Rev. Thomas Doyle, O.P., the canon lawyer who left a great job in Washington years ago to pursue a life in opposition to clerical abusers, commends Pope Benedict XVI for his facing up to the problem:
It is well worth noting that Pope Benedict said more and did more relative to the worldwide plague of clergy sexual abuse in five days than his predecessor did in two decades.
His predecessor, John Paul II, kept his counsel on the matter for nine years after learning of it “in detail” in 1984. From then to his death in 2005, he mentioned it publicly 11 times. Requests for meetings with victims and victims’ groups were routinely ignored.
For all practical purposes, the victims of the worst scandal in church’s history since the dreadful days of the Spanish Inquisition were non-persons as far as the Vatican was concerned. Not so with Benedict XVI.
For that matter, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican office for defending orthodoxy, “was interviewed and gave the usual party line” in 2002, when the Boston revelations surfaced, calling media coverage of abuse “a planned campaign . . . intentional, manipulated, [motivated by] a desire to discredit the Church.”
But by 2004, he was considerably more open, meeting for two hours with Judge Anne Burke of Chicago and two other members of the U.S. Bishops’ National Review Board who “by-passed” the bishops and came calling on him. Three American lay people talked, and the cardinal listened, as Burke described the meeting at a Voice of the Faithful gathering in Indianapolis in 2005.
Most dramatically, in 2006 the Vatican put a lid on the infamous Marciel Maciel-Degollado, founder of the wealthy and powerful Legionaries of Christ. Ratzinger had been blamed for putting one on the investigation of Maciel, but this had been John Paul’s doing. When Maciel died last January in Houston, he was buried privately, significantly without comment by the Vatican.
For a compelling account of the sordid Maciel doings, see Jason Berry and Gerald Renner’s Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (Free Press, 2003), in which Ratzinger makes a cameo appearance, by the way, in which he is not sympathetic to the former Legionaries complainers about Maciel’s abuse.
The pope’s pointed commentary during his visit, broken out by Doyle in 10 parts, including his admitting that the problem “sometimes was very badly handled” is
a long overdue indication that the pope and hopefully the Vatican bureaucracy, are beginning to comprehend the profound ramifications of the legacy of clergy sexual abuse and hierarchical duplicity in the ecclesial culture
It is not, however, as some have said, “a sign that the crisis is passed and the Church can now move on.” To think so, Doyle said, is “a combination of wishful thinking and naiveté.” Suspicion of official church statements about it “will not be turned around in a week.”
There’s more more more . . .
Blithe Spirit 
Let’s see some Papal action in addition to the right words. Heads need to roll so that we laity can believe that we have leadership in which we can be proud.
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