FaithWorld

Undaunted cardinal says John Paul backed his praise for hiding abuser

Tom Heneghan

Apr 17, 2010 17:18 EDT

A former Vatican cardinal who congratulated a French bishop for hiding a sexually abusive priest has said he acted with the approval of the late Pope John Paul, a Spanish newspaper reported on Saturday.

Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the Vatican official in charge of priests around the world when he praised the French bishop in 2001, dragged the Polish pope into the controversy during a conference in the Spanish city of Murcia. His comment came after a Vatican spokesman indirectly confirmed that a 2001 letter to the bishop posted on a French website on Thursday was authentic and was proof the Vatican was right to tighten up its procedures on sex abuse cases that year.

By invoking John Paul, Castrillon Hoyos appeared to up the ante in a subtle Vatican power struggle over who was to blame for past failures to deal effectively with the abuse cases whose revelations in recent months have shaken the Church. Vatican officials had no official reaction on Saturday.

“After consulting the pope … I wrote a letter to the bishop congratulating him as a model of a father who does not hand over his sons,” the daily La Verdad (here in Spanisn) quoted Castrillon Hoyos as telling the conference on Friday, to a round of applause from the assembled prelates, priests and lay people.”The Holy Father authorized me to send this letter to all bishops in the world and publish it on the internet.”

Castrillon Hoyos, a Colombian who retired from Vatican service last year, argued on CNN’s Spanish-language television last week that temporarily suspending abusive priests and then quietly reassigning them elsewhere was not a cover-up. Austen Ivereigh at America magazine has English quotes in this excellent analysis.

The retired cardinal seems to be in complete denial about the problem. What do you think about his statements?

Here is the CNN interview in Spanish:

Embarrassing Vatican letter hailing bishop who hid predator priest

Tom Heneghan

Apr 15, 2010 19:29 EDT

As a tide of previously confidential Catholic Church documents about child sexual abuse by priests has risen over recent weeks, the Vatican has been able to say that none of them was a “smoking gun” proving it had instructed bishops to cover up the scandals. This defense looks thinner than ever with the posting of a 2001 letter by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos congratulating (yes, congratulating!) a bishop for not only hiding a self-confessed serial abuser but earning himself a criminal sentence for doing so. For more on the 2001 case, click here.

This amazing letter, in which Castrillon Hoyos promises Bayeux Bishop Pierre Pican he will be presented as a hero to all Catholic bishops around the world, exudes the arrogant atmosphere of Church superiority that victims say they have had to battle against for years to have their grievances taken seriously. It puts forward the incredible argument that a bishop, because he has a kind of “spiritual paternity” for priests under him, is equivalent to a father who is not obliged to testify against his son. It even cites Saint Paul and the Second Vatican Council as supporting this view.

My news story on the letter translates the main (and quite explicit) quotes from the French original. The Golias story on it (in French) is here – and its PDF copy of the letter is here.

Earlier documents on the abuse crisis posted by the New York Times or the Associated Press illustrated the secrecy with which the Church handled such cases, but they did not provide the “smoking gun” to prove that the Vatican actively encouraged local bishops to hide the misdeeds. Those documents deal more with issues like the defrocking of the priests concerned and the Vatican responses amount to suggestions to slow down rather than speed up the handling of the cases.

That’s serious enough, to be sure, but it’s not proof the Vatican encouraged a cover up – and the Vatican has seized on that as proof it did nothing of the sort. But anyone familiar with the Roman Catholic Church knows it has a culture of secrecy shrouding anything that might discredit it. Even alcoholism among priests, a real problem which is serious but nowhere near as shocking as child sexual abuse, was also long hushed up “to avoid giving scandal”. Bishops who asked the Vatican for advice on how to deal with a predator priest didn’t have to be told they weren’t supposed to announce it from the pulpit or go blabbing about it to the local police chief or newspaper. If you belong to an elite club, you don’t want to show you don’t understand the rules.

It’s also interesting to see that Fr. Federico Lombardi, who as head of the Vatican press office functions as its spokesman, indirectly confirmed the letter’s contents by not challenging its veracity or countering any of the statements in it. Instead, he held it up as an example of what was wrong at the Vatican before the abuse cases were all directed to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in May 2001:

“This document is confirmation of how opportune it was to centralise treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors by clerics under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to guarantee a rigourous and coherent treatment, as in fact happened with the documents approved by the pope in 2001.”

Unusual tit-for-tat in the Vatican over Williamson affair

Philip Pullella

Sep 25, 2009 11:50 EDT

There’s nothing new about tit-for-tat and finger-pointing in diplomacy and politics but the Vatican is usually quite careful not to wash its dirty laundry in public. So it was surprising to see some of the principal characters in the the long-running saga of Richard Williamson, the traditionalist bishop who sparked a crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations when he denied the extent of the Holocaust on Swedish television, now spatting in public over it.

Just when the Vatican thought it had put the Williamson affair behind it, the story has came back to haunt the Holy See. On Wednesday evening, the Swedish television network SVT aired a follow-up to its January 2009 documentary about the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). That program sparked off a public controversy because the Vatican lifted excommunications on Williamson and three other SSPX bishops three days later, creating the impression the Church either didn’t know or didn’t care about his Holocaust statement. In the uproar that followed, Pope Benedict once again condemned Holocaust denial and said he hadn’t known about the statements in advance. Usually discreet Vatican officials publicly blamed others for not informing him.

The new report on the “Uppdrag granskning” (Assignment: Investigate) program said the Vatican knew about Williamson’s views well before the bans on the SSPX bishops were lifted. To make matters worse, in conjunction with the new broadcast, the website of Stockholm’s Roman Catholic diocese posted a note saying Bishop Anders Arborelius and the Vatican nuncio to Sweden told the Holy See in November 2008 about the not-yet-aired interview that Williamson had given to Swedish television in which he said “I believe there were no gas chambers”. The interview was recorded in Germany in November 2008 and aired in Sweden on 21 January 2009. See our latest story on this here.

Now, in an interview with the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (excertps in German here and English here), the Vatican official at the center of the controversy, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, is fighting back. Castrillon Hoyos was until July the head of Ecclesia Dei, the department set up by Pope John Paul in 1988 to try to bring the traditionalists back into the fold. He said “None of us knew about Bishop Williamson’s statements. None of us!” and then he adds this: “And no one had the duty to know it!”

In the full text of the interview published only in the print edition, Castrillon Hoyos fired away at Bishop Arborelius for saying he informed the Vatican last November. “I regret this dubious statement very much because it is wrong,” he said. “Spreading this information is slander. We store digitally all documents that we get. So Bishop Arborelius should say how, to whom and when he communicated that, and whether this was done in writing or orally.”

Williamson’s interview and the story and reactions to it made headlines in the Italian and international media for days afterwards. Radio Vatican’s German service reported on it as early as January 23. While defending himself, the cardinal implied he was completely unaware of all that for two weeks: “I was only informed of his (Williamson’s) statements on Feb 5. The nunciature had informed the Secretariat of State, which then gave me the information in sealed envelope that I have kept.” In his defence, he added that no other bishops had ever told him about Williamson’s views.