Papal Penance

Two weeks prior to Easter Sunday—the holiest day in the Catholic liturgical calendar—Pope Benedict XVI was preparing for an apology instead of a celebration. On Sunday, March 21, congregations throughout Ireland were read a letter authored by the Pope, which expressed his “shame and remorse” for the acts of child sexual abuse committed by priests in the nation. The Pope was responding to two reports released by Irish officials last year, which discovered frequent abuses in parochial schools and widespread efforts by ecclesiastical authorities to cover up these crimes. Ultimately, despite the penitential tone of the Pope’s letter, his apology for Church abuses is insufficient, as it does not attempt to correct these abuses through institutional reform.

The flaw underpinning most of the Pope’s logic relates to his framing of the abuse scandal as a problem of faith rather than of regulation and management. In response to the heinous crimes, the Pope recommended that all Irish priests attend a religious retreat and suggested that churches designate certain chapels where congregations can pray for “healing and renewal;” nonetheless, these are simply abstract solutions to a concrete problem. While the Pope’s recommendations might allow for personal healing and spiritual redemption, they fail to attack the root cause of the abuse tragedy: a lack of administrative supervision and accountability. To prevent abuse in the future, the Church needs to concentrate not on spiritual advice but rather on substantial and systematic reform.

A number of specific reforms, if immediately adopted, could reduce the ability of priests to engage in sexual abuse and of bishops to conceal these crimes. First, the Church must reaffirm its commitment to treating cases of sexual abuse as open civil matters rather than concealed ecclesiastical ones. For example, one of the reports in Ireland noted the Church hierarchy’s systematic failure to inform local authorities of felonies committed by priests. Priests need to be made aware of the appropriate means of reporting crimes to civil enforcement officials and mandated to do so in many cases. The obligations of confidentiality that all priests must uphold due to the sacred Church constraints on confessional may at times make it improper to prioritize civil demands over ecclesiastical concerns, but in all other cases, civil authorities should be informed immediately to prevent internal cover-ups. After that, the matter can be addressed within the Church.

A second reform involves providing bishops with more authority to handle cases of abuse. Constructing this extra layer of local defense against priestly indiscretions would demonstrate the Church’s commitment to ending sexual abuse in its dioceses. Bishops should be granted the authority to report cases of abuse on their own (without consulting the Church hierarchy), impose consequences such as mandated leaves of absence or counseling for priests guilty of felonies, recommend the defrocking of priests to the Pope, and speak out against transferring priests simply to conceal histories of abuse.

For example, when the Pope himself served as an archbishop in Germany in 1980, a priest in his diocese struggling with pedophilia was permitted to move to Munich for therapy. The priest was subsequently appointed to serve in a church, and civil officials were never informed of the allegations against him. Within five years, the priest was again accused of sexual abuse and he was convicted in 1986. Providing bishops with more power and more incentives to speak out against incidents like this—times when abusive priests are discreetly transferred without informing civil authorities of their criminal actions—can provide a local mechanism to limit widespread abuse.

One further problem with the Church’s reaction to the abuse scandal relates not to the Pope’s communication, but to the protests of Catholics around the world. A controversial letter recently published in USA Today, for example, likens the Pope to a “martyr” who, “like Jesus, is completely innocent and is doing everything in his power to weed out those priests guilty of sexual abuse.” These and similar claims, which portray the Pope as a martyr for bringing the sexual abuse claims to light, are offensive to the victims of these crimes and unacceptable if the Church is to move past these allegations. The Pope’s controversial actions have certainly brought him into the spotlight, but his own insufficient response to the scandal is driving the attention placed on him: A martyr he is not.

Nonetheless, the Pope’s apology represents at the very least a step in the right direction, especially for an institution that has been notoriously slow in apologizing to those it has slighted in the past (ask Galileo or the victims of the Spanish Inquisition). In this regard, the Pope’s response to the sexual abuse allegations represents an unusually quick reaction, and he was proactive in creating a council to investigate the abuses in Ireland. Even so, the Pope’s actions thus far are only a first step in what must be a long road toward forgiveness and progress. Pope Benedict’s letter is an impassioned apology, but the Church’s penance still lies ahead.