The thing happened in Cameroon, a half-Catholic country, in 2009. It was Pope Benedict XVI’s first visit to Africa, a continent where, for 10 years, HIV-AIDS had been the leading cause of death. The World Health Organization, NGOs, several governments and South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu were redoubling their efforts to prevent contagion through the AFC program (abstinence, faithfulness, condom). Yes, but what do God and his representative on earth think of it? the 160 million or so Catholic Africans might then ask themselves.
Historically, the Vatican has always been opposed to contraception – and to the condom -, advocating only the first two elements of the triptych: abstinence and fidelity. But when the death toll in Africa had passed 30 million and the epidemic was spreading to women (61% of those infected) and children (90% of all infected children in the world were African), was it necessary be more flexible? Or at least remain silent on the condom so as not to interfere with the efforts?
Faced with this enormous responsibility, Benedict XVI was going to surprise. Unpleasantly. “We cannot solve this scourge by distributing condoms: on the contrary, they increase the problem,” he said. The pope was to awkwardly try to rectify the situation the following year by affirming that the condom could be used in “exceptional” cases—among male prostitutes, for example, for whom it would be “a first step towards moralization”. The question was not there.
Of course, one cannot quantify the number of lives that could have been saved if the pope had sided with public health rather than with the most rigid version of the dogma. Only one thing is certain: through his fault, more people were infected, sick, died prematurely, including women and children.
The inflexibility of Benedict XVI in situations where tolerance and forgiveness should have prevailed was illustrated shortly before with regard to abortion.
In Brazil, a 61% Catholic country, a nine-year-old child repeatedly raped by her stepfather had recourse to an abortion. The local, ultra-conservative archbishop reacted by excommunicating the doctors who performed the termination of pregnancy as well as the child’s mother, who had approved the operation. The outcry was general, but the Vatican approved the excommunications in the name of the “right to life”. Here again, it is difficult to measure the impact of this insensitivity on the lives of young Latin American Catholics who are victims of aggression, but summoned by their Church to carry their pregnancies to term, even in the worst conditions.
Since the death of Benedict XVI, we have heard charitable voices claiming that he has begun the Church’s march towards recognition of its responsibility for the extremely numerous sexual assaults perpetrated by members of the clergy. It is true that he was the first, in 2008, to say he was “deeply sorry” for the suffering that the victims endured. But the criterion of appreciation that should apply here is not whether he was able to begin to manage, in 2008, a crisis that had become acute. Rather, we must ask whether he did everything in his power to limit the number of victims as soon as he was made aware of it and as soon as he was in a position of power within the Church. .
The answer is a deafening no. Bishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, he, according to an independent report, covered the actions of four attackers punished by German justice, but maintained in their pastoral functions by the future pope, who in no way sanctioned them. He thus personally sent to the other aggressors a serious signal of impunity and ignored this injunction of Jesus: “If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to fall into sin, it is better that a large stone around his neck and throw him into the bottom of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).
He then became one of the most powerful figures in the Vatican, officiating for 23 years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and centralizing in his office, from 2001, sexual assault files.
There is no doubt in retrospect that he was for a long time in this position one of the main cogs in the greatest sex crime cover-up operation of the modern era. This action was deployed, as we know, by the refusal to denounce to the police the aggressors – 4% of the members of the Catholic clergy, it is estimated -, by the practice of transferring the aggressors from one parish to another without obviously informing the faithful. For decades, especially those when Joseph Ratzinger was in charge, the Vatican’s response was to deny, to minimize, to cover up.
Faced with the growing scale of the scandal and hounded by the UN, Ratzinger began to crack down late, at the turn of 2010, expelling nearly 400 priests in two years. Even pope, he continued to minimize the Vatican’s responsibility, blaming the national Churches, even the effects of the Second Vatican Council, rather than the complicity of the entire hierarchy. His handling of the crisis did not satisfy UN investigators, who concluded in 2019 that, particularly under his leadership, an “apparently systemic cover-up” was taking place in the Vatican (cover up) and obstruction of holding abusers accountable”.
It is still impossible to calculate the number of contemporary victims, but a recent official report put the figure at 330,000 victims in France alone. Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, is obviously not the only one involved, far from it. A group of survivors called in 2013 for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to bring him and other Catholic leaders to trial as crimes against humanity for having “tolerated and enabled the systematic and widespread concealment of rapes and sexual crimes committed against children around the world”. The ICC declined the request. That’s a shame. We could have gotten to the bottom of things. To be certain.
But since the time has come to take stock of his action, how can we not conclude that not only a holy man, but simply a good man — or, as our civil law says, “a good father” — , informed that unspeakable crimes were taking place under his responsibility, targeting tens of thousands of children—even just one—would have moved heaven and earth, from the morning of his first day at work, for this to stop? Not him. Rather, he took refuge, in the words of Matthias Katsch, a representative of German abuse survivors, behind an “edifice of lies”.
blog: jflisee.org