The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal for the first time tonight as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The priest went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for “therapy” in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as “H”, was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence and fined 4,000 marks ($2,800 in today’s money). There have been no formal accusations against him since.

The church has been accused of a cover-up after at least 170 accusations of child abuse by German Catholic priests. The scandal broke in January but the claims, which continue to emerge, span three decades. Critics say that priests were redeployed to other parishes rather than fired when they were found to be abusing children.

The archdiocese of Munich and Freising said there had been no complaints against the priest during the therapy at a Church community in Munich. It said the decision to allow him to continue work in Grafing was taken by Gerhard Gruber, now 81, and then Vicar General of the archdiocese.

The Vatican noted in a statement that Monsignor Gruber had taken “full responsibility” for the priest’s move back into pastoral work but did not comment further.

Monsignor Gruber said the Pope, who was made a cardinal in 1977, had not been not aware of his decision because there were a thousand priests in the diocese at the time and he had left many decisions to lower level officials.

“The cardinal could not deal with everything,” he said. “The repeated employment of H in pastoral duties was a serious mistake… I deeply regret that this decision led to offences against youths. I apologise to all those who were harmed.”

However, he did not indicate whether the convicted paedophile would be allowed to continue working in the Church.

The Pope was Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982, then moved to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a post he held until his election as pontiff five years ago after the death of John Paul II.

“H”, the priest, went on to work in an old people’s home for two years after his conviction then moved to the town of Garching where he became a curate and later a Church administrator. In May 2008 he was removed from his duties in Garching and was not allowed to work with your people, but he still works in the diocese, according to the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the story.  

In the cases in Germany I have studied, I have noticed that German courts give far lighter punishments for abuse than American courts do (this is true of all crimes).

Also note that the abuser was allowed to work in a parish until 1998 and is still an active priest. The rules about Zero Tolerance that American bishops made in order to save themselves (and their bank accounts) do not apply outside the United States.

It would be astonishing if Ratzinger had delegated such a sensitive decision to an underling. That alone would indicate a failure to take responsibility. 

As Edward Gibbons, no admirer of the clergy, recounted, Pope Gregory the Great took responsibility for the poor of the city of Rome. When a poor man was found starved to death in the streets, Pope Gregory suspended himself for a period as public penance for his failure.

John Paul and Benedict both failed to punish bishops who tolerated and enabled abuse. Perhaps Benedict could start by making an example of himself - and then proceed against other bishops. It would be a striking and historic confession of responsibility - it might redeem Benedict’s papacy, which is being tarnished almost beyond redemption by the continued revelations of sexual abuse by the clergy.

An e-mail sent from the administration to the faculty about the AMU Dress Code (already a warning – a “dress code” for professors?) 

In hopes of bringing clarity and unity among all employees with respect to the dress code policy, I have been asked by the University Council to communicate the following information: Attached is the revised AMU Dress Code Policy.  As you will note, it is a clarification of the existing policy to provide clearer direction of what is and is not acceptable professional business attire.

Male employees are required to wear business attire that effectively promotes the professional image of Ave Maria University; meaning, jackets and ties are required with a preference of suits for faculty: suits are required for staff.  Of course, this is in conjunction with the stipulation noted in the policy regarding employees working in certain areas of the organization that warrants dressing differently.

In addition, beginning August 30, 2010 the AMU Dress Code Policy will be revised to state that female employees will no longer be permitted to wear slacks or pant suits during work hours.  They will however be permitted to wear slacks when traveling.

Although this is a major change for some of you and certainly comes with a cost for adding skirts, suits, and dresses to your existing wardrobe, it is the intent of Senior Management to work with local retailers in the hopes of providing suitable business clothes such as skirts or skirt-suits at discounted prices.  This information will be shared as it becomes available.  Please keep in mind that we are implementing this change to improve our overall appearance as an institution of professionals.  Knowing that this change will require time and planning, Management believed it important to provide several months advanced notice.

It is the expectation that all employees will adhere to the policy as written and management will enforce the policy accordingly.  

I like the word “enforce.” My wife was approached about teaching at AMU (for free of course) but she said no one from Michigan was going to tell her how to dress.

The word and the concept appear to be suffering a similar fate in Catholic theology: 

According to the chairman of the Catholic bishops’ conference of Germany, the death of Jesus Christ was not a redemptive act of God to liberate human beings from the bondage of sin and open the gates of heaven. The Archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, known for his liberal views, publicly denied the fundamental Christian dogma of the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death in a recent interview with a German television station.

Zollitsch said that Christ “did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat.”

Instead, Jesus had offered only “solidarity” with the poor and suffering. Zollitsch said “that is this great perspective, this tremendous solidarity.”

The interviewer asked, “You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave his own son, because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?”

Monsignor Zollitsch responded, “No.” 

The loss of the sense of expiation may help explain why the hierarchy treated abusers so lightly: expiatory punishment is a forgotten concept.

Only 15% of the students in the Catholic schools in Baltimore City are Catholics.

In part, the racial and demographic changes of the past two generations are taking their final toll. Baltimore used to be a white, middle and working class city. Now it is a poor, black city with a few middle class neighborhoods, but the people who live downtown and around the renovated harbor do not have children.

The Catholic population has moved to the suburbs but the schools have not followed them. The archdiocese decided it was impossible to finance a Catholic school system when the religious who had staffed it were no longer available. And Catholics are having far fewer children, probably below replacement level for non-Hispanic Catholics.

Religious life in the United States is vanishing (see The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators). Some parishes pray for vocations, but the only contact that most people had with religious was in school. As the schools vanish, children have no contact with religious and therefore never even consider a religious vocation. That leads to an even lower number of religious, and so on in a downward cycle.

Some consider this situation decadence. But perhaps it is not. Religious life may have been suited to a certain phase of the history of the Church, and perhaps a Church that is 99.99% lay can be as vital as a Church in which priests and religious are the main carriers of religious tradition.

But Catholics in the United States relied upon Catholic schools, priests, and religious to transmit the faith, and nothing has replaced them. The European Catholics who constituted the bulk of the Catholic Church are either dying out or losing their faith; that group has suffered as severe a decline as the Episcopal Church has. Catholic numbers are increasing because of immigrants from Hispanic countries. But in those countries the surrounding culture carried and transmitted the faith, and that culture does not exist in the United States. The two or three hours of religious instruction a month that some Catholic children have until they are confirmed is really insufficient to form a Catholic identity.

A handful of Catholic families transmit both the culture and doctrines of Catholicism: they tend to be large, home-schooling families. The Catholic Church may end up like Judaism, with a small core of Orthodox families who produce children and an amorphous body of adherents who call themselves Catholic mainly because of lingering family traditions.

In the nineteenth century, Europe began to develop an image of Modern Man, and I mean man, not woman. The New Man was nationalistic, militaristic, rational, scientific. He rejected he world of Catholicism, which was international, pacifist, and superstitious – and feminine. In France, Italy, and Germany the Catholic clergy was attacked as the enemy of true masculinity.

Some who attacked the church more or less explicitly accused the clergy of perversion, either homosexuality or pedophilia.

The New Man took other incarnations in the twentieth century: The Futurist Man, the Fascist Man, and the Nazi Man. In the mid-1930s the Nazi government arrested hundreds of Catholic priests and brothers and charged them with sexual molestation of children and adolescent boys. (see the Wikepedia article) Historians have assumed that these charges were fabricated.

But what we have discovered about the Catholics clergy makes it appear probable that many of the charges were in fact true. The Nazis wanted to attack the Church, and the perverse and criminal behavior by a segment of the clergy gave them the tool. The cases, as far as I can tell, were tried in the regular German courts, not the Nazi courts, and in the regular German courts courts legality largely ruled.

The Nazis may have inadvertently done the Catholic Church in Germany a favor by purging hundreds of abusers from the ranks of the clergy. As a result of that purge, we may now be seeing fewer cases in Germany than in Ireland and the United States.

The memory of the trials of the Nazi era may explain, but not excuse, the touchiness of some German bishops. Germans have a long memory, and anything that reminds them of the Nazi era (Boy Scout uniforms, smoking bans) sets off irrational reactions.

For the Laughlin letters, go here

and for Steigerwald letter, go here.

3. Arturo Vasquez is a witch: We are surprised that people don’t make this accusation more often, because this is the one that would stick the best. “Behind all of his piety, and pretensions of traditionalism, Arturo uses his large basement for spells and other dark works. That is why he posts all of those questionable prayers, pictures of folk saints, and essays on Renaissance magic on his blog: to promote his business as a Tarot card reader and curandero.” “Yeah, I’ve seen him. Arturo was hustling on a street corner and offered to read my palm and put a curse on my ex-boyfriend for dumping me for my best friend.” “Arturo said he would cure my kid of the evil eye but instead made his skin turn purple. And the poor child can’t stop singing Prince songs.” “Arturo turned half of the members of the Ladies Altar Guild Wiccan.” And so forth. If there was still an Inquisition, he would be the first burned at the stake if his critics were Dominicans with a huge axe to grind.

 Dwight Longenecker, Anglican-turned-Catholic, would seem to be at the opposite pole from Vasquez, but he comments upon modern liberal religion: 

Religion, if it is religion at all, is surely about man’s commerce with the supernatural realm. In this sense Paganism is a real religion. A priest sacrificing chickens or virgins to a monstrous deity in hope of supernatural protection and power is what I call religion. An animist, high on the fermented juice of the tropical tree, dancing around the campfire and cutting himself to satisfy the spirit of the river is a real religion. So is a Buddhist monk sitting in a snowdrift in his underpants humming his mantra and transcending the cold. For that matter, even the Mormon baptizing someone for the dead or a televangelist praying down the Holy Spirit fire to heal, mightily heal is practicing real religion. It may be a false or misguided religion, but at least it is religion.

All of this is in contrast to the milk and water that much of mainstream modern Christianity has become in most Western cultures. There is no religion there because the modernists no longer believe in the supernatural.

 When I was a guest of the Hopis, it was clear they really believe in the kachinas, the spirits that mediate between us and the Creator. They hope to become a kachina when they die and bring God’s blessings, especially rain, to their people. 

Some say the American South is, or at least used to be, not exactly God-centered, but God-haunted. For me, and for many, the American Southwest is spirit-haunted. The veil between this world and the next is very thin in the desert. And the Hopis and the Navajos and the others know that the spirits are not effeminate semi-males with wings, but fearful, even when they are friendly.

Laughlin, Levada explains, was ordained in 1948 at the age of 23. Levada continues, “he began homosexual contacts with boys shortly after his ordination (about age 25), and admitted to such misconduct both during his first priestly assignment as a teacher at Central Catholic High School, and as a pastor of St. Mary Parish in Corvallis. These contacts continued and apparently increased in frequency and number during his tenure as pastor of All Saints Parish until the time criminal charges of sexual abuse of minors were brought against him in 1983.”

“The reliable testimony of several boys questioned suggests that Fr. Laughlin used the confessional for purposes of solicitation.

“Even after his conviction, sentence, and having served six months in prison, he abused the privilege of his court ordered parole under the aegis of the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico by arranging for a secret liaison with one of the young men he had molested, and paid for his journey to meet him in San Diego for the purposes of engaging in sexual conduct.”

Archbishop Power of Portland had known about the abuse by at least 1975 and had not acted on it. That is not surprising, since in 1976 Power had received this letter from an official of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Seminary in British Columbia in which the official conveyed information from a “most reliable source” about Philip Steigerwald:

PHILIP STEIGERWALD, presently working in Queen of Peace, Salem, Oregon, scheduled to be ordained to the Priesthood on the 20^th day of June , 1976, is an avowed homosexual.

 

 He rationalizes that neither the world nor the Church, at the present time, understands the beauty and good in such a relationship. His companion, at the present time, is another seminarian at Mount Angel (redacted). Philip has practiced homosexuality since thirteen years of age and claims to have been initiated into this practice by his confessor at that time.

 

This situation is known to his mother, some of his family and, at least two or more seminarians.

Archbishop Power found this letter no reason not to ordain Steigerwald, who of course made sexual advances to boys in his parish. Years later, their mother found out, and talked to a priest, who told them “that the archdiocese knew before they ordained Phil that he was a homosexual.” The mother wanted an explanation. So do I. The most probable one is not flattering to the personal moral conduct of Archbishop Power.

Ratzinger may not have known about the type of person who Power thought was suitable for the priesthood, but he certainly knew there were severe problems in the Church in the United States. Why the failure to act effectively?  Did Ratzinger tell himself these must be bizarre and isolated cases – but he was getting them on a regular basis. Or was he following John Paul’s implicit or explicit instructions about how to handle sexual abuse cases discretely and quietly? As Pope Benedict, Ratzinger owes the Church an explanation.

It also gives an explanation, all too probable, for the failure of the Vatican to cooperate with the Irish government or to admit any responsibility for clerical abuse: 

Which brings us to one of the bottom lines of Holy See thinking on the question of clerical sex abuse – a bottom line which explains all the insistence on “appropriate diplomatic channels” for contacts between the Murphy commission and the Holy Office or indeed the papal nuncio’s refusal to go before the foreign affairs committee, namely, that co-operating with the commission or going before the Oireachtas committee could in some way be interpreted as admission of legal (whatever about moral) responsibility for clerical sex abuse.

The Holy See has looked on aghast as the US Catholic Church has paid out upwards of $2 billion in damages to victims of clerical sex abuse. This is one buck that it does not want to see stop at the Apostolic Palace.

As we all know, our treasure is here, and bishops obviously think that when they stand before the judgment seta of God they will be judged on the size of the bank accounts they left behind in their dioceses. Lady Mead, Money, has been the curse of the Church for centuries, and continues to exert her poisonous influence in the corridors of the Vatican.