TWICE IN LESS than two weeks, news has emerged of a once-mighty prince of the Catholic church facing severe retribution for the sexual abuse of children. The first punishment was imposed by the church itself, on ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington, DC, who was stripped of his priestly status because of misdeeds involving adults and minors.
Then on February 26th, it was disclosed that a secular court in Australia had found cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s former treasurer, guilty of five charges of sex abuse perpetrated against two 13-year-old choristers in Melbourne.
A lawyer for cardinal Pell said that his client “has always maintained his innocence and continues to do so”. He has already filed an appeal.
The guilty verdict was delivered by a jury in Melbourne on December 11th but was immediately subjected to a gagging order. Only this week was the media allowed to report on the four-week hearing, in which a former chorister (in pre-recorded testimony) described how he and a fellow singer had sneaked off from an end-of-mass procession in December 1996, found their way to the archbishop’s sacristy, or dressing-room, and drunk some wine.
He said the prelate had caught them and forced them to engage in sex acts. (The other chorister involved died in 2014.) The cardinal’s defenders challenged the details of the story on grounds of timing and logistics, but the jury was unconvinced.
Pope Francis removed cardinal Pell from his list of close advisers in December without giving a reason. The prelate had taken indefinite leave of absence from his job as chief financial adviser to the Vatican in order to fight his legal case. He faces sentencing later this week.
The McCarrick and Pell sagas are devastating blows to the morale and credibility of the Catholic hierarchy in the Anglophone world. Both involve individuals who formerly had access to the most powerful politicians in their respective countries. The American was regarded as a charming and clubbable figure, while the Australian had a more severe, ideologically conservative and authoritarian style. Both have left the politicians and other public figures who once trusted them feeling severely embarrassed.
In between the two sensational news reports from America and Australia, an event took place in Rome that was billed as a turning point in the Vatican’s attitude to clerical sex-abuse: a four-day gathering of bishops from around the world.
In some respects, the conference might claim to have achieved its stated purpose: making sure that Catholic authorities all over the world spoke with one voice in acknowledging that child abuse has been a terrible scourge which demands swift, uncompromising retribution. The defrocking of Mr McCarrick, a few days before the meeting, was seen as a demonstration of the Vatican’s firmness of will.
But critics of the church, including those who represent victims of abuse, were left disappointed by the gathering in Rome. Many were struck by the fact that Pope Francis and his senior advisers seemed to stop carefully short of saying that defrocking would be an automatic penalty for abusers. It was repeated that clerics who committed abuse should have no role “in public ministry”, a formula that implies that they might retain the priestly rank and perform some bureaucratic function.
Those sceptics will certainly point to the conviction of cardinal Pell, long the pre-eminent figure in Australian Catholicism, as further proof that the church cannot be trusted to police itself or clean up its behaviour. They will argue that secular authorities, including judicial ones, are the only ones who can really hold princes of the church to account.
