THE TABLET

THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY FOUNDED IN 1840

CLERICAL CHILD ABUSE

THE ERRORS OF

BENEDICT

It seems clear that when he was Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was his own worst enemy. He was a thinker, a theorist, an intellectual, one of the most influential of his generation. But his management of people, his insight into human nature, was considerably less impressive. He failed to realise the urgency and importance of the reports he was hearing about certain priests who were sexually abusing children. They should have been reported to the police. And, as in so many places across the world, the archbishop needed to own up, explain and apologise, and make sure such mistakes never happened again. These failures, an official inquiry has declared, amounted to misconduct.

There is a parallel to be drawn between this case and that of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster between 2000 and 2009. He too failed at first to recognise how grievous was his mistake in sending an abusive priest into a situation where he could abuse again. But he also realised – albeit after the case had been exposed by the media – that he as a bishop and the institutional Church as a whole were deeply at fault in failing to recognise the impact of abuse on the lives of survivors and in putting the reputation of the Church above the need to investigate such cases. He set up a commission of inquiry under Lord Nolan. It brought forth a comprehensive programme of action for the Church in England and Wales, transferring responsibility for dealing with abuse from the local bishop to a team of independent experts, based on the fundamental principle that the police and civil authorities must always be involved. He accepted responsibility, apologised and came close to resigning. And he privately urged Rome to ask other local hierarchies to impose similar guidelines on bishops across the Church.

Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, did none of those things. He went on to spend years as Pope John Paul II’s enforcer of discipline in the Catholic Church as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was during that papacy that clerical child abuse began to emerge as a major scandal right across the Church, and the CDF’s response was at times tardy and even devious. Better progress was made when the Cardinal became Pope Benedict XVI, which suggests he had sometimes been held back from taking appropriate action by John Paul II himself.

But the clericalist mindset of the Vatican, moulded by these two key figures over several decades, still allowed the closing of ranks, the turning of blind eyes, the protection and even the promotion of the guilty, the preoccupation with the defence of the institution’s good name, and, above all, the dreadful failure to recognise the suffering of the victims, not all of whom survived. Report after report has shown that the pattern of gross negligence in the Munich archdiocese was being replicated elsewhere.

Pope Emeritus Benedict holds no position from which he can be dismissed, nor does he deserve to be disgraced more than has already occurred. But he could have done more to stop the rot. That is a grim legacy to have come to terms with.

UKRAINE

CRISIS

PUTIN, POLITICS

AND PARANOIA

There is no easy solution to the Ukraine problem. Its history is as complicated as its politics and the two are entwined. Such conditions are ideal for the sort of strategic games Vladimir Putin likes to play: diplomacy as a form of martial art. There is a sniff of war in the air as he rattles his sabres, with dozens of armoured battle groups parked on Ukraine’s borders as a general warning. What he intends to do with them is by no means clear. His ultimate purpose is to oppose the advance of United States and European influence into what he still regards as part of Russia’s ethnic heartland. A strong strand in his philosophy is Russian Orthodox nationalism – Holy Russia, including Ukraine, as God’s earthly kingdom.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) has embraced almost all of the eastern European countries previously in the Warsaw Pact; and politically and economically, the European Union has conducted a parallel process of absorption. In its way, this was a greater defeat for Russian ambitions than the collapse of Soviet communism. And it is not reversible. What he still fears is the loss of Georgia and Ukraine to the same ideological opponent. The military occupation of Ukraine’s vast spaces is not a viable strategy. Yet Putin’s allegation that Nato is planning military aggression against him is even more far-fetched. It is paranoia if he believes it, the thinnest of excuses if not.

A more realistic aim would be for him to solidify his hold over the Eastern Ukraine Donbas region, to break the stalemate in a low intensity civil war that

Russia has been sponsoring from outside. But would this really bring peace? Donbas is a Russian-speaking society and half the population is ethnically Russian, at least in the towns and cities in this heavily industrialised region. Peasant farmers tend to be Ukrainian, are looked down on as kulaks, and turn towards Kiev rather than Moscow. What should the West do to prevent war and promote peace in this turbulent region? It can threaten economic sanctions, obviously, but those will only deter Putin if ordinary Russians turn against him as a result. What the Stalin era and then the Second World War proved to the world is the immense resilience of the Russian people under unimaginable hardship. So mere sanctions, however tough, could be shrugged off. Nato can shuffle its military hardware round Ukraine’s borders, to reassure Nato members like Estonia and Poland that European solidarity still exists. It can export arms to the Ukraine army and lend specialists to train them. And it can speak softly while carrying a big stick, in Theodore Roosevelt’s famous phrase. But these are only manifestations of Western impotence.

If the Donbas region really wants to join Russia, Putin needs to find a political route to bring this about by agreement, rather than rely on destabilisation, subversion, sponsored insurrection and disguised invasion as he did in Crimea. Negotiating a peace treaty with Ukraine and the West should be an option on the table, with a renunciation of force by both sides. But Putin needs to see that if Russia fears being encircled by its enemies, the only enemies it has are those it has made for itself.

2 | THE TABLET | 29 JANUARY 2022