L-R: Journalists Ben Bradlee, Jr., Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Walter Robinson attend a special screening of Open Road Films’ “Spotlight” at The DGA Theater on November 3, 2015 in Los Angeles, California
By Fiachra Gibbons
The child abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church are only the tip of the iceberg, the journalists who exposed one of the hierarchy’s biggest cover-ups said Wednesday. Walter Robinson and Mike Rezendes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering how the Church had hushed up the activities of nearly 90 paedophile priests in Boston, told AFP that thousands more have escaped justice in the United States alone.
With the Hollywood film “Spotlight” about their painstaking probe of the scandal for the Boston Globe newspaper nominated for six Oscars and a slew of other prizes, they said research showed between six and 10 percent of priests have abused children.
Robinson, who led the newspaper’s Spotlight investigative team, said they found that around one in 10 priests in Boston were molesters after “the Church was forced to make its records public.
“In many other places the numbers reported by the Church are very small because they have not been forced to tell the truth,” Robinson said.
“That is true in France and many other countries, and parts of the US also.” ‘Six percent are child abusers’
Experts at the University of Toronto and Royal Ottawa Healthcare group believe between 0.5 and 1 percent of the general population are paedophiles, although studies carried out in Germany, Norway and Finland have estimated that as many as five percent of men have had sexual thoughts about children.
A leading authority on clerical abuse, Richard Sipe — a former Benedictine monk — found around six percent of priests were abusers after a 25-year study into celibacy.
His book “Sex, Priests and Power” is cited in the film, which was voted best film at the Los Angeles Critics’ Choice Awards earlier this week — a reliable pointer to Oscar success.
Pope Francis said the Church itself estimates two percent of priests are paedophiles, according a private conversation he had in 2014 with an Italian journalist, details of which the Vatican later contested.
“This figure should calm me, but I must tell you it does not calm me at all,” the pope was quoted as telling the veteran founder of La Repubblica daily, Eugenio Scalfari.
While the Church’s attitude to such cases has changed radically since the election of Francis, who has vowed to root out abuse, Robinson and Rezendes suspect the culture of secrecy still runs deep.
“There have been big changes in how the Church deals with this in Boston,” said Robinson. “There are even classes for children in how to recognise molesters. But not so much (has been done) in other dioceses and around the world.”
Rezendes said the real problem was Church’s attitude to sex and its insistence on a celibate clergy.
“Because priests are people, many — maybe most — are having sex with women and men, and some with children. Because all sex is illegal in the eyes of the Church it is kept secret.
– Teachings on sex –
“A priest who is having sex with a woman or a man is not going to tell on a priest who is having sex with a child. Because all of it is wrong in the eyes of the Church, they protect one another,” he said.
Robinson — who is played by Michael Keaton in the film — admitted that part of the blame lay with the press for not holding the Church to account earlier.
He himself failed to follow through on a story about clerical abuse in Boston years before his Spotlight team launched their major inquiry in 2002.
“Our generation of editors were too deferential to the power and supposed moral standing of the Church. Clearly we missed clues,” he said.
“It was unthinkable that such an moral authority would allow and then cover up the crimes of thousands of priests for so many decades, and never care about what happened to the children.”
All four of the journalists who carried out the months-long inquiry are lapsed Catholics, and Robinson said it had shaken their confidence in the institution, if not his own faith.
The story also took a toll on the reporters and their families.
“It was very emotionally draining for us to listen to the stories of so many people whose lives were ruined as children. It was horrible. We carried this burden.
“My wife, who is a nurse, believes we had a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder. We were brought to tears by what many of the victims had to say.”
The Catholic Church, including Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, has broadly praised the film, with Vatican Radio calling it “honest and compelling”.
It said the Boston Globe reporters were “examples of their most pure vocation to find the facts” and demand that justice be done.
The Chilean film “The Club”, which handles the same sensitive subject, narrowly missed out on a Golden Globe earlier this month after winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain on Friday apologized for the actions by clergy and religious brothers and sisters who abused minors. He said in a letter that he is disclosing the names “in the interest of further transparency and accountability” and to continue to encourage victims of sexual abuse by clergy to come forward.
The list includes cases where allegations of child sex abuse have been admitted, established or determined to be credible. The list took nearly two years to develop with the help of independent consultants and a review board of professionals who advise the archbishop on child sex abuse.
The 77 named in the list lived or served in Western Washington between 1923 and 2008.
“Most of the individuals on the list were past the statute of limitations,” said Greg Magnoni, Archdiocese of Seattle. “Although, they were all reported to law enforcement.”
“Bringing it out in the open is one giant step to help diminish the number and to hold predators accountable and to help keep children safe,” said Mary Dispenza, spokeswoman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
“People want to think that this crisis of priest abuse is over. It isn’t. And there have been some gains and we need to celebrate those. But it would be a great big failing to think everything’s just fine now,” Dispenza added.
Sartain said the archdiocese has made efforts to respond to victims since the mid-1980s and thanked abuse survivors who have come forward.
The Archdiocese of Seattle asks anyone who has knowledge of sexual abuse or misconduct by a member of the clergy to call the archdiocesan hotline at 1-800-446-7762.
Pope Benedict XVI, in 2007, with his brother Georg Ratzinger, who, from 1964 to 1994, was the director of a Catholic boys’ choir that is the subject of a recent sex-abuse investigation.
The election of Pope Francis, in 2013, had the effect, among other things, of displacing the painful story of priestly sexual abuse that had dominated public awareness of the Church during much of the eight-year papacy of his predecessor. The sense that the Church, both during the last years of Benedict and under Francis, had begun to deal more forcefully with the issue created a desire in many, inside and outside the Church, to move on. But recent events suggest that we take another careful look at this chapter of Church history before turning the page.
During the past week, a German lawyer charged with investigating the abuse of minors in a famous Catholic boys’ choir in Bavaria revealed that two hundred and thirty-one children had been victimized over a period of decades. The attorney, Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the Diocese of Regensburg to conduct the inquiry, said that there were fifty credible cases of sexual abuse, along with a larger number of cases of other forms of physical abuse, from beatings to food deprivation.
The news received widespread attention not only because of its disturbing content but because the director of the Regensburg boys’ choir from 1964 to 1994 was Georg Ratzinger, the older brother of Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger was the Archbishop of Munich from 1977 until 1981, when he went to head up the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which establishes theological orthodoxy and was also one of the branches of the Church that dealt with priestly sexual abuse.
The developments in Germany raised the question of what the two Ratzinger brothers knew about the abuse in the Regensburg choir. Most of the sexual abuse took place, apparently, at a boarding school for elementary-grade students connected to the choir. The chief culprit, according to Weber, was Johann Meier, the boarding school’s director from 1953 until 1992. The composer Franz Wittenbrink, a graduate of the school, told Der Spiegel magazine, in 2010, when the abuse scandal became public, that there was “a system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure.”
At that time, Georg Ratzinger, who was on the three-person supervisory board of the elementary school, acknowledged that some choirboys had complained about the punishments they received at the school. “But I did not have the feeling at the time that I should do something about it,” he told the Passauer Neue Presse, in 2010. “Had I known with what exaggerated fierceness he was acting, I would have said something.”
In fact, accusations of abuse surfaced and were investigated in 1987, but no one saw fit to remove Meier from his post until the year of his death. When asked at his press conference last week whether Georg Ratzinger had been aware of the abuse, Weber replied, “Based on my research, I must assume so.” He estimated that a third of the students in the choir had suffered some form of abuse. Georg Ratzinger has said that he routinely slapped choirboys when their performance was not up to snuff, standard treatment until Germany banned corporal punishment, in the early eighties. So far, the Regensburg diocese has offered compensation of twenty-five hundred euros for each victim.
In the early nineties, a monk who worked at the Vatican told me, “You wouldn’t believe the amounts of money the church is spending to settle these priestly sexual-abuse cases.” He was not exaggerating. By 1992, Catholic dioceses in the U.S. had paid out four hundred million dollars to settle hundreds of molestation cases. These financial settlements were reached largely to keep the victims quiet: in almost all cases, the documents were sealed and the victims signed a non-disclosure agreement. Given the enormous amounts of money involved, the men running the Vatican were well aware of the problem.
The basic outlines of the sex-abuse scandal were already evident that year when Jason Berry, an American journalist, published his first book, “Lead Us Not Into Temptation.” (While the “Spotlight” team at the Boston Globe is rightly getting its moment of glory, praise is also due to Berry, whose pioneering work on the subject, a decade earlier, was done with far less institutional support.) As Berry reported, Ray Mouton, a lawyer whom the Church hired in 1985 to defend a pedophile priest in Louisiana, warned that, if the Church did not adopt a policy for helping victims and removing pedophiles from the ministry, it could face a billion dollars in losses from financial settlements and damage awards in the next decade. It turned out that Mouton had actually underestimated the financial cost of the crisis. By 2006, the Church had spent $2.6 billion settling sexual-abuse cases, as Berry wrote in the 2010 edition of “Vows of Silence,” his second book on the pedophile crisis, which he co-authored with fellow-journalist Gerald Renner.
Most cases of abuse were handled (or not handled) by local bishops and archbishops, but some were adjudicated by Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The most prominent of these cases was that of Father Marcial Maciel, a favorite of Pope John Paul II and the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful Mexican religious order that, at its pinnacle, included eight hundred priests, fifteen universities, and a hundred and fifty prep schools, as well as a lay movement with a reported seventy thousand followers.
In the seventies and eighties, former members of the Legionaries reported that, as young boys, they had been sexually abused by Maciel. As the Church later acknowledged, the complainants were highly credible and had no ulterior motives: they were not seeking monetary compensation or notoriety. They followed Church procedures by filing formal charges through ecclesiastical courts in Rome, but nothing was done. In fact, Pope John Paul II called on Maciel to accompany him on papal visits to Mexico in 1979, 1990, and 1993.
When one of the former Legionaries expressed his frustration, in the lawsuit, about the Church’s inaction, Berry and Renner reported in their book, the Legionaries’ own canon lawyer, Martha Wegan, who made no secret that her first loyalty was to the Church, replied, “It is better for eight innocent men to suffer than for millions to lose their faith.”
Cardinal Ratzinger reopened the case against Father Maciel in 2004, and, when he became Pope, in 2006, he acknowledged the validity of the claims, forbidding Maciel to continue his ministry and limiting him to a “life of prayer and penitence.” The Vatican found Maciel guilty of “very serious and objectively immoral acts . . . confirmed by incontrovertible testimonies” that represent “true crimes and manifest a life without scruples or authentic religious sentiment.
Though the sexual-abuse crisis reached its peak in the public sphere during Benedict XVI’s papacy, the single figure most responsible for ignoring this extraordinary accumulation of depravity is the sainted John Paul II. In the context of his predecessor’s deplorable neglect, Pope Benedict gets slightly higher marks than most. In 2001, he acted to give his office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, jurisdiction over all sexual-abuse cases, and soon he began to push the Maciel investigation, despite considerable Vatican opposition. After ascending the throne of St. Peter, he became the first Pope to kick predator priests out of the Church: in 2011 and 2012, the last two full years of his papacy, the Church defrocked three hundred and eighty-four offending priests.
That said, it was too little, too late. As the second-most-powerful man in John Paul II’s pontificate, Ratzinger had more ability to know and to act than almost anyone. The actions he finally did take were largely dictated by a series of embarrassing scandals: his move to take control of pedophilia cases in 2001 closely followed scandals in the U.S., Ireland, and Australia, and staggering financial settlements for American plaintiffs. The decision to reopen the case against Maciel would almost certainly not have happened without the courageous reporting of Berry and Renner. And the zero-tolerance policy that led to the systematic defrocking of abusive priests happened only after the annus horribilis of 2010, in which a new sexual-abuse scandal seemed to explode every week and loyal parishioners left the Church in droves.
Ratzinger understood better than most, if late, that priestly abuse was the negation of everything the Church was supposed to stand for. But, for much of his career, his focus and priorities were elsewhere. During most of his tenure, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was too busy disciplining anyone who dared step out of line with Church teachings on personal sexuality and family planning to bother with the thousands of priests molesting children. In 2009, a nun named Margaret McBride sat on the ethics committee of a San Diego hospital that had to decide the case of a pregnant woman whose doctors believed that she (and her fetus) would die if they did not terminate her pregnancy. The committee voted to allow an abortion, and the woman’s life was saved. Almost immediately, McBride’s bishop informed her of her excommunication. It took multiple decades and thousands of cases of predatory behavior to begin defrocking priests, but not much more than twenty-four hours to excommunicate a nun trying to save a human life. In 2011, also under Pope Benedict, the Vatican lifted its excommunication of McBride.
A reëxamination of the sexual-abuse scandal may help the Church reconsider the standoff between traditionalists and progressives during Francis’s papacy. The traditionalists, who oppose changes such as offering communion to remarried couples, bemoan the good old days when papal authority was unquestioned, civil authorities treated the Church with extreme deference, and parishioners obeyed without objection. They have forgotten that those good old days were also a time when children were slapped, beaten, and often sexually abused, and priests, bishops, parents, and police looked away.
Pope Benedict XVI with the Regensburg choir in Bavaria in 2006. The former pope’s brother conducted the choir from 1964 to 1994, a period that coincides with accusations of abuse.
At least 231 children who sang in a boys’ choir led for 30 years by the brother of former Pope Benedict XVI were abused over a period of almost four decades, a lawyer investigating reports of wrongdoing said Friday.
The lawyer, Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the choir to look into accusations of beatings, torture or sexual abuse, said he thought that the actual abuse was even more widespread.
At a news conference in Regensburg, Bavaria, where the choir traces its roots to the year 975, Mr. Weber estimated that from 1953 to 1992, every third member of the choir and an attached school suffered some kind of physical abuse.
He attributed the beatings and other mistreatment mostly to Johann Meier, director of a lower school attached to the choir from 1953 until his retirement in 1992. Mr. Meier died suddenly later that year, Mr. Weber said. A 1987 investigation of reported abuse did not prompt the choir’s leaders to remove Mr. Meier or take other action, the lawyer said.
Asked whether Benedict’s brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, who conducted the Regensburg choir from 1964 to 1994, had known of the abuse, Mr. Weber said, “After my research, I must assume so.”
Ulrich Weber is investigating accusations that children who sang in a German choir led by Georg Ratzinger were abused.
Father Ratzinger, who turns 92 this month, is the older brother of Joseph Ratzinger, who served as pope from April 2005 until he stepped down on Feb. 28, 2013, saying he was too frail to fulfill the full range of his duties. Now known as the pope emeritus, he still lives in the Vatican; his brother resides in Regensburg.
Mr. Weber noted that, as conductor of the choir, Father Georg Ratzinger sat on a three-person supervisory body, along with the directors of the high school and the boarding school attached to the choir, that was supposed to oversee the lower school where Mr. Meier worked.
Mr. Ratzinger, the brother of the former pope, Benedict XVI.
Mr. Weber started investigating the Regensburger Domspatzen, as the choir is known, in 2015 and said he had interviewed dozens of victims and figures in charge. He said at least 40 of the 231 abuse cases also involved sexual violence, “from fondling to rapes.” Most cases are too old for legal action now, he said.
The choir has been run since 1994 by Ronald Buchner, who is not associated with the Roman Catholic Church.
The first accusations of physical punishments and sexual abuse in the choir surfaced in 2010, in connection with other reported abuses in the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, Belgium and Austria. The Diocese of Regensburg last year spoke of 72 victims and offered about $2,700 in compensation.
Mr. Weber said that after his report Friday, at least eight people who had not previously come forward with accusations of abuse had contacted him.
A Filipino priest has been condemned by diocese authorities, after video of him gliding around church on a hoverboard during Christmas Eve mass went viral.
The priest, who has not been named, can be seen sailing up and down aisles as churchgoers in Laguna province applaud.
“That was wrong,” the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Pablo said in a statement on its Facebook page.
It said he greeted people and sang a Christmas song on the hoverboard and he was now out of the parish to “reflect”.
“The Eucharist demands utmost respect and reverence. It is the Church’s highest form of worship, not a personal celebration where one can capriciously introduce something to get attention,” the diocese statement said.
It added that the priest saw the incident as a “wake up call”.
A version of the video was uploaded by traditionalist Catholic group Novus Ordo onto its Facebook page and was widely shared, but it has drawn a mixed reaction on Facebook.
“Complete and total disrespect not only for the Lord but also for the salvation of all those poor souls,” said Scott LaLonde. “To top it off he couldn’t even sing.”
Filipino Catholic Romy Vicente said the incident was “ridiculous”. “How can you meditate if you see this happening inside the church where holy mass is going on?”
Other users showed support for the priest and applauded his “fun spirit”.
“This is actually fun,” said Rob Trainor from Canada. “I am Roman Catholic but not a practising one that attends Mass regularly. If there were more priests like this one, I may be tempted to return to mass. If people keep calling for traditions, you will lose even the most ardent Catholics.”
“Doing a sermon from a hoverboard was a great way to show how Catholic church is making strides in entering the new era,” commented another Facebook user Mark Lewis.
The Philippines is the third largest Christian country on earth, with an estimated 80 million Catholics.
With 81% of the population defining themselves as Catholic, the country’s culture and society has been closely intertwined with the teaching of the church. Laws in the country are also often framed around traditional Catholic values.
