On Faith Panelists Blog

March 30, 2010

Benedict should stay - and clean house

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Q: Should Pope Benedict XVI be held responsible for the escalating scandals over clerical sexual abuse in Europe? Should he be investigated for cases of abuse that occurred under his watch as archbishop of Munich or as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer? Should the pope resign?

The Catholic Church is not a corporation and Pope Benedict XVI is not its CEO. His role is that of a spiritual father to the world's billion-plus Catholics. And fathers don't resign. But they do clean house.

When it comes to clergy sexual abuse scandals, the Catholic Church could use a good housecleaning. The depressingly familiar pattern of serial abusers being bounced from parish to parish by cowardly or naïve bishops is one that rightly infuriates the Catholic faithful. And recent reports suggesting Benedict's involvement in two decades-old cases of predatory priests in Munich and Milwaukee have exacerbated the frustration of American Catholics who are not eager to relive the long Lent of 2002, when the scandal first exploded on our shores.

In the Munich case, all that's known for sure is that then-Cardinal Ratzinger allowed an accused priest to come to his diocese for psychotherapy - considered at the time an appropriate remedy for pedophilia - and that the priest was reassigned to parish work on Ratzinger's watch, although the Vatican says the future pope did not authorize the reassignment. In the Milwaukee case, Ratzinger's Rome office was informed about the abusive priest more than two decades after the priest left a school for the deaf amid abuse allegations. A church case against the priest was ongoing when he died two years later, according to the judge in the canonical trial.

Those caveats do not change the fact that children were brutally robbed of their innocence while their abusers roamed free. The acts committed against these children were unspeakably evil. And the dawdling pace of the church's response to them was inexcusable.

But banishing Benedict would not fix the systemic problem that underlies these cases. In fact, as leading Vatican expert John Allen has argued in his The New York Times op-ed and elsewhere, this pope has been a leader in attempting to rectify this sorry chapter of Catholic Church history, however inadequate his initial response to its manifestations may have been. After his office was assigned responsibility for reviewing abuse case files in 2001, he pored over them personally and grasped the scope of the problem as few other clerics have. This "conversion experience," Allen says, goes a long way toward explaining why he became known among Vatican insiders as a hard-liner on the question of disciplining abusive priests. It also explains why as pope he has taken several unprecedented steps - including meeting personally with abuse victims, writing a pastoral letter on the abuse crisis and disciplining such high-profile predator priests as the Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi - to combat what he has described as "filth" in the church.

Should Catholics be angry about the ongoing revelations of clergy sexual abuse? Absolutely. Do victims deserve a full accounting of how those cases were handled? Yes again. Should Benedict resign? No. He should do what a good father would do: Root out the filth in his house, acknowledge the church's past failings frankly and let his flock know, in both word and action, that he shares their fury at these unspeakable crimes and their resolve that they never be repeated.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is author of “The New Faithful,” an ex-presidential speechwriter, op-ed columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and host of “Faith & Culture,” a TV and radio show on EWTN.