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Commentary

Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?

By MAUREEN DOWD, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times

March 31, 2010 - WASHINGTON

It doesn't seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.

Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter
public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse
culture of protecting molesters and the church?s reputation rather than
abused ? and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged ? children.

The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday
are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.

This week of special confessions and penance services is unfolding as the
pope resists pressure from Catholics around the globe for his own confession
and penance about the cascade of child sexual abuse cases that were ignored,
even by a German diocese and Vatican office he ran.

If church fund-raising and contributions dry up, Benedict?s P.R. handlers
may yet have to stage a photo-op where he steps out of the priest?s side of
the confessional and enters the side where the rest of his fallible flock
goes.

Or maybe 30-second spots defending the pope with Benedict?s voice intoning
at the end: ?I am infallible, and I approve this message.?

Canon 1404 states that ?The First See is judged by no one.? But Jesus, Mary
and Joseph, as my dad used to say. Somebody has to tell the First See when
it?s blind ? and mute ? to deaf children in America and Italy.

The Vatican is surprised to find itself in this sort of trouble. Officials
there could have easily known what was going on all along; archbishops
visiting Rome gossip like a sewing circle. The cynical Vatican just didn?t
want to deal with it.

And now the church continues to hide behind its mystique. Putting down the
catechism, it picked up the Washington P.R. handbook for political sins.

First: Declare any new revelation old and unimportant.

At Palm Sunday Mass at St. Patrick?s, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York
bemoaned that the ?recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by
some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old
story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again.?

A few priests? At this point, it feels like an international battalion.

A re-run of an old story? So sorry to remind you, Archbishop, that one
priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who showed no remorse and suffered no
punishment from ?Rottweiler? Ratzinger, abused as many as 200 deaf children
in Wisconsin.

Archbishop Dolan compared the pope to Jesus, saying he was ?now suffering
some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the
pillar,? and ?being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.?

Second: Blame somebody else ? even if it?s this pope?s popular predecessor,
on the fast track to sainthood.

Vienna?s Cardinal Christoph Sch?nborn defended Pope Benedict this week,
saying that then-Cardinal Ratzinger?s attempt in 1995 to investigate the
former archbishop of Vienna for allegedly molesting youths in a monastery
was barred by advisers close to Pope John Paul II.

Third: Say black is white.

In his blog, Archbishop Dolan blasted church critics while stating: ?The
Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it
ourselves,? adding: ?We do not expect any special treatment. ...so bring it
on.? Right.

Fourth: Demonize gays, as Karl Rove did in 2004.

In an ad in The Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League
president, offered this illumination: ?The Times continues to editorialize
about the ?pedophilia crisis,? when all along it?s been a homosexual crisis.
Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of
them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory
behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have
been gay.?

Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a
crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that?s partly because priests for
many years had unquestioned access to boys.

Fifth: Blame the victims.

?Fr. Lawrence Murphy apparently began his predatory behavior in Wisconsin in
the 1950s,? Donohue protested, ?yet the victims? families never contacted
the police until the mid-1970s.?

Sixth: Throw gorilla dust.

Donohue asserts that ?the common response of all organizations, secular as
well as religious,? to abuse cases ?was to access therapy and reinstate the
patient.? Really? Where in heaven?s name does that information come from?
It?s absurd.

And finally, seventh: Use the Cheney omnipotence defense, most famously
employed in the Valerie Plame case. Vice President Cheney claimed that his
lofty position meant that the very act of spilling a secret, even with
dastardly intent, declassified it.

Vatican lawyers will argue in negligence cases brought by abuse victims that
the pope has immunity as a head of state and that bishops who allowed an
abuse culture, endlessly recirculating like dirty fountain water, were not
Vatican employees.

Maybe they worked for Enron.

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