Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal

After a previous posting about the Pope Ratzinger and the ever expanding sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, a friend wanted to know why, since abuse happens also in Protestant churches, why does the media focus seem to just be on the Catholics? I think the sheer size of the Church as compared to the fragmentation that is the nature of Protestantism plays a role. Usually, the sexual scandals involving Protestants(at least here in the Midwest) involve straight sexual hi jinks, and while lurid, they are not as creepy or media-sensational as pedophilia is.

The two biggest reasons, though, for worldwide focus on the Catholic Church are: The institutionalized, knee-jerk, denial and cover up response for all allegations about sexual abuse, and the current Pope's past involvement with that very Institutional Response. Some snippets:

In its long struggle to grapple with sexual abuse, the Vatican often cites as a major turning point the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly.
..

But church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.

And:

Yet throughout the ’80s and ’90s, bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome, according to church documents and interviews with bishops and canon lawyers.

Besides Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, bishops were sending off their files on abuse cases to the Congregations for the Clergy, for Bishops, for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and for the Evangelization of Peoples — plus the Vatican’s Secretariat of State; its appeals court, the Apostolic Signatura; and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.

“There was confusion everywhere,” said Archbishop Philip Edward Wilson of Adelaide, Australia.

A new Code of Canon Law issued in 1983 only muddied things further, among other things by setting a five-year statute of limitations within which abuse cases could be prosecuted.

And:

As Father Gauthé was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine(Translation: He'd vote Republican.). Later, he also reined in a Dutch theologian who thought lay people should be able to perform priestly functions, and an American who taught that Catholics could dissent from church teachings about abortion, birth control, divorce and homosexuality.

Here's a biggie:

Cardinal Ratzinger also focused on reining in national bishops’ conferences, several of which, independent of Rome, had begun confronting the sexual abuse crisis and devising policies to address it in their countries. He declared that such conferences had “no theological basis” and “do not belong to the structure of the church.” Individual bishops, he reaffirmed, reigned supreme in their dioceses and reported only to the authority of the pope in Rome.

This is nice..

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, then the head of the Congregation for the Clergy, set the tone, playing down sexual abuse as an unavoidable fact of life, and complaining that lawyers and the media were unfairly focused on it, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. What is more, he asked, is it not contradictory for people to be so outraged by sexual abuse when society also promotes sexual liberation?

Soo.. The person most familiar with The Bigger Picture regarding the entire scandal for the last 20 years, the man who actually blocked progress aimed at righting situations and preventing abuse, is now The Pope. The man who oversaw the Church's official response towards pedophilia, had-other-priorities. Why would anyone believe this man and his institution of behaving any differently than in the past?

To answer (alternately)from a marketing standpoint: The Catholic Church will never get out in front of this scandal. Even if they could move that fast, they first would would need the inclination, which clearly they do not have. And clearly, this scandal will continue to grow..