EXCERPT: Benedict, both as a Bishop and as Vatican official, has personified the kind of official plagued with a good heart but bad vision. Men like him (and they were all men) had the best intentions to protect the Body of Christ from harm – but their horrifying myopia has cost us all dearly. To put it simply: they went after the wrong “bad guys.”
This sad story offers lots of villains: the child-rapists themselves; their enablers and protectors; commentators attacking the media for investigating criminal behavior; commentators aiming to exploit scandal simply to harm the church; church officials who avoided facing the scandal for fear of harming the church.
But from 1981 on, Joseph Ratzinger earned the moniker “God’s Rottweiler” for his aggressive vigilance against a wholly different target: priests whose writing, speaking, and thinking seemed at odds with official Church teaching. Jason Berry sums up that history like this:
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was decisive in running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is housed in a 17th-century palazzo where Galileo the astronomer was convicted of heresy. On issues ranging from the Vatican prohibition of birth control devices to Liberation Theology of Latin America, the C.D.F. used anonymous investigators to critique the works of suspect scholars. In closed tribunals, Ratzinger and his assistants interrogated those out of step with doctrine, punishing some by excommunication or orders to keep silent for periods of time. Catholic liberals were aghast as Ratzinger clashed with some of the church's leading thinkers. The Swiss theologian, Father Hans Küng, famously called him "The Grand Inquisitor," after Dostoevsky's religious persecutor in "The Brothers Karamazov."
Ratzinger was perfectly cast for the role, since he had battled such “dissidents” as both theologian and bishop throughout the 1970s even before coming to the Vatican. Indeed, he was a hero to all who, like him, felt that allowing such dissent to continue would do irreparable harm to the Church.
But while vigilant defenders of the faith of like Ratzinger and his supporters crusaded against a few dozen maverick thinkers, thousands of priests worldwide continued to rape children and youth even after their crimes were discovered. Their bishops recycled them, protected them from discovery, and fought all attempts to bring their crimes (or even official documentation of their crimes) to light.
The appalling truth is that Ratzinger and all like-minded bishops, clergy, and laity committed a horrible blunder. They poured all their energies into suppressing the threat from “dissenters,” blind to the much greater threat of child abuse.
These men were obsessed with enforcing orthodoxy (correct teaching) but blind to the importance of enforcing orthopraxy (correct practice). The system they protected enshrined secrecy and non-accountability, and made a thriving breeding ground for the very “filth” Ratzinger himself later decried. How sadly ironic: that someone so alert to the least deviation from official thinking had no clue about deviant behavior.
The Church could well have used his vigilance aimed at the real threat—but the blinders have fallen from his eyes too late. He must now resort to apologizing to victims, because no one ever protected them. Perhaps Benedict’s reputation will survive – but to tell the truth, his belief (shared by many others) that liberal theologians were the greatest threat to the Body of Christ has turned out to be tragically bad judgment.
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