Breaking! Benedict followed church law

June 2, 2010 By
Pope Benedict XVI sprinkles holy water during the Pentecostal mass in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican

For a few months now, mainstream media outlets have been attempting to tie Pope Benedict XVI to a cover-up of the clerical sex abuse scandal that plagued the Roman Catholic Church. The claims themselves haven’t made the case. In fact, those reporters most knowledgeable of the Vatican situation, such as John Allen, say that Benedict has done more than anyone else to improve how the church handles abuse cases.

Most of the problem with media coverage seems to be wholesale confusion with the rules and guidelines that determine how the church deals with problem priests. This Associated Press story that ran in the Boston Globe provides a good example of that confusion in the opening graphs:

The future Pope Benedict XVI refused to remove a US priest from the ministry after the priest confessed to molesting numerous children and even served prison time for it, simply because the cleric wouldn’t agree to such a discipline.

The case provides the latest evidence of how changes in church law under Pope John Paul II frustrated and hamstrung US bishops struggling with an abuse crisis that would eventually worsen.

But the time of this case, bishops did not need Vatican permission to remove a priest from active ministry. They had full rights to do this on their own. Springfield (Ill.) bishop Daniel Ryan could have removed the priest without getting Vatican permission.

Another version of this Associated Press story puts it this way:

The future Pope Benedict XVI refused to defrock an American priest who confessed to molesting numerous children and even served prison time for it, simply because the cleric wouldn’t agree to the discipline.

The problem with this phrasing is that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did not have the authority at that time to laicize a priest involuntarily. It’s sort of like saying “Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to order involuntary kidney transplant.” It may be true, in one sense, but it’s just not even a possibility. Our courts have processes for how we handle the accused. These processes help us assign cases to the proper court and help us grant the accused certain rights.

Now, if you read the actual story, much of this is explained quite well. In fact, the lede — of either version excerpted above — is dramatically different from the meat of the story. The meat of the story does a pretty good job of explaining the frustration and hamstringing mentioned. It even explains that the priest was laicized a few years later when he agreed to it.

Another mark in this story’s favor is that it doesn’t hide the scandal of one of the key players, Springfield bishop Daniel Ryan. He resigned following claims he had failed to act against abusive priests because he feared exposure of his own homosexual activities. Bishop Ryan was suspended from public ministry in 2002 following claims he had molested a young man.

Few will disagree that the church did a poor job of fighting child abuse in its midst. That story is much more complicated than a conspiracy theory involving the pope. But apart from the misleading headline and lede, this story does a good job of exploring part of that complexity — how canon law hampered some efforts to deal with problem priests.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, Journalism, Sex, World
  • Martha

    See, this is where the confusion arises: between removing the alleged abuser from active ministry and what laicisation involves.

    If the priest did not wish to be laicised, then he could not be against his will. That does not mean that he couldn’t be removed from active ministry.

    The implication in the stories is that an abuser was permitted to remain in charge of a church or in contact with youth and children, which is a different thing to being “defrocked”.

    It’s that whole “ontological change” thing again, I’m afraid.

    And how do you “defrock” a member of a religious order who isn’t an ordained priest (a religious brother or a nun)? There have been such cases too.

  • http://eclecticmeanderings.blogspot.com/ Hank

    The big irony keeps being missed.

    If a priet is removed from ministry,he is still subect to the obligations of being a priest.

    Laicisation releases him from the oblgations of being a priest.

    The notable example is celibacy.

    If a priest leaves the priesthood to get married, he has to request laicisation in order to marry.

    A priest who is removed from all priestly duties is still bound by celibacy. Assuming he cares about what the Church says laicisation could be considered to his advantage nort simply an additonal punishment.

    Laicisation gets the %^$%^ off the books, which is good and should be done, but I think to much is being made of it as a punishment.

  • Julia

    Most reporters don’t seem to understand that the Catholic Church believes that once ordained, a man is a priest forever. It’s like baptism – an indelible mark.

    A Catholic priest can be fired from his church job, work instead in a gas station and he’s still a priest. Even when he is laicized (“de-frocked”), he is released from certain vows and the church is no longer responsible for him – he is still technically a priest but must live as if he is not a priest.

    Most reporters probably also do not understand that a laicized (“defrocked”) priest, or even one sent to jail for heinous crimes, is not necessarily excommunicated. There are criteria in canon law for that. It is similar to being found “in contempt of court” in US courts. A convicted murderer is not thereby held “in contempt of court”; neither is a bad sinner excommunicated in the Catholic Church – except for a few rare circumstances under canon law.

    This is where most reporters missed the boat concerning Archbishop Williamson, the ignorant guy who kept arguing there weren’t millions of Jews killed in gas chambers in WWII. There is no canon law provision for excommunicating somebody for saying stupid, offensive things – unless, perhaps, he is defying direct church orders. He and the other 3 bishops were excommunicated for defying church rules about ordaining new priests without authority to do so. That’s why so-called women priests are automatically excommunicated.

    Canon law is a real legal system, the oldest one in existence. Many of our legal concepts derive from it. And just like our courts there are arguments about meanings and application of canon law. Too many articles are written as if the Pope and others at “the Vatican” can just do as they please, ad libbing at will.

    The current compilation of canon law is way shorter than the health care bill. It wouldn’t hurt reporters who are going to cover Catholic matters to skim through it and have it on their hard drive.

    http://www.intratext.com/x/eng0017.htm

  • Julia

    because the cleric wouldn’t agree to such a discipline.

    The problem here is calling laicization a “discipline”. As Hank says, sometimes laicization is sought by a priest who wants to marry.

    A lawyer whose license is suspended is being disciplined. A lawyer who is disbarred can no longer function as a lawyer – it’s different than discipline.

    In the last 10 years, many states have begun to keep convicted sex crime convicts in confinement past their normal time of release for the good of the public. Sometimes it’s not such a good idea to laicize a priest sex abuser, either, and set him loose on the community.

    As long as the diocese has the carrot and stick of pension, living expenses and housing, especially when the man is elderly, it might be better to have him living at one of the restricted facilities now in existence for troublesome elderly priests. The diocese can’t maintain any control over a younger priest with marketable skills, so laicization is a better option in those cases.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Journalism, folks, journalism.

    Try to focus on the actual content of the story and the post.

  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    That the story had correct information and that, overall the body of the story was fair—makes the garbage ledes stink all the more. For an AP writer must know that many readers don’t get past the first few paragraphs of a story and that some headline writers don’t seem to get past the first sentence. So what better way to smear the pope, yet claim you got everything basically right if challenged.

  • Passing By

    Well, at least this story involves a priest who actually wasn’t removed from ministry. In the Milwaukee and Oakland cases, the priests were removed from ministry, though not laicized, at least initially.

    …to remove a US priest from the ministry…

    …to remove the priest

    At this point, when I read phrases as quoted above, I can assume the intent is to confuse the issue and implicate the pope, whether the facts support it or not. Granted, the story gets around to including most of the relevant information, but still leaves the impression that those bad old rules were putting children at risk. That’s simply not true.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    I’m having to delete comments from someone who is not familiar with our commenting policy.

    Again, this is not a site for debating the Catholic Church or its policies. It’s for discussing mainstream media coverage of religion news.

    Comments should be focused on that topic. If you want to discuss your feelings about Catholicism or policies of that church, this is not the venue for that.

    Best,

    MZ

  • Dave

    Perhaps journalism generally has soaked up the wish of some adult survivors of childhood abuse by priests that the latter be stripped of their status completely.

    We should remember that the long-standing abuse story is one that the press missed for a long time. For decades there were jokes about priests, but those were probably dismissed as sectarian bigotry (which, of course, they were) so no one looked for a kernel of truth behind the jokes.

  • Peggy

    TIME has a nasty cover saying “Why Being Pope Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” It is based on the pope’s possibly issuing some statement of apology or something penitential at the close of the Year for PRiests.

    The story associated with it is called “The Trial of Benedict XVI.”

    What carp!

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/current/

  • Patrick

    @ Julia:

    “Most reporters don’t seem to understand that the Catholic Church believes that once ordained, a man is a priest forever. It’s like baptism – an indelible mark.”

    There are quite a few American Catholics who don’t understand that, either. I’d guess more than half. If we’re wondering why “the press…just doesn’t get religion”, perhaps it’s because most of the religious don’t, either, because doctrine is never discussed in Church.

  • Julia

    Patrick:

    You’re probably right.

    My sons learned how to fall back and trust that somebody would catch them in HS and watched films of the religion teacher’s wife giving birth. After 12 years of Catholic schooling they learned shockingly little about their Faith. The 1970s and 1980s were the era when how you felt meant more than what you knew about your faith. Dogma and doctrine were bad words. We reap what we sow. I’m trying to sneak in some remedial learning little by little – surreptitiously with my sons (and here – shhhh). They don’t necessarily have to believe it.

    But if a reporter is writing an article about a religious matter shouldn’t he or she want to get background information as much as he or she would for a secular matter?

  • Patrick

    “But if a reporter is writing an article about a religious matter shouldn’t he or she want to get background information as much as he or she would for a secular matter?”

    Yes and yes; I think this is especially true for secular press in a quasi-Puritan culture writing on Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Puritans love punishment and dislike religious rituals, so it would seem “logical” to “defrock” somebody who commits atrocious sins and illogical that the sacrament of Holy Orders is, you know, infused with a power nobody can take away.

    With the 2-hr news cycle, though, the secular press doesn’t do a lot of research on secular matters, either. I find it better to avoid television and newspaper reporting entirely.

    “The 1970s and 1980s were the era when how you felt meant more than what you knew about your faith. Dogma and doctrine were bad words. We reap what we sow.”

    I’m very relieved, for some reason, to hear that. I grew up in the 1980′s as a “cradle Catholic”, and when I was sixteen, I wasn’t sure why you needed Jesus to “be nice to people” or why, besides sentimentality, would you be devoted to the Blessed Virgin. I had got the idea that Catholicism was merely about “being nice to people.” And that was wrong, wrong, wrong, but nobody explained any of the reasons behind the “strange” rites of the Catholic Church either in Church of CCD. Well, I returned to the Church years later and finally read the Catechism and some encyclicals and apologetics and found out: “WOW! Why didn’t I know any of this after growing up Catholic?”

    I go to Mass as often as possible, and I probably still wouldn’t know any of the doctrines without independent research (and I’m sure to read the Canon Law you posted!). It’s sad, but many American Catholics seem to think we’re just another denomination of Protestant when it’s oh-so-much-more interesting than that.

    Older folks have all of these “horror stories” of the pre-Vatican II Church, and I’m sure it was awful. It sounds like ritualism-without-personal-faith and enforced corporate hierarchy, which is sad. Still, though, I sometimes feel a little disappointed that I had to return to the Catholic Church in order to understand how interesting and multi-faceted Catholic culture really was – all I got in the ’80′s Church was a sentimentalism I don’t share. In other words, sometimes I’m a little jealous of folks who had too much dogma, because us ’80′s kids didn’t get enough.

    Thanks for that- it made my day.

  • Julia

    Patrick:

    I was at a Jesuit university (1962-66) during Vatican II, where we read the documents as they were being debated. I also remember very well the preceding era, and I can tell you that some older folks just love to tell these “horror stories.” Perhaps they were the later 1960s rebellious boomers that came after my cohorts.

    There was lots of personal faith. The Church needed some tweaking and updating, but it was not awful for most people. Unfortunateley, there aren’t too many sources to get a more balanced idea of what was needed. In the US we had quite a few Irish priests who were imbued with a Jansenism that resulted in fire and brimstone sermons at times, but that was not always the case. And nuns were so worried about our virginity before birth control pills that they often went overboard, too. But there was also lots of laughing and church picnics, May crownings, lovely singing in the choir and a warm comradeship with other parishioners that is missing today.

    Ritual is not a bad thing and we had missals with Latin and English. We knew what was going on as much as people at the new Mass do. You hear the same words at every Mass and you soon know what the Latin means even if you didn’t study Latin in school. Of course, the changing Introit, Gradual, etc. were always right there in the missal.

    I dropped out in the late 70s & early 80s due to what I considered the vapidity that was overtaking my church and returned in the 90s due to MA classes I took at a very non-Catholic university. Two non-Catholic professors in particular expressed great admiration for the intellectual aspects of Catholicism and mourned what had happened to my church. In a course on the Popes where I was the only Catholic, we read original documents starting way, way back and I began to appreciate and regain what had been lost in the happy,clappy era.

    Independent reading is always good – sometimes better b/c you aren’t just looking for a grade anymore. Benedict is a patient teacher. His talks about the history of the thought of the church are being compiled in small books. They are very much worth reading. I think he truly recognizes what happened and is patiently trying to re-build. Sometimes crises are a good thing.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Keep comments focused on journalism, please.

  • Dave

    Hang in there, Mollie! :-)

  • http://www.mormoninmichigan.blogspot.com John Pack Lambert

    I think my point that this story is very flawed is reinforced by the statements of the commentors.

    I would say that the most baisc journalistic responsibility is to state that the case in question involved a priest who was in prison at the time.

    Laicization was a mute point, at least in matters of protecting children or anyone else from a sexual predator. The man was behind bars.

    It seems that at some level the general claim is that this “cover-up” of abuse either a- allowed more abuse to occur or be allowed people to avoid punishment. Since Campbell was in prison neither of these were true.

    Dave has a good point about journalism soaking up the demand Priests who abused be fully removed from office and be denied any respect. What the press avoids asking is, if you can sue a Church for giving someone a title, not just a point of contact, but a mere title, than what has happened to religious lierty? In this case, with the man in prison, refusing to go through a proper canonical trial makes no sense at all.

    If he had avoid prison due to any number of reasons, one could argue a full public denunciation of him by removing every respect and power of being a Catholic priest may have helped. However there are two flaws with this.

    First, he was in prison, clearly disgraced and whehter or not he was a Catholic priest would have no effect. Secondly, the news articles do not actually make such arguments. They never ask “who cares” about these things. They assume somehow it matters if the preist is laicized or not. When he is languishing in jail, I think the media has a duty to demonstate that Cardinal Ratzinger’s actions had any effect on anything. Of course, that would require the basic decency of telling us this involved a priest who was serving a prison term at the time of the letter. That seems like it would be the basic minimum, and it seems that should be stated clearly at the start of the article, instead of never being actual said, and being left to those of us who bother doing the math and determinging that serving seven years from 1985 Campbell was released from prison in 1992.