Notes on the Papal Visit 4: Playing the Man, Not the Ball

And continuing from yesterday...

I've friends who say of this that there's no smoke without fire, but so far it seems that all the smoke there's been has come from smoke bombs thrown by lazy or malicious journalists. I think the press has actually done the Church a favour with the abuse stuff -- though I'm sure this wasn't the intention -- by forcing it to confront the problems, but that doesn't change the fact unlike so much else that's been reported, these particular personal attacks on the Pope have indeed been 'petty gossip'. Abuse has been widespread in the Church, especially about thirty years ago, and even allowing for the shambolic organisation of the Church at national level, a tendency towards cover-up seems to have been endemic, but there's not a jot of proof that indicates that Benedict, in whatever capacity, was responsible for either committing or concealing abuse.

That's not to say that prior to about eight years ago Benedict was as good and thorough as he might have been in tackling these problems, or that he didn't make mistakes, but that's a far cry from saying that he was in any way responsible for their having been perpetuated, and as John Allen has pointed out, since 2001 he's done more than anyone to try to cleanse the Church's Augean stables.

Meanwhile, and I know it's generally bad form to play the man and not the ball but given their form in this area I think their credibility counts, look at the people who have been screeching loudest that he's a criminal who shouldn't be allowed here, two of the most prominent of whom have put their name to documents that pretty much condone sexual relations between adults and children.

Take Richard Dawkins, for instance. In The God Delusion he claims to have been molested as a child by one of his teachers, covering up the identity of the abuser and saying that it did him no harm at all.

'All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).'

So depending on who's doing the abusing, and the exact nature of the abuse, Professor Dawkins thinks that there are situations in which child molestation, even if embarrassing, is essentially harmless. This doubtless goes some way to explaining why just a page later in that same screed he records how he has wondered aloud whether it'd be better for a child to be raped by a priest than to be taught by one.

'Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by the child up Catholic in the first place.'

Is this really a credible person to make any sort of claims about the Pope's record in this area?

Or Peter Tatchell. Yes, Peter Tatchell, the very fellow who did that ludicrous 'documentary' about the Pope for Channel 4 the other week. By this point, you should be well aware of how in 1997 he wrote in the Guardian that:

'The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’

Yes, that's Peter Tatchell, whose main mission in life seems to be lowering the age of consent so that many cases of clerical sex abuse would actually cease to be intrinsically illegal.

I'm glad to see some more thoughtful and traditional atheists, such as Brendan O'Neill and the Guardian's Andrew Brown, realising the risible and hysterical nature of so many of the current attacks on the Pope.

And though he's no atheist*, and so I'm reluctant to cite him here, the libertarian political blogger 'Guido Fawkes' is utterly right to say that the current attacks on the Pope are nothing more than atheist bigotry dressed up in rationalist clothes. Yes, bigotry, which is not a belief that you're right, but an absolute unshakeable refusal to countenance the possibility that you might be wrong. This is about attacking somebody who is seen to embody not just the Catholic faith, but traditional Christianity in general.

Not, of course, that Catholics or Britain's wider Christian community should be too heartbroken about being attacked in this way. As Our Lord pointed out, if the world hates us, we should remember that it hated Him first.

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* Nor, to be fair, is he someone I like to cite in any situation.

Notes on the Papal Visit 3: Sex Abuse and Supposed Vatican Cover-Up

So, as I was saying...

What then of the whole abuse issue? Well, firstly, it was absolutely monstrous, it happened, and it presumably is still happening although nowhere near on the scale it was about thirty years ago. The jury is still out on whether it was more prevalent in the Catholic Church than among ministers of other religions or indeed among society in general, though all the statistical evidence that's been so far collected suggests that this was not the case.

(The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Report, from 2002, which suggested that one in four Irish adults  - roughly 700 people from a sample of about 3000 - had been sexually abused in one way or another when they were children or teenagers, found that only one in sixty of those - 12 out of the more than 700 confirmed survivors, had been abused by religious ministers of any denomination.)

In connection with how the Pope is regularly attacked over this, complaints about abuse were indeed spectacularly mishandled by people who had the job of dealing with it. Why they did this is difficult to ascertain, but there seem to have been a range of reasons and I think it's foolish and simplistic to seek a holistic explanation, unifying all the factors. The 2009 Murphy Report, analysing how complaints were handled in the Dublin archdiocese between 1975 and 2004, singled such contributory factors as a determination to avoid scandal, an excessive degree of clericalism both within the Church hierarchy and in society at large, a tendency to downplay the significance of abuse, a belief that abusive priests were ill and in need of treatment more than punishment, and a post-Vatican II unwillingness to apply the Church's own internal disciplinary mechanisms.

The questions are, though, was Benedict in any way personally responsible for this and was there a centrally-mandated cover-up conspiracy in Rome? People who call him a criminal really ought to do some research into this before hurling around libels like that.

Andrew Brown, writing in the Guardian back in March, had this latter point spot on: there was no Vatican cover-up, but there were hundreds of little local ones that grew naturally out of clerical culture. Brown's article is particularly depressing, especially as he notes that the worst period by far for clerical sexual abuse in America - 1978 to 1983 - was a period during which not one complaint of abuse received by American bishops was referred to Rome. The significance of this, he rightly points out, lies in how bishops tended to hide the truth from Rome. The good news is that this means Rome is probably innocent of coordinating a grand global conspiracy to cover up sexual abuse around the world, but the bad news is that it didn't need to, as it happened anyway, which means that we can expect more horror stories in the years to come and it's going to be very hard to solve things.

But what about the then Cardinal Ratzinger's famous 2001 letter in which he demanded that all abuse allegations should be passed on to him, insisting on absolute secrecy and a refusal to cooperate with the civil authorities wherever the abuse took place. If you've heard this you've just heard typical media nonsense, possibly converted into an anti-Catholic diatribe.

And yes, 'media nonsense' is a fair way of describing this kind of stuff. John Allen, who seems to be by far the best Vatican journalist in the world, recently listed a few typical instances of how the mainstream media invariably gets this stuff wrong.

There was a 2001 letter, sure, directed to the bishops who Benedict feared had indeed made a complete mess of things, and taking these matters out of their incompetent - and in some cases arrogant and even corrupt - hands. It was designed to ensure that abuse allegations were dealt with properly, as they all too often had not been, and it helped abuse victims and justice in general by greatly extending the time limits for bringing complaints. The Church's internal handling of these matters indeed involved confidentiality, largely because of the basic principle that people should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, but the 2001 document  in no way precluded bishops or victims from going to the police. It didn't direct them to do so, but it most certainly didn't bar them from doing so.

And what of the specific instances where Benedict supposedly obstructed the course of justice and engaged in cover-ups himself, whether as Archbishop of Munich or as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? A few such stories hit the headlines earlier in the year, but none of them had legs once genuine investigation took place. Unfortunately, the papers which screamed about Benedict's guilt when the story's initially broke tended not to publish equally prominent articles retracting their claims. I'm not sure of the order the stories broke in, but just in order of how I learned of them...

Hullermann

The first concerns the then Archbishop of Munich's 1980 decision to allow a priest, one Peter Hullermann, who years later was convicted of molesting boys, to move to his archdiocese to undergo therapy for paedophilic tendencies. Weeks after his therapy began, one of the then archbishop's deputies approved Father Hullermann's return to pastoral duties. Was the then Archbishop Ratzinger at fault? The question concerns what he knew, of course, and there's no evidence that he knew of anything other than the initial decision to allow Hullermann to live in the archdiocese, without pastoral involvement, while undergoing therapy. Father Gerhard Gruber, the then Vicar General of the diocese, has repeatedly stated that the decision to allow Hullermann to return to duty was his and something the then archbishop had not been involved in; given how big the diocese was, and how priests in it at the time found Ratzinger to be rather remote and uninvolved with what went on, this seems likely to be true.

(The Murphy Report, for what it's worth, noted the widespread tendency back then to think of paedophilia and ephebophilia as conditions that could be treated, and the belief that therapy was the best solution; it specifically says, in a document that otherwise damns the Irish Church, that this was a reasonable approach, provided that the person undergoing therapy wasn't at liberty to reoffend. That the then Archbishop Ratzinger agreed to allow an abusive priest into his diocese for therapy seems something that can't reasonably be objected to, and there's no evidence that he was responsible for his subordinate's decision to allow said priest back into any sort of ministry.)

Murphy

A second story concerned a retired priest in Wisconsin, one Father Lawrence Murphy, who admitted to having abused nineteen boys but who it has been speculated may have abused as many two hundred deaf children, and who the then Cardinal Ratzinger supposedly protected and refused to laicise. As ever the story is more complicated than meets the eye, but the clear facts are as follows.

Murphy was guilty of numerous instances of sexual abuse between 1950 and 1974, though the figure of 200 is purely speculative. Complaints were made to the police and the diocese, but the police declined to prosecute or to do anything about the matter; feeling there were grounds for the complaints, the Church eventually removed Murphy from ministry anyway. He lived in seclusion at home for about twenty years, with no further complaints being made about him. In 1996, with some of Murphy's victims bravely continuing to pursue the matter, the affair was finally referred to Rome by Murphy's bishop. Three months later, under instructions from Cardinal Bertone in Rome, a canonical trial started to get underway, and numerous interviews were conducted with Murphy's victims. In 1998 Murphy was ordered to give a deposition himself, but his doctor wrote to say that he could not travel as he was ill. A week later he died.

There's no reason to believe that the then Cardinal Ratzinger was involved in the affair in any regard, and it was only sloppy journalism - marked by an apparent desire to smear the Pope - that generated the impression that he had been.

Teta and Trupio

The third related story two priests in Arizona,  Michael Teta and Robert Trupia, both of whom were removed from ministry as soon as allegations about them came to light.

The case against Teta solely concerned his abusing the confessional to solicit sex from adult males - the sole allegation concerning abuse of children went to court and was thrown out as clearly false. The subsequent canonical trials - because solicitation is regarded as a serious crime in the Church - continued for years, with a lengthy appeal following, so that more than a decade passed before Teta was dismissed from the clerical state. Rome was only involved in the Teta process in three respects: at the start, when its permission was sought for the trial to begin; during the trial, urging the diocese to expedite the process; and during the appeal, when the diocese asked from Rome's help in expediting the process.

As early as 1975, soon after his ordination, there were serious allegations made about Trupia molesting boys, but they were never passed on to Rome in any sense. In 1989 the police expressed concerns, but again, nothing came of this. It looks very likely that the diocese covered up for Trupia's actions, for whatever reason, but they certainly were never passed on to Rome. A fresh complaint in 1992 concerning abuse that had taken place in 1981 led to Trupia being confronted and admitting what he had done; he was suspended from ministry and  barred from presenting himself as a priest. Then began the lengthy process of canonical trials and appeals, which was clearly a bureaucratic mess, but during which children were not endangered, as the key step - according to the Murphy Report - of removal from ministry had already been taken. In 2001 responsibility for handling matters such as this in Rome was taken over by the then Cardinal Ratzinger's CDF, and work started on the thousands of cases that came in from around the world. In 2003, Trupia's bishop personally raised the matter with the CDF, and Trupia was dismissed from the clerical state the following year. Early in this process, the police were informed in Arizona, though criminal cases came to nothing; civil lawsuits brought some justice to Trupia's victims though I gather Trupia is at liberty nowadays.

In any case, what these stories clearly show, in connection with the Pope, is that he was in no way responsible for allowing either Teta or Trupia to have abused anyone, and indeed his involvement simply consists of his having pushed through the final decisions to laicise both men.

Kiesle

The last of these stories concerned how the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1985 supposedly refused to punish one Father Stephen Kiesle, a Californian priest who a Californian court convicted of child molestation in 1978. Kiesle's diocese responded to this by withdrawing permission for him to remain in ministry, and in 1981 he asked to be laicised, which meant that he asked to be allowed withdraw from the obligations of the clerical state, including celibacy and the duty to obey his bishop.

Dismissal from the clerical state can take place within the Church as a punishment, but it is only granted to priests who request it if they're in good standing with the Church. Kiesle, obviously, wasn't in good standing, and so Rome was in no hurry to grant his request. The then Cardinal Ratzinger signed a form letter in 1985, saying that the matter needed further consideration, and two years later Kiesle's wish was granted. The key thing here is that the abuse case was never sent to Rome, and there was never any question of Benedict refusing to punish an abusive priest; if anything, he was reluctant to reward one.

Just one more piece. Tomorrow, so.

Notes on the Papal Visit 2: Condoms, AIDS, and Africa

Continued from yesterday...

You know the story: supposedly millions upon millions of people in Africa are dying of HIV-AIDS because the Pope tells them they shouldn't use condoms, and they obey him on this because they're too thick to do otherwise. I've heard this too many times to count. There's only one problem with it: it's not true, as people would realise if they only stopped to think.

Brendan O'Neill utterly nails this nonsense in yesterday's Spiked, concisely making points I've been cumbersomely making for years. He glosses over the all-important fact that the Church is the single largest provider of healthcare -- notably for victims of HIV-AIDS --  in Africa, such that one could argue that the Church does more to fight HIV-AIDS than any other organisation in the world. Instead he points out that HIV-AIDS is most prevalent in African countries with tiny Catholic minorities rather than in countries with sizeable ones, and identifies the racism that's implicit in claims about the Church worsening the AIDS crisis, noting that such claims are wholly underpinned by the assumption that Africans are idiots, utterly in thrall to religious teachings, unlike sophisticated Europeans and Americans who cannily ignore the ones they find inconvenient. Have a read  and then think about the fact that while a few priests and bishops have said some false and dangerous things about condoms, their opinions don't necessarily represent Church teaching, anymore than my old blog from back in the day used to represent the official position of my old employer.*

And then take a look at these two maps, the top one showing the countries in Africa with the highest proportions of Catholics, and the bottom one showing the countries with the highest rates of HIV-AIDS, and then have a think about why there's not exactly a huge overlap between the most Catholic countries and the ones most blighted by HIV-AIDS. Does anyone seriously think that Church teaching carries in any meaningful way in countries where only small minorities of people are Catholic?

There is also the possibility that Pope may in any case have well been right when he opined that condoms may actually make the problem worse, by lulling people into a false sense of safety, thereby encouraging reckless behaviour, or so at least Harvard's Edward C Green, among others, has argued.

I know, intuitively this seems wrong, but according to that article, current empirical evidence supports the Pope on this. Ben Goldacre, for all his brilliance elsewhere, looks utterly guilty of bad science himself when he claims otherwise.

It's worth noting too, as pretty much everyone seems unaware of this, that the Pope has never said that condoms shouldn't be used when having sex outside of marriage. Not a word. All of his comments on the matter have concerned contraception within marriage. Why? Well, the Church regards sex as being exclusively for marriage - it is the act of marital communion, for want of a better way of putting it - and regards all extramarital sex as intrinsically wrong. Whether you agree with that is, in this context, neither here nor there. What matters is that the Church isn't in the business of advising people on how to mitigate things it regards as sins. It says, with God, 'thou shalt not commit adultery'. It doesn't say, 'we'd rather you didn't commit adultery, but if you must cheat on your wife with some random skank, for whatever reason, well, it might be prudent to wear one of these things.'

So everything the Church -- as opposed to the odd priest or bishop -- says about condoms pertains to marital sex only. Why does it do this in the case of HIV-AIDS, where they'd be used to prevent infection rather than conception? My thinking, ultimately, is that its about love. In cases where one partner in a married couple has HIV-AIDS, the Church takes the line that the most loving thing to do is to abstain from sex, not to engage in it with or without a condom.

Why? Well, look at the figures that Goldacre cites. Over a given period, any such couple engaging in regular sex without a condom can be sure that the disease will be passed from one partner to another, but for such a couple engaging in regular sex with a condom, the disease will only be a fifth as likely to be passed on. There's the crux of the issue: over a period that would cause faithful monogamous sex without a condom to lead to a 100% infection rate, faithful monogamous sex with a condom would have a 20% infection rate, and loving abstention would have a 0% infection rate.

If I had AIDS and loved my wife, I don't think I'd be inclined to play Russian Roulette with  her body. Would you?

More tomorrow...

Notes on the Papal Visit 1: Cost and Purpose

Sick in bed all today, I wrote a very long Facebook post about the Papal visit and the controversy some have tried to kick up about it. Thinking it mightn't be a bad idea to post it here too, here goes...

I've gotten rather tired of playing whack-a-mole with all the crazy myths being perpetuated about the Papal visit, so here's a pretty straightforward summary of where I stand on this.

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF STATE VISITS

Firstly, the Queen has made at least two formal state visits to the Holy See at the invitation of the Pope, and at the Holy See's expense. Given this, is it really so odd that the Pope, as head of state of the Holy See, should have been invited here or that he should have accepted? It is worth pointing out that the Holy See, to which the United Kingdom's ambassador is accredited, is not synonymous with the Vatican City, and predates most if not all other European states, dating back well into the medieval period.

There are straightforward political reasons why the British government should have wanted the Pope to visit. The British government and the Holy See work together in the fields of international justice, development, and debt, as well as other issues such as the environment. The government wants to develop these ties further to make use of what it perceives as the Holy See's massive 'soft power' in these areas. This is why the Pope has been invited here on a formal state visit, and is why more than half the cost of the visit is being paid for by the state.

THE COST OF THE VISIT

Why not all the cost, as would normally be the case? Well, the Pope is taking advantage of being here in order to perform his pastoral duties for British Catholics, and to oversee the beatification of Cardinal Newman, one of his heroes, and one of mine, for what it's worth. Benedict would hardly have come here if he could not have done such things, and such pastoral and ecclesiastical elements of the trip are being paid for by the Church, which is having to seek special donations from Britain's Catholics to fund these, as when John Paul II visited in 1982, the Church in Britain was left broke and in debt.

(For what it's worth the Queen shall be visiting Ireland in 2011, and shall be doing so at the Irish taxpayers' expense. I hope there shan't be Irish people upset at the prospect of paying for the Supreme Governor of the Church of England to visit their country.)

It looks as though £8 million of the costs shall be borne by Britain's Catholics, with the remaining £12 million or so - according to the government - being borne by the state that's invited Benedict to visit. This £12 million figure excludes security costs, but the government reckons they'll cost about £1.5 million. Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, on the other hand, is screeching that the visit will cost about £100 million, but given that the G20 Summit last year had a security budget of less than £8 million, I very much doubt that the Pope's visit shall cost eleven times that amount.

In short,  it looks like the taxpayer will be paying something in the region of £14 million for the visit. Presumably the government believes this will be money well spent if it means that it gain the support of the Holy See in achieving some of its foreign policy objectives. And £14 million, lest people feel that that's an outrageous amount to be spending on helping starving people in Africa, say, isn't that much; it's about 23p per head of population. And if that still bothers people, Halifax reckons everyone has, on average, seven tiimes that amount buried in their living room couch.

What then of the other reasons being wheeled out against Benedict being here? Two seem to be paramount, being the abuse scandals and the supposed effect of Church teaching on AIDS in Africa; there are other issues, but these pale into insignificance next to these. So...