Religion

Secrets of the Catholic Church

by Ronald Goldfarb - 04/12/10 5:59 PM ET

At a recent meeting at the Vatican of
high church officials, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio
Bertone, told the twenty-four Irish Bishops that their country’s pedophilia
scandals were “abominable sins”, as if they needed to be told that obvious
conclusion. In November 2009, the Murphy report to Irish church officials
concluded that obsessive concealment between 1975-2004 protected the Church but
failed to safeguard its children. It was a “culture of cover-up.” Victims
groups pleaded with the Pope to redress these flagrant abrogations of “Christ’s
teaching.” The Pope apologized and told the Bishops to be “courageous”, but he
was not.

The Catholic Church must deal with the
recent, unfulfilled promise of Pope Benedict XVI that it will never again hide
the sins of pastoral administrators. His admirable condemnation of past
misconduct and his allusion to extending the statute of limitations for claims
against offending priests are appropriate first steps.

* * * *

Without two changes in the Church’s
practices: it’s absolute rule about the pastoral privilege by which
confidential confessions are invariably protected, and its resort to
confidentiality agreements in settling complaints of priests’ misconduct, his
admonitions will prove illusory. The Vatican’s secrecy policies have impeded
attempts to expose and punish wrongdoings by priests.

Reportedly, the Church’s failures have
caused a financial crisis—as well as a moral one—in the Irish ministry, as it
has in Australia and the United States, indeed around the world. In the United
States alone, records proved that 13,000 youngsters were assaulted by predatory
priests, 300 priests were convicted of these crimes, 1,000 were severed from
ministry. Some dioceses were bankrupted—over $2.6 billion has been paid in known
damages—no one knows how many more crimes were shrouded in secrecy.

There are two secrecy problems that
need to be addressed, and redressed. First, the confidentiality of the
confessional, intrinsic to Church doctrine, while benign in most situations,
also has led to terrible injustices. A recently exposed Wisconsin case
disclosed a priest who began his misconduct with a twelve-year-old parishioner
who came to him for confession. That priest molested 200 young boys. Second,
the confidentiality of settlement agreements is a questionable legal tactic
misused by many litigants, and used by the Catholic Church in these
settlements. Church money has been used to pay secret settlements that avoid
bad publicity. Both practices led to hidden misconduct and bred repeated
offenses.

As far back as Pope Leo I in the fifth
century the Catholic Church decreed that confessions for penance were not to be
revealed. By the twentieth century, canon law decreed that “the
sacramental seal is inviolable” and eternal damnation would be the price for
its breach. Priests can be excommunicated for revealing confessions.

The rationale for the rule of
confidentiality is understandable—it allows tormented sinners to seek solace.
The idea that penitents wouldn’t confess if they feared exposure of their
secrets makes sense, but not always. Some confess to be prevented from
continuing misconduct, others to find peace and relief. Analysts have said, as
Oscar Wilde remarked, “It is the confession, not the priest, which gives us
absolution.”

Protection of the confessional is
deemed by the Catholic Church as strictly an ecclesiastical matter. One high
church officer remarked: “The good of religion prevails over the good of
justice.” But ours is not a society operating under ecclesiastical law.
While American common law and statutes originally denied the pastoral
privilege, it is now generally recognized. The Supreme Court has said the
privilege “recognized the human need to disclose to a spiritual counselor, in
total and absolute confidence…and received consolation and guidance in
return.” But this privilege is not absolute, and all clergy are mandated
by state laws to report serious criminal conduct, such as child abuse as was
involved in the Church cases. Pastors, imams, rabbis follow the mandate;
Catholic priests do not.

The absolute privilege in the Catholic
Church has resulted in horrible crimes and injustices that might have been
avoided. One painful example occurred a few years ago. A Bronx priest knew from
his communications with a parishioner that two men on trial for murder were
innocent. His confessor confessed committing the crime. Yet the priest
waited twelve years, allowed the two innocent men to be convicted and
imprisoned, before coming forward after his confessor died.

In the Pope’s native Germany, a priest
knew of his confessor’s ghastly murder, did nothing, and the murderer sexually
tortured and murdered three eleven-year-old boys before being caught four years
later. These latter crimes could have and should have been avoided. Invariably
there have been unheeded warnings in these situations. The Church’s policy has
been to allow priests to repent their sins, secretly, and remain repeat
offenders, rather than seeking to protect their members and punish offenders.

Some offenses involved clergy using
their confidential settings to procure and perform misconduct, a recent book
reported. One investigation revealed that a notorious brother had been guilty
of “violation of the seal of the confession, the illegitimate use against the
penitent of confidential information revealed during the confession, violation
of the right of privacy…” In this author’s conclusion, the scandals were the
result of “a clericalist mentality” that defended clergy rather than protecting
the wards of the church. The Vatican argues that secrecy protects victims, but
the victims disagree.

Institutional self protectiveness is
permitted not only by rules of pastoral confidentiality in confessions (we
cannot know how many priests confessed their misconduct and were protected by
the sanctity of the confessional),but also in settlements of many of the recent
scandals. When civil cases are settled, confidentiality agreements are commonly
added to induce private resolutions. The practice has been criticized and
modified in some courts to avoid repeated offenses of the same kind to innocent
parties unaware of the dangers uncovered by the settled litigation. A
South Carolina attorney who brought suits against the Church on behalf of
multiple victims of sexual abuse by priests refused to shroud the settlement in
secrecy because that public enlightenment of church abuses was one of the
reasons for bringing the case, and his injured clients needed closure for their
healing process to work. Victims should not feel their silence was
bought, he told me.

Many of the scandals that besmirched
and bankrupted the Church in many American cities and now has spread to Europe
might have been avoided if these two rules of confidentiality were
modified. In comparable confidentiality privileges involving lawyers,
doctors, psychoanalysts, spouses, the rule prevails but is not absolute. And
courts are beginning to refuse settlements of civil claims which contain
confidentiality clauses, where similar crimes could be repeated.

To avoid future scandals like those
Pope Benedict has acknowledged, the Church’s two rules about confidentiality
must be modified. The settlement of all claims against the Church must be
a matter of public record, to deter repeated offenses. And a balanced
rule which protects the sanctity of most sacramental confessions but mandates
exceptions where serious, repeated, or church related crimes are involved
should be enforced by Church legislators. One Vatican official stated that
reporting child abuse is not prohibited by the Code of Canon Law or Vatican
norms. If the Church won’t cure the problem, the secular authorities may have
to do so. No American court or legislature will wish to intrude on rules of the
Catholic Church, and they shouldn’t. But they may if the Church doesn’t
enforce balanced rules of confidentiality in the spirit of Pope Benedict’s
entreaties.

All institutions protect the administrators
of the institutions over their clientele—prisons, schools, police, professions,
even government agencies. But that fatal flaw should be especially unacceptable
when with dealing with an agency of spirit and morality. Those institutions
should not have to be instructed by the public or its courts or legislatures to
do what it exists to do. Yet recent disclosures prove that the Church’s
“highest priority was protecting the Church from scandal.” The Miami
Archdiocese, and the Vatican, knew of a Cuban priest’s sexual abuse of children
and permitted him to transfer to south Florida and continue his offenses.
Church officials were told to “protect this priest with your accustomed
paternal charity.”

The Vatican has ignored the cardinal rule
about coping with public scandals—get it all out in the open, deal with it, and
move on. Instead, it has acted like it existed in an ecclesiastical world where
it was sovereign, rather than in a secular, statist world that is hospitable to
organized religion when it acts as a responsible part of the larger society,
and critical when it does not. The result is a constant, continuing drip, drip,
drip of scandal that concerns important moral matters that have no “other
side.” The Catholic League of Religious and Civil Rights ran an ad in The
New York Times editorial
page claiming The Times’
articles about the “pedophilia crisis” really concerns a “a homosexual crisis.”
Wrong! It is a Church crisis, one of taking responsibility for the crimes of
its agents on children, and continuing to hide the facts and protect the
wrongdoers. Doing that implicates the institution itself.

On Good Friday, the Pope’s pastor at
the Vatican compared world outrage over the Church’s conduct of this issue with
persecution of Jews! As if the Church is the victim because personal misconduct
of its priests does not warrant collective responsibility of the institution
which shields them. Demonstrating how bizarre Church defenders have become, the
Holy See’s chief exorcist has claimed that criticism of the church is “prompted
by the devil”, New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd has reported.

It is past time the Vatican acted like
the parental power it is for its members. Its worldwide wounds need openness
and treatment, no more blame denial or responsibility shifting; and
fundamentally nor more secrecy.