same garda gave evidence at the internal church tribunal hearings on the laicisation of Walsh, and had dealings with the then Fr Willie Walsh (later of course bishop of Killaloe), when he arrived at Whitehall Garda station “stating that he had been appointed to carry out an internal investigation into the paedophile activities of Fr [Walsh]”.

It is clear that the Garda should now extend its own internal inquiries to include the Walsh case among the others unearthed by the Murphy commission where Garda investigations into clerical child abuse were inadequate. The results of these inquiries should be published in full.

It is vital for public confidence in the force that its past failures in this area be thoroughly exposed, and that rigorous procedures be in place to detect and guard against shielding either institutions or individuals from the full force of the law.

Analyst Dissects Vatican WikiLeaks Fallout

This article comes from the National Catholic Reporter.

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Sex abuse crisis, Vatican PR woes figure in WikiLeaks scoops

By John L. Allen, Jr.

Secret diplomatic cables revealed this morning as part of the WikiLeaks releases confirm that while the Vatican was appalled by revelations of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland in 2009 and 2010, it was also offended by demands that the papal ambassador participate in a government-sponsored probe, seeing it as an insult to the Vatican’s sovereign immunity under international law.

 

That stance, according to the cable, came off in Ireland as “pettily procedural” while failing to confront the reality of clerical abuse, and thereby made the crisis worse.

The cables also contain critical diplomatic assessments of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to create new structures to welcome disgruntled Anglicans, as well as the perceived technological illiteracy and communications ineptitude of some senior Vatican officials.

PR woes in the Vatican, according to one cable, have lowered the volume on the pope’s “moral megaphone.”

Newly disclosed cables also indicate that:

• The Vatican has expressed desire to resist the influence of Venezuelan Socialist strongman Hugo Chavez across Latin America;

• It agreed to quietly encourage countries to support the Copenhagen accord on climate change, even though the Holy See does not officially take positions on draft agreements;

• It hoped that Poland would act as a bulwark against radical secularism within the European Union, especially by “holding the line” on life and family issues;

• Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger opposed Turkey’s entry into the European Union, but as pope, Benedict XVI has taken an official neutral stance, while continuing to emphasize the importance of Europe’s Christian roots.

While the cables unveiled this morning don’t really contain any surprises about the Vatican itself, they do lift the veil on how American diplomats and their colleagues have viewed various moves by Rome in recent years.

The revelations come mostly in cables from the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See back to the State Department in Washington, often expressing information gleaned from conversations either with church sources or with other diplomats in Rome.

The cables were unveiled in the Dec. 11 issue of the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper.

One 2009 cable, titled “Sex abuse scandal strains Irish-Vatican relations, shakes up Irish church, and poses challenges for the Holy See,” reports on a conversation between Julieta Valls Noyes, the number two official at the U.S. embassy to the Vatican, and her counterparts in the Irish embassy to the Holy See.

Noyes writes that while the Vatican’s first concern was for the victims of abuse, it also felt that requests for its ambassador in Ireland to cooperate with the “Murphy Commission” probe threatened its sovereignty under international law.

The cable reports that the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, ultimately wrote to the Irish Embassy to the Holy See to insist that any requests for information should come through proper diplomatic channels.

That stance, Noyes wrote, produced backlash in Ireland: “Much of the Irish public views the Vatican protests as pettily procedural and failing to confront the real issue of horrific abuse and cover-up by Church officials,” she wrote.

As the Irish situation developed in late 2009 and early 2010, Noyes went on to say, “the normally cautious Vatican moved with uncharacteristic speed to address the internal church crisis,” pointing to a meeting between Pope Benedict and Irish bishops in February 2010, but she also says that contacts both in Ireland and the Vatican expect the crisis “to be protracted over several years.”

In another 2009 cable, Noyes describes a conversation with Francis Campbell, the ambassador of the United Kingdom to the Holy See, about the pope’s decision to create new structures, called “personal ordinariates,” to welcome traditionalist Anglicans upset with liberalizing moves such as the ordination of women and openly gay bishops, and the blessing of same-sex unions.

The move put the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in an “impossible situation,” according to Campbell, and potentially constituted “the worst crisis in 150 years” in Anglican-Catholic relations.

According to Noyes’ description of the conversation, Campbell warned that the move could unleash latent anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom, and even provoke acts of violence in isolated cases.

The cable from the U.S. diplomats expressed doubt about “whether the damage to inter-Christian relations was worth it,” especially, it said, “since the number of disaffected Anglicans that will convert is likely to be a trickle rather than a wave.”

Another cable from January 2009 from Noyes, written in the wake of a global controversy provoked by Pope Benedict’s decision to lift the excommunications of four traditionalist Catholic bishops, including one who is a Holocaust denier, said the case revealed a serious “communications gap” in the Vatican.

That gap, according to the cable, leads to “muddled, reactive messaging that reduces the volume of the moral megaphone the Vatican uses to advance its objectives.”

The Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, is the only senior papal aide to use a Blackberry, according to the cable, and most senior Vatican officials don’t even use e-mail accounts.

Because senior Vatican officials typically do not understand the nature of modern communications, the cable asserted, they often speak in “coded” language impossible for the outside world to decipher. Noyes cited an example from the Israeli ambassador to the Holy See, who said he had been given a letter from the Vatican which supposedly contained a positive message for his country, but it was “so veiled he missed it, even when told it was there.”

Part of the communications problem, the cable asserted, is structural: Lombardi is not part of the pope’s inner circle, so he “is the deliverer, rather than a shaper, of the message,” and he is “terribly overworked.”

In the wider Catholic world, the cable added, there are communications success stories – pointing in particular to the way the Catholic group Opus Dei responded to the frenzy created by the novel and movie “The Da Vinci Code.”

In general, the cable reported there's ferment in the Vatican about the need for better communications strategies, but little concrete sense of what to do about it.

“Our Vatican contacts seem to be talking about nothing but the need for better internal coordination on decisions and planned public messages,” it said. “But if or when change will come remains an open question.”

For the moment, it doesn't seem that today's disclosures are likely to create a diplomatic crisis, especially given that the Vatican announced preemptively that it did not want the WikiLeaks revelations to disrupt U.S./Vatican ties.

For one thing, Vatican officials realize that at least some of the critical assessments expressed in the leaked cables, especially on the PR front, are widely shared inside the Vatican itself. In addition, the Obama White House has tried to send reassuring signals to Rome, including the recent appointment of a presidential delegation to attend the Nov. 20 consistory for the creation of 24 new cardinals. It was the first time a U.S. president sent an official delegation to a consistory, and it was seen in the Vatican as a diplomatic way of expressing respect.

At mid-morning, Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, released a statement in both Italian and English on the WikiLeaks disclosures.

"Without venturing to evaluate the extreme seriousness of publishing such a large amount of secret and confidential material, and its possible consequences" the statement read, "the Holy See Press Office observes that part of the documents published recently by Wikileaks concerns reports sent to the U.S. State Department by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See."

"Naturally these reports reflect the perceptions and opinions of the people who wrote them," the statement said, "and cannot be considered as expressions of the Holy See itself, nor as exact quotations of the words of its officials. Their reliability must, then, be evaluated carefully and with great prudence, bearing this circumstance in mind."

U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Miguel Diaz likewise issued a statement, condemning the leaks "in the strongest possible terms" while declining to comment on their authenticity.

The United States and the Holy See are working together on multiple fronts, Diaz said, from fixing the global economy to human rights, climate change and interfaith dialogue, and those partnerships "will withstand this challenge."

Wikileaks: Pope Blocked Sex Abuse Investigation

 

This article comes from MSNBC.

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Wikileaks: Pope impeded abuse investigation

Pope Benedict refused to allow Vatican officials to testify in an investigation by an Irish commission into alleged child sex abuse by priests, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, The Guardian newspaper reported. 

Benedict was also reportedly furious when Vatican officials were called upon in Rome, The Guardian reported Saturday.

The Murphy Commission of Inquiry into sexual and physical abuse "offended many in the Vatican," according to a cable dated February 26, 2010.

"The Vatican believes the Irish government failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations," it said.

On Saturday, the Vatican press office declined to comment on the content of the cables but decried the leaks as a matter of "extreme gravity."

The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See also condemned the leaks and said the Vatican and America cooperate in promoting universal values.

Other latest revelations include that Britain's Vatican ambassador feared anti-Catholic violence in Britain after Benedict offered to accept traditionalist Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church.

 

Catholic-Anglican relations faced their worst crisis in 150 years because of the offer, which undercut the authority of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the cable quoted Ambassador Francis Campbell as saying after the offer last year.

Five Anglican bishops in Britain announced last month that they would join the Catholic Church early next year, in response to the offer made in October 2009 to Anglican clergy opposed to the ordination of women bishops in the Church of England.

The cable, dated November 30, 2009 and published by The Guardian, reflected concerns that have since eased. Tensions that it predicted for the pope's visit to Britain in September this year did not materialize.

Immunity granted to Vatican officials  

According to the cable detailing the Vatican's refusal to cooperate in the abuse investigation, the Vatican believed opposition politicians in Ireland were publicly putting pressure on the government to vilify the Vatican just to make "political hay".

The Irish government, meanwhile, wanted "to be seen as co-operating with the investigation" because its churches and education department were also involved in the scandal.

The Irish ambassador's deputy, Helena Keleher, told U.S. diplomats that her government eventually acquiesced to the Vatican and granted their officials immunity from testifying, the Guardian reported.

"Foreign ambassadors are not required or expected to appear before national commissions," the cable said.

Still, the Irish commission was able to gather enough evidence and testimony to conclude that some bishops had put the Catholic church before the victims by covering up claims of abuse, the Guardian reported.

In the cable describing the British fears over anti-Catholic violence, U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Miguel Diaz said British ambassador Campbell noted that England's Catholics were a minority and mostly of Irish origin.

"There is still latent anti-Catholicism in some parts of England and it may not take much to set it off," it said, paraphrasing his words. "The outcome could be discrimination or in isolated cases even violence against this minority."

 
Speaking after the two churchmen met at the Vatican last month, Campbell said the pope had "put Williams in an impossible situation" and the archbishop's cautious reaction — meant to avoid harming relations with Rome — angered some Anglicans. 

Diaz ended the cable asking "whether the damage to inter-Christian relations was worth it — especially since the number of disaffected Anglicans that will convert is likely to be a trickle rather than a wave."

Another cable dated November 9, 2009 said Campbell told Diaz that the Catholic Church would face "unforeseen obstacles" if many traditionalist Anglicans took up Benedict's offer.

"A large transition of Anglican converts could overwhelm the financial resources of many dioceses," it cited him as saying.

No consideration for Church of England  

The Anglicans most likely to make the switch were the most conservative, he said.

"In uniting traditionalist Anglicans with the Catholic Church, the pope is bringing together two groups strongly committed to defending Europe's Christian heritage — a theme he strongly champions," it added.

The cable cited an unnamed source as saying Williams was probably informed about the offer only a day before it was announced. When he expressed concern about it, he was told the Vatican had made its decision and was going ahead.

According to the November 30 cable, Campbell felt the Vatican had acted without considering what its move would mean for the Church of England, mother church for the world's 80 million Anglicans, or their spiritual leader Williams.

"The Vatican decision seems to have been aimed primarily at Anglicans in the U.S. and Australia, with little thought given to how it would affect the center of Anglicanism, England, or the Archbishop of Canterbury," it said in relating his view.

The Vatican announced last month that its first so-called ordinariate for Anglican converts would be established in Britain. Bishops and priests would join the Church in the first half of the year, followed by lay people wanting to switch.

Reuters, The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

US Judge Asks Vatican to Serve Papers to Pope

 

This article comes from the Associated Press.

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US Judge asks Vatican to serve court paper to pope

 

By Dinesh Ramde

 

MILWAUKEE —

A federal U.S. judge is asking the Vatican to cooperate in serving the pope and two other top officials with court papers that stem from decades-old allegations of priest sexual abuse in Wisconsin.

The request is an incremental step in a lawsuit that accuses the officials of conspiring to keep the allegations against a Milwaukee priest quiet.

The Vatican is not obliged to cooperate with the request. A message left with the Vatican's U.S.-based attorney, Jeffrey Lena, was not immediately returned.

Plaintiffs' attorneys say the Vatican has not cooperated with similar requests in previous lawsuits.

Abuse Lawsuit Names Pope Benedict as Defendant

This article comes from the Catholic News Agency.

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Sex abuse lawsuit involving Wisconsin priest names Pope Benedict as defendant

Milwaukee, Wis., Sep 24, 2010 / 05:59 pm (CNA).- A lawsuit filed by a man sexually abused decades ago by a Wisconsin priest has named Pope Benedict XVI as a defendant. However, two authors have claimed the latest charges against the Pope repeat “widely debunked” inaccuracies.

The suit has been brought by 60-year-old deaf abuse victim Terry Kohut, who says he was abused by Fr. Lawrence C. Murphy while he was a priest and principal at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

According to CNN, Kohut said through an interpreter that the abuse first took place in the priest’s office when he was in his early teens. The abuse continued for years. 

About 200 former students have said they were molested by Fr. Murphy, sometimes even in the confessional. Victims reported abuses to the civil authorities in the mid-1970s, but authorities dropped the investigation.

The case came to prominence earlier this year, with media outlets such as the Associate Press claiming that Fr. Murphy was “spared a defrocking” because he was allegedly “protected” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Clergyman such as current CDF head Cardinal William Levada and former judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee Fr. Thomas Brundage have said the CDF only suspended canonical proceedings against Fr. Murphy because he was dying. A lack of records in the archdiocesan archives also impeded the canonical case, which was opened in the mid-1990s after advocacy by Murphy’s victims.

Until 2001, the CDF had limited jurisdiction over sex abuse cases. Generally it was only involved in cases concerning allegations of abuse which took place in the confessional and possibly involved violations of the Sacrament of Penance. Prior to that year, most cases were handled in the Roman Rota.

In its March reports on the case, the New York Times relied on documents provided by lawyers Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, some of which were poorly translated from Italian. Anderson is one of the leading attorneys in sex abuse lawsuits and has claimed that Pope Benedict was "the mastermind, head, of an international conspiracy to cover up their own crimes and keep them above the law."

According to CNN, Anderson is the lead lawyer in Kohut’s lawsuit. The suit alleges that through a policy of secrecy the Holy See “knowingly allowed, permitted and encouraged child sex abuse by its priests, including Murphy.”

Gregory Erlandson and Dr. Matthew Bunson, authors of the Our Sunday Visitor book “Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal,” have claimed that the latest allegations concerning the Pope’s involvement in the Fr. Murphy case rehash discredited charges.

"While the Murphy case is a glaring example of the poor oversight and inadequate communication that typified many abuse cases in the U.S. dioceses in the past 50 years, it does not show Cardinal Ratzinger in any way tolerant of, or insensitive to, the actions of abusers," they said in a press release from Our Sunday Visitor.

Brussels Court: Raid on Church Illegal

This article comes from Zenit.

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Raid on Belgian Church Declared Illegal 

Archbishop to Announce New Abuse Prevention Plan

BRUSSELS, Belgium, SEPT. 10, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The appeals court in Brussels ruled that a raid on the archbishopric was illegal, and the documents seized must be returned.

The Belgian police raided the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Malines-Brussels, where the bishops of Belgium were meeting for their monthly meeting on June 24. The authorities detained the bishops at the headquarters for nine hours as they searched the offices and the Cathedral of Mechelen.

At that time they drilled holes in two graves located in the crypt of the cathedral, and then sent cameras down in search of hidden documents.

In addition to the headquarters of the archbishopric of Brussels, the authorities seized some 500 confidential files In Leuven, Belgium, from the office of Peter Adriaensses, president of the commission for the treatment of sexual abuses. The home of former archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, was also searched.

On Thursday, the Belgian court ruled that these measures were "disproportionate," and that the documents collected could not be considered as valid evidence in any trial.

The judge ordered that the material be returned to the owners without passing under the eyes of prosecutors.

A communiqué from the archdiocese reported that Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard "hopes that all the attention will finally be concentrated on the victims of the sexual abuses in the context of a pastoral relationship."

The prelate affirmed that he is not at all "opposed to a judicial investigation carried out correctly."

He noted that he "is satisfied by the fact that this event was finally clarified," and "in the interest of all, that the fundamental rules of law are respected."

Today, Adriaensses released a report from the commission, which compiled the testimonies of over 500 victims abused by clergy, most of the cases taking place in the 1960s and 1970s.

Archbishop Léonard has said that he will respond to these cases on Monday with a new initiative meant to help the victims and prevent future abuse.

New Trends in European Catholicism

This article can be found at the Economist website.

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The Void Within

Catholicism is hollowing out in its traditional European strongholds. But signs of intriguing new life are springing up at its periphery

IN THE small world of traditional French Catholicism, everybody knows about Abbé Francis Michel. For the past 23 years this small, stubborn figure in his well-worn soutane has been responsible for the cure of souls in the village of Thiberville in Normandy. The locals like his conservative style, even though his Latin services would not suit all French churchgoers. The village’s 12th-century church, and the 13 other places of worship under his care, are kept in good repair by his supporters. (These days, some priests in rural France must cope with as many as 30 churches.)

Since the start of the year Abbé Francis has been at war with the region’s bishop—in church terms, a liberal—who has been trying to close the parish and move him to other duties. 

Uproar ensued in January when the bishop came to mass and tried to give the priest his marching orders. Most villagers followed Abbé Francis as he strode off to another church and celebrated in the old-fashioned way. He has made two appeals to Rome, both rejected on technicalities; a third is pending.

To Father Francis’s admirers Thiberville is a pinpoint of light against a sombre background: the near-collapse of Catholicism in some of its heartlands. In the diocese of Evreux, Christianity has been part of the fabric of life for 15 centuries. Of its 600,000 inhabitants, about 400,000 might call themselves, at least loosely, Catholic. But the number of priests under the age of 70 is a mere 39, and only seven of those are under 40. That is just a bit worse than average in a country that, as recently as the 1950s, boasted 40,000 active priests; in a few years, the number under 65 will be a tenth of that. This suggests a body that is not so much shrinking as dying.

On closer inspection French Catholicism is not dead, but it is splintering to the point where the centre barely holds. The brightest flickers are on the fringes: individuals like Abbé Pierre, founder of the Emmaus movement for the homeless; “charismatics” whose style draws on Pentecostalism, and traditionalists who love Latin rites and processions. Meanwhile, the church’s relatively liberal mainstream is almost in free fall. As conservatives like Abbé Francis see it, it is largely the liberals’ own fault: “They keep selling and closing properties, while we [traditionalists] are busy building and restoring.”

Among Europe’s historically Catholic lands, France is an outlier. Its leap into modernity took the form of a secular revolution; that differs from places like Ireland or Poland, where church and modern nationhood go together. Things are different again in Bavaria or the southern Netherlands, where the church inspires local pride; or in Spain, where Catholicism is at issue in an ideological war.

But in many European places where Catholicism remained all-powerful until say, 1960, the church is losing whatever remains of its grip on society at an accelerating pace. The drop in active adherence to, and knowledge of, Christianity is a long-running and gentle trend; but the hollowing out of church structures—parishes, monasteries, schools, universities, charities—is more dramatic. That is the backdrop against which the paedophile scandal, now raging across Europe after its explosion in the United States, has to be understood. The church’s fading institutional power makes it (mercifully) easier for people who were abused by clerics to speak out; and as horrors are laid bare, the church, in many people’s eyes, grows even weaker.

A couple of decades ago Ireland defied the idea that modern societies grow secular: churches were packed. But last year, after a decade of mounting anger over clerical malpractice, the nation was stunned by two exposés of cruelty by men and women of God. First, a nine-year investigation found that thousands of children had been maltreated at church-run industrial schools and orphanages. Then a probe of the archdiocese of Dublin, over the three decades up to 2004, not only found widespread child abuse by priests but police collusion in hiding it. 

Five Irish bishops offered to step down; the pope has accepted three resignations and is considering the others. When a new bishop, Liam MacDaid, took office on July 25th, he presented a stark picture: “Society has forced us in the Irish church to look into the mirror, and what we saw [was] weakness and failure, victims and abuse.”

Ireland is still a churchgoing nation; about half claim to attend mass weekly, and there has been an uptick since the economy turned sour. But in a land that used to export priests and nuns to the world, vocations have dried up. In a couple of decades there could be a French-style implosion. That need not imply a collapse in Christian belief; but as one Catholic history buff puts it, rural Ireland could go back to its early medieval state, when a largely priestless folk-religion held sway. Already, popular religion—local pilgrimages, or books on Celtic prayer—does better than anything involving priests. And Ireland’s political class, once so priest-ridden, now distances itself from the clergy.

A state within a state

In Belgium, where Catholicism used to hold a disparate nation together, relations between church and state have been transformed in a spectacular way. On June 24th, as the country’s nine bishops were conferring at their headquarters, the building was taken over by the police. On the same day police raided the home of a retired archbishop, drilled holes in the tomb of at least one cardinal (looking for hidden papers) and took away 450 documents from the office of a church committee that was probing clerical abuse. The committee, headed by a layman, resigned in protest.

What the Belgian and Irish stories suggest is the collapse of a centuries-old order in which the church functioned as a sort of “state within a state”—administering its own affairs, and often the affairs of its flock, by a system of law and authority that ran in parallel with, and could trump, the authority of the state. Europe’s enlightenment may have put an end to the sort of formal theocracy in which popes commanded armies and kings ruled by divine right. But in a messy mixture of ways the authority of church and state has remained intertwined across Europe.

Even now quasi-theocracy dies hard. Ireland’s hierarchs have lost their grip on secondary and higher education, but primary schooling is still a church-based affair; even non-Christian youngsters are drilled in Catholic teaching. In France the Catholic hierarchy had until recently an informal place in the establishment. Nicolas Sarkozy may be the first French president who does not see the archbishop of Paris as a natural interlocutor. Mr Sarkozy, whose own roots are secular and Jewish, speaks of the church from an outsider’s distance.

As the Irish case shows, the most insidious links between church and state are often informal ones, which can leave priests and bishops virtually exempt from scrutiny. But all over Europe the child-abuse scandal has made secular powers keener to reassert their authority, and less willing to accept the Catholic church as a semi-autonomous power. In almost every country, therefore, the church is in decline as an institution—a situation in contrast to its vibrancy in Africa, Asia and much of Latin America, and the energy brought by Latinos to the church in the United States. But its decline across Europe is not uniform; in each country, the church faces a different mixture of threats and residual strengths.

Across southern Europe an intense, atavistic attachment to Catholic tradition remains, sharpened by a perceived challenge from the fast-growing Muslim neighbours. In Italy Catholicism, as a mark of cultural difference in a homogenising world, is held dear in some unlikely quarters: among atheist intellectuals, for example. As recently as 2006 a research institute, Eurispes, asserted that the share of Italians calling themselves Catholic had risen by eight percentage points over 15 years, to 88%. It also found that 37% of Catholics claimed to be regular mass-goers. Despite the decline of its flagship party, the Christian Democrats, the church has muscle; it has seen off challenges to Italy’s strict curbs on in vitro fertilisation.

But Italians are less pious than they pretend. A study of central Sicily, published this year, found that only 18% of people actually went to church, although 30% said they did. And the Eurispes study of Italy found that 66% backed liberal divorce laws and 38% supported euthanasia. Only 19% favoured abortion on demand, but 65% could accept the practice in cases of rape. Strikingly, more Catholics than non-Catholics supported cohabitation by unmarried couples. Behind supposed religious uniformity lies a range of views. “Rather than Catholicism, it is more accurate to talk about Catholicisms,” says Giuseppe Giordan, a sociologist of religion. “There are those who identify completely with the teaching of the pope, and those who dissent—both from the traditionalist and liberal viewpoints.” Among those who—paradoxically—find Pope Benedict XVI’s church a tad liberal are xenophobic groups that fear Islam: they groan at the sight of Catholic charities running halal soup-kitchens for immigrants.

Across much of traditionally Catholic Europe, there is massive dissent from the church’s teaching on morality. If the Vatican has lost credibility in this area, says Mr Giordan, it is for reasons that go beyond sex: it has failed to see that since the 1960s, there has been “a huge anthropological change in favour of…freedom of choice. People are no longer prepared to obey instructions.” The pope’s defenders—like Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano—would insist that Pope Benedict does believe in human freedom: he would prefer a small church of freely committed believers than a giant flock herded in by custom or constraint. But in many parts of Europe, critics of the Vatican feel it still tries to tilt the playing-field—by clinging on to old privileges—rather than embracing religious freedom.

The end of obedience

In Spain the church presents all these contradictions: it is culturally very strong, and rooted in one half of a divided society. It is losing its sway over people’s behaviour but retains a loud and controversial voice. Some 28% of people in Spain call themselves practising Catholics, and another 46% non-practising Catholics; as many as 38% profess devotion to a particular saint or image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. But secularism, and a long-term backlash against the Catholic authoritarianism of the past, is on the march: 2009 was the year when town-hall weddings finally overtook those in church.

In recent weeks thousands of Spanish Catholics have joined church-backed rallies against a new, liberal abortion law, part of the ruling Socialists’ programme of radical change. In other measures, gay marriage has been legalised and religious (in effect, Catholic) education has been downgraded. Rallies in favour of the new abortion law were just as large, though, and a centre-right government would be unlikely to change it. The church can still mobilise, but it cannot impose its will.

Among the Catholic nations of Europe, Poland stands out as the only place where seminaries are full and priests abound. The percentage of churchgoers remains high, though it peaked, at 55%, in 1987. But Catholicism has no monopoly over Poland’s public square; the country played host this summer to a European gay pride march, and this year’s musical hits include a song by a famous crooner, Olga Jackowska, in which she discloses that she was abused by a priest as a child. Nor is Polish Catholicism immune from social changes; a survey of Polish priests found that 54% said they would like to have a wife and family, and 12% said they already had a stable relationship with a woman.

But for Poles Catholicism retains a huge emotional power. It is true that Polish Catholicism has a vitriolic fringe, prone to bigotry and anti-Semitism. But there are several positive traditions on which the church can draw, ranging from the efforts of John Paul II to improve relations with Jews to the tolerant nature of the 17th-century Polish Commonwealth, which had room for Protestants, Jews and Muslims. Unlike the once-mighty Latin churches at whose behest the New World was conquered, the Polish church sees itself as honourable but embattled: a defender of the nation against invasion and a comfort in its darkest days.

Embracing humility

Poland’s tradition—or rather, some carefully selected bits of it—is one place to which the Vatican might look if it wants to shake off the habit of arrogance that has bedevilled its responses to the child-abuse scandal. It is true that most of the cases took place in the 1960s and 1970s; the culture of cronyism and impunity which made such horrors possible is now well in the past, and most of the institutions involved have been shut for decades. But many of today’s senior bishops were part of the world that tried to cover these things up. That is deeply embarrassing for the elderly men who now run the church, including the 83-year-old pontiff. And their reaction has ranged from slow to staggeringly insensitive.

As a rule of thumb, the reaction has been especially clumsy in parts of Europe (including Rome itself) where the church has recent memories of enjoying unchallenged power; and much more intelligent, and appropriately humble, in places where the church was used to fighting its own corner in a noisy democratic space.

Take the sunny Saturday in May when the Dutch diocese of Roermond, in the country’s Catholic south, commemorated 450 years of life. In deference to the public mood, the festivities were reduced in scale, and a note of repentance was added to a dignified cathedral service. A small group of child-abuse protesters rallied outside, but the impression was left of a church already working to clean its stables.

In the French city of Lyon, where St Irenaeus hammered out some of the basics of Christian doctrine 19 centuries ago, the church is downsizing in a different way. One of its best-known priests is Father Christian Delorme, an admirer of Gandhi who has been speaking out for poor Muslim immigrants since the 1970s. As pastor of two parishes near the city centre, where families of Spanish or Portuguese origin rub shoulders with North Africans, he is kept down to earth by having to conduct at least 200 funerals a year. Some of his colleagues, he says, refuse to take funerals because they feel they should be preparing their flock for the time when there are no priests available. But he officiates willingly, feeling that this is his biggest chance to meet people who are mostly unchurched. At 60, he regrets the decline of the progressive French Catholicism that flourished in his youth—and also of Christian culture in general. Businessmen he lectures to do not even know the rudiments of doctrine.

But he is too busy, and intellectually active, to wallow in gloom or pessimism. As he sees things, the regime of laicité has protected the French church from the dangers of power over the vulnerable. Catholic schools exist in France—but not the vast network of unaccountable authority that led Irish, Belgian and Bavarian priests into temptation. French Catholicism is a battered tree, but it can still sprout new and unexpected branches. In places like Italy, where the church shelters behind a high wall of culture and convention, the hardest days may still lay ahead.