“During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: ‘Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?’ The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: ‘Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
– Ross Douthat on page A19 in The New York Times, Monday, March 29, 2010
“Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s darkest eras.
“This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.”
– ibid.
“A wealthy Italian industrialist called Angelo Balducci had been honored by the Vatican as a gentiluomo del Papa, a ‘gentleman of the Pope,’ but then in charges that hit the headlines in Italy last month he was put under investigation for allegedly raking in money from sleazy building tenders. Separately, a member of the Vatican choir claims he was paid to find gay partners for Balducci. Despite the Church’s draconian stand on homosexuality, the Vatican has long been known as a gay hot house, and insiders believe that Benedict’s elevation changed nothing.
“Meanwhile scandals continue to rain down on the Church from abroad. Shortly after Benedict condemned the ‘heinous acts’ of paedophilia among priests in Ireland, accusations of similar acts surfaced in the famous choir of Regensburg, in Bavaria, of which the Pope’s brother Georg was director while Joseph Ratzinger was a professor at the university (Georg claims no knowledge of any such abuse during his time there). Still more lurid are the accusations leveled at Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legionaires of Christ, who died in 2008 aged 87.”
– Peter Popham in The Independent ,of Monday, March 15, 2010
“For centuries, the Catholic Church tried to carry on as though the modern world did not really exist …
“Then in 1958 a fat, aged cardinal called Angelo Roncalli, the Patriarch of Venice, was elected Pope following the death of Pius XII. He was not expected to live long – and he didn’t, dying a mere five years later – nor to do much. His was expected to be a holding operation after the 19-year reign of his predecessor, a moment for the Church to stand still and reflect. Instead the man known as the sweetest Pope who ever lived, instigated a revolution.
“It didn’t look or sound like a revolution, and Roncalli himself died in the middle of it. But the Second Vatican Council, attended by 2,800 bishops from around the world in four sessions from 1962 to 1965, turned out to be the most defining event in Christendom since the Reformation. While the Church had been huddled in its blacked-out room, muttering Latin prayers, the world outside had changed. Pope John XXIII, as he became, was an unusual prelate in that he was not afraid of this new world, and at the Council he threw open the windows and tried to find a place for it in what the world had become.”
– ibid.
As an international institution which is almost two thousand years old, the Roman Catholic Church has mind-boggling assets – precious metals, valuable objects of art, massive real estate holdings, magnificent cathedrals, modern buildings, large bank accounts, and so on and so forth. The multiplying child abuse cases, however, which began a couple decades ago in the United States and have now spread to Europe, have damaged the Church where it has some financial vulnerability. This is where the Church’s cash flow is concerned. In the United States, leading, important American dioceses, like the ones in Boston and Los Angeles, have had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to victims of child molesting priests. The snowballing successes of the attorneys representing those abuse victims have only caused more and more victims to come forth.
Recently, a cloud has even come over the reputation of the reigning Pope, Benedict XVI, who was in charge of child abuse cases as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern equivalent of the Inquisition. This is very serious business. The Pope is an object of religious veneration for hundreds of millions of devout Roman Catholics all over the world.
Before the papacy of John XXIII, which lasted from 1958 to 1963, the Church was a closed institution. But John threw the Church open in an unprecedented way. His Second Vatican Council gave lay Catholics far more importance in the Church’s life, offered accommodation to other Churches by declining to insist that the Catholic Church was the only true one, and moderated the Pope’s primacy by emphasizing the principle of “collegiality,” giving bishops a bigger say in deciding the Church’s direction.
Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII, was personally staid and businesslike. John XXIII had been the most popular Pope in living memory. He had been loved not only by Catholics, but also by non-Catholics. Paul VI, wisely, decided to continue the work John had begun: he decided to continue the Second Vatican Council, which lasted until 1965. A Marian devotee, Paul VI, according to Wikipedia, sought dialogue with the world, with other Christians, religions, atheism, excluding nobody. “He saw himself as a humble servant for a suffering humanity and demanded significant changes of the rich in America and Europe in favor of the poor in the Third World.” Remember now, Paul VI reigned as Pope during the international revolutionary turmoil of the 1960s and most of the 1970s.
According to Tracy Wilkinson in an article in the Los Angeles Times of Sunday, March 28, 2010, “…. Second Vatican Council …. resolved, among other goals, to promote a preference for the poor. Orders such as the Jesuits moved to the left, to the chagrin of the traditional elite.”
(It is for sure that the Jesuits are the Catholic Church’s most important order in Latin America, and probably the world.)
When Paul VI was succeeded in 1978 by John Paul I, “The Smiling Pope,” more of the same Second Vatican Council “vibes” were expected, but John Paul I died mysteriously after just 33 days in the papacy. He was succeeded by John Paul II, who swung the Church hard to the anti-communist right, hard to the pre-John XXIII era.
Though conservative in dogma and philosophy, John Paul II was internationally popular and charismatic. Ruler of the Church for more than twenty-five years, he was the long term boss of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), who had been a liberal before certain experiences at Germany’s University of Tübingen in 1968 drove him to the right. In the words of Peter Popham: “Instead of trying to embrace the modern world, the Church, in Ratzinger’s new view, had to go the other way entirely: to cleave to traditional truth, purge false prophets, bear witness to the faith of the fathers despite the taunts and provocations of the fashionable. And to stand firm. In essence, that is what Joseph Ratzinger has been doing ever since.”
With that said, we can consider the matter of the Legion of Christ, which has become the case of systematic, successful child and sexual abuse in the Church in Belize’s immediate region. The Rev. Marcial Maciel founded the Legion of Christ in Mexico in 1941. Maciel ingratiated himself with Mexico’s top entrepreneurs and richest families. He told the wealthy of Mexico that God loved them more than the poor, exactly what they wanted to hear. Among those who provided financing for his extensive Mexican network of elite primary and secondary schools was Carlos Slim, now considered the world’s richest man. As late as 1994, John Paul II praised Maciel as a Jesus–like model for youth. The assets of the Legion of Christ are estimated by some to be worth US$20 billion.
According to Tracy Wilkinson, “Maciel was popular with the Vatican because the Legion was one of the fastest growing orders in the Catholic Church, able to produce wealth and recruit priests at a time of declining membership and severe shortage in the clergy, and because it espoused the conservative brand of Catholicism that recent popes have favored.”
The Legion of Christ operates in nearly 40 countries with 800 priests, 2600 seminarians, and a lay branch called Regnum Christi (“Kingdom of Christ”) which has more than 75,000 members.
But evidence continues to mount that Maciel who died in 2008, sexually abused boys, had affairs with women and was addicted to drugs. After Maciel’s death, the Legion of Christ, under Vatican pressure, acknowledged that Maciel had a daughter, now in her 20s, who lives in Spain. In the late 1990s, Jose Barba and seven other former Legion seminarians exposed sexual abuse they suffered in the 1950s at the hands of Maciel. Barba, now a Mexican historian, said Maciel told seminarians he had special papal permission for young nuns to give him massages. Maciel is accused of abusing his two sons (with a mistress) for eight years.
The hierarchy of the Church worldwide protected child molesters for too long, and today in the age of instant international communication, this is costing, and will cost, the Church a ton of money. Jesus the Christ had specifically warned against scandalizing children, but these warnings went unheeded by some who claimed to be acting in His name. Now, indeed, confession is good for the soul. There is a price which must be paid. Penance must be performed. It is written.