It could hardly have been a bleaker day for the Vatican as it fights the disastrous fallout of the clerical sex abuse scandals. In Belgium a church investigation into abuse cases shut down because all its files had been seized by the police; in the US the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the Vatican in a landmark case that opens the way for priests to stand trial for paedophilia — a decision that means that, in theory, the Pope himself could face questioning, under oath, on child sex abuse cases.
In Austria it was revealed that the faithful are leaving the Church in droves and in Rome the pontiff sought to assert his grip by taking the highly unusual step of chastising a senior cardinal who had accused another senior cardinal of a cover-up.
When the Pope asked this month for “forgiveness” for the paedophile scandals at a Mass for 15,000 priests and pledged to “do everything possible” to prevent further abuse, he clearly hoped that he was drawing a line under the crisis.
In March he condemned the “heinous crime” of clerical sex abuse in a letter to the faithful of Ireland. In April he prayed and wept with victims of abuse in Malta. In May he told journalists on the papal plane to Portugal that the crisis was not — as some Vatican officials claimed — the result of a conspiracy by “enemies” outside the Church but of sins committed within it.
The sex abuse scandal, however, refuses to go away as the drama of the weekend police raid on the Belgian Church reminded a shocked Vatican.
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Apparently caught unawares, it protested furiously. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, said: “There are no precedents for this, not even under communist regimes.” Pope Benedict later described the raids as “surprising and deplorable”.
In a further assertion of his authority the pontiff yesterday took the unusual step of rebuking Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, who last month not only dared to suggest that priestly celibacy might be a cause of paedophilia but also accused Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the former Secretary of State, of having obstructed an inquiry into sex offences by the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, his predecessor at Vienna, who resigned in 1995.
Cardinal Schönborn, seen by some as a possible future pope, also accused Cardinal Sodano — now Dean of the College of Cardinals — of causing “massive harm” to victims when he dismissed claims of abuse as “petty gossip” at Easter.
After yesterday’s papal carpeting, the Vatican said accusations against a cardinal were “uniquely the competence of the Pope”. Cardinal Schönborn told the pontiff that he was sorry his remarks had been “misinterpreted”.
The problem is that the sex abuse scandal is a Hydra: as soon as one head is lopped off, another two spring up. The Pope himself has faced allegations — strongly denied in the Vatican — that as Archbishop of Munich and later as Vatican Head of Doctrine he helped to protect paedophile priests.
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The Belgian raids were welcomed by the American clerical abuse victims’ group, Snap, which said that the Vatican should be “ashamed of itself” for criticising Belgian police for “taking action “.
In a further blow to the Vatican yesterday the US Supreme Court refused to accept the Holy See’s argument that it has immunity against a lawsuit holding the Catholic Church responsible for moving a priest, the late Father Andrew Ronan, from Ireland to Chicago and then Portland, Oregon, despite sex abuse accusations against him.
No wonder Vatican officials have lashed out. However, in the run-up to the Pope’s landmark visit to Britain in September, the Vatican’s best strategy would surely be not sound and fury but a reversion to the pontiff’s earlier decision to stop treating the abuse revelations as a plot to discredit the Church and emphasise the need for co-operation with the civil authorities.
There are signs that the Pope himself realises this. While deploring the Belgian raids at the weekend, he emphasised that abuse cases must be handled by both civil and canon law, and that “justice must be allowed to take its course” — provided that the rights of victims and accused priests are respected.