Cleaned out on the pedophile priests

The scandal of the pedophilia of the catholic clergy extends in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Austria. Vatican seems encircled and knocked out today. And a trial begins: if any educational institution is not spared by the sexual abuses committed on children, why does the Roman Catholic Church seem the most touched? Is it about individual drift, the revelation of which becomes daily, or is it the structure which is perverse? The storm mutters in Germany. It had burst in January with revelations of abuse committed by two priests in prestigious Jesuit Canesius middle school of Berlin, which trained a part of the German political elite of the post-war years. Since, the tongues loosen free. Other victims, trained in catholic establishments, become known or lodge a complaint. On February 24th, Barnabas Bögle, superior of the monastery Benedictine of Ettal, in the diocese of Munich, resigned because of sexual abuses committed on children schooled in his internat. According to a report, a hundred of children would have been " massively victims of treatment " led by monks of this monastery Benedictine estimated at about ten. The most recent facts would go back up to 1970s and 1980s. Let us remind that cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, future Benoît XVI, was an archbishop of Munich from 1977 till 1982. Another famous Bavarian institution is under the shock: Regensburger Domspatzen, former choir of the singers of the cathedral of Ratisbonne. The bishop of Ratisbonne has just recognized two cases of sexual abuses within this prestigious choral which the own brother of the current pope, Georg Ratzinger, managed from 1964 till 1993. This one, who is 86 years old and lives henceforth in Rome, let know that he ignored everything of the charges which go back up to the end of 1950s: " it was quite an other generation ", he said, before asking for forgiveness to the victims and to their relatives. According to a music composer close to this choir, that he frequented until 1967, everybody knew about these perverse sexual practices. He doubts that Georg Ratzinger was never informed about it. The very catholic Bavaria is still reached by two other affairs: in the community of the Capuchin friars of Burghausen, near Altötting, where the manager of the seminary would have raged on young people in the years 1984-1985. Then, in the diocese of Augsburg which has just warned the public prosecutor's department of a going back up affair in 1999. In front of this waterfall of revelations, the debate took a political tour in Germany. The Minister of justice, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, demands financial compensations for the victims of prescribed crimes and wants to make a bill vote to extend the limitation periods for the cases of abuse in schools. It questions especially Vatican which would have set up on this affairs a " wall of silence ". It hints at a letter sent, in 2001, to the bishops of the whole world by cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Roman congregation for the doctrine of the faith. This entitled text " Of delictis gravioribus " (" about the gravest offences ") made obligation to the bishops to pass on the major cases directly to the pope in Rome. The German Minister of Justice, followed by a big part of the press, retains of this letter that the most serious abuses must not be revealed outside. Wrong, answers Vatican: it was " a determining signal " to remind the episcopate its responsibility in front of the gravity of the committed crime. The scandal also reaches Austria: Bruno Becker, superior of the abbey Benedictine Saint-Peter of Salzburg, resigned on March 8th with immediate effect. He admitted publicly to have abused a child in 1969 in his native municipality of Grödig. Then the Netherlands where the order of the salesian has been the object of charges for facts which would have occurred in the 1960s and 1970 in an internat near Nimègue. A commission of inquiry of the Dutch Church, launched at the beginning of March a call to the persons victims of priests: 34 cases of sexual abuses were indicated in four days. In Vatican, it is consternation. The German cardinal Walter Kasper, in charge of the oecumenical questions, has just declared to the Italian daily paper Repubblica that " the sexual abuses on minors by members of the clergy are criminal, shameful acts and inadmissible mortal sins ", who must " be punished with an absolved firmness ". The pope took himself this painful file. He made it for the United States, Ireland, knew how to find the words and achieved by the doubtless insufficient gestures. He will receive on March 12th the president of the conference of the bishops of Germany. But the nightmare seems not to finish any more. In many circles, the temptation is big today to implicate, beyond the individual offences committed by some priests, the catholic institution itself, in general, and to condemn it as perverse structure. Father Federico Lombardi, spokesman of the pope, made public on Tuesday, March 9th a strong clarification. He does not deny the gravity of the storm which crosses all the Church. He reminded the orders of extreme severity and of transparency, makes observe that in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Austria, the concerned authorities had reacted determinedly and speed. But he especially wanted to underline that the scandal of the pedophilia did not limit itself to the Church: it is a "much wider" question and a fact of concentrating the charges only on the Roman Catholic Church " false the point of view ". He was delighted at the request of the German Minister of the family to gather all the educational institutions to speak about this tragedy and promised the participation of the episcopate. It remains that the other Churches - Protestants, Anglican or orthodoxes - who are also in charge of educational establishments, seem relatively spared. The most massive and violent facts are the ones which blamed the Roman Catholic Church, the United States, in Australia, in Ireland, in Germany, in Austria, in a lesser degree in France, etc. Hans Küng, the famous theologian of Tübingen in Germany (but Swiss of origin), the most violent opponent of Benoît XVI, found the guilty: the discipline, specifically catholic, the celibacy of the priests. In a point of view published by "Le Monde" March 5th, he tells not to ignore that this stories also burst in families, schools, associations and, more occasionally, within Churches where the rule of the celibacy of the priests does not exist. But what, for him, engenders all the drift, it is " the wrinkled relation which maintains the catholic hierarchy with the sexuality ", which the celibacy of the priests is " the most striking expression ". This point of view surprised the psychoanalysts and publishers close to the Roman Catholic Church. There is no direct causal relation between the pedophilia and the celibacy. The best proof, comments Gérard Leclerc in " catholic France ", is that " prisons are populated with married sex offenders and heads of family and that the main part of the pedophile crimes is of incestuous nature. The marriage of the priests would guarantee not at all the catholic institutions against this type of crime ". Nevertheless, the trial of a Roman Catholic Church in the perverse functioning began. There is doubtless an obnoxious contradiction between the high level of moral requirement which requires this Church, in its own rows and in the whole today's society, and the behavior of those who are in charge of supervising it and of spreading its teaching. But it would be reducing and absurd to decrease the debate to the criticism of a Church which would create in itself its devianting tendencies.