Pope Benedict XVI: Has His Legacy Been Tarnished Forever?

(ANALYSIS) It has been 20 years since The Boston Globe broke open the decades of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, dragging into the light a hellish story that had lingered on the edge of elite media coverage since the 1980s (see this GetReligion post: “That gap between 1985 and 2002”).

Two decades later, this is a story that continues in the form of questions about who in the Catholic hierarchy knew what and when in a variety of dioceses around the world. The issue wasn’t limited to Boston. Predator priests were everywhere — a scandal that may have been unearthed in the United States but continues to plague other parts of the world.

The focus the past few weeks has been on Germany and the involvement of 94-year-old Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in the handling of some abuse cases, decades before he became a key church official in Rome and, eventually, pope. This was also long before the church — in part due to his leadership — adopted stricter policies on how to handle cases of clergy sexual abuse.

READ: Pope Benedict Faulted Over Sex Abuse Claims

READ: Pope Benedict Becomes Longest-Living Pope In History

This is a complex subject for journalists to cover, in part when events in the past are viewed through the lens of present church policies and standards. How is the press doing?

Here’s a timeline of these fast-moving developments. This latest chapter in the decades-long clergy sex abuse saga began on Jan. 20 when a law firm released a report, commissioned by the German church, to look into how cases of sexual abuse were handled in Munich between 1945 and 2019. Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, headed that archdiocese from 1977 to 1982, when he was named to head the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The report’s authors found that Ratzinger failed to stop the abuse in four cases. The report also faulted his predecessors and — this is crucial — his successors for their own misconduct in allowing clergy accused of sex abuse to stay in ministry.

The 2,000-page report also criticized Cardinal Reinhard Marx, currently the archbishop of Munich and Freising, for his role in two cases dating back to 2008. Marx offered his resignation to Pope Francis last year, saying he was willing to take responsibility for his part in the sexual abuse crisis. Francis did not accept the resignation, which says something about what this pontiff thinks of the German prelate.

Benedict, who now lives in a monastery at the Vatican largely out of public view, provided extensive answers to the lawyyers’ questions via an 82-page document — including the case of a priest named Peter Hullermann. It was also widely reported that Hullermann continued to abuse after being put back into service, and he was given a suspended jail sentence in 1986. He remained a priest until 2010, and he was still in contact with minors.

This is when things get complicated. It’s where journalism — both mainstream, Catholic and the Vatican’s own media outlets — can help inform and clarify. It’s also a case study in damage control and legacies on both the Catholic left and right — something that continues to play itself out on social media. More importantly, it is being shaped by the press and, in part, by the Vatican. Notably absent from any of the news coverage has been Pope Francis.

Four days after the report was made public, Benedict strayed from his previous written testimony, admitting that he had in fact attended a 1980 meeting where the transfer of a pedophile priest to his diocese was discussed. He blamed an editorial error for his previous assertion that he wasn’t there.

This is what The Associated Press reported on Jan. 24:

In a statement to Germany’s KNA Catholic news agency on Monday, Benedict’s longtime secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, said the retired pope wants to clarify that he was in fact at January 1980 meeting of local church officials in which the priest’s transfer to Munich was discussed. He said Benedict apologizes for the error.

“He would like to stress that this did not happen out of any bad intent, but was the consequence of a mistake in the editorial processing of his statement,” Gaenswein said.

Gaenswein stressed, however, no decision on the priest resuming pastoral work was made at the meeting and that it only approved him being put up in Munich during his therapy.

That same day, The Pillar’s Ed Condon provided wonderful context and information regarding Benedict’s slipup. Did this mistake change how Catholics and the public should view him? Condon makes this key point in his explainer piece:

The pope emeritus has said he will be making a further statement in due course explaining how he ended up at odds with the facts in the first place, and there’s certainly reasonable scope for a 94 year old to make a genuine error in producing a personal report on events that happened more than 40 years ago.

But, whatever context he is able to give in the future, in many ways what happened during Ratzinger’s time in Munich and after encapsulate what went so badly wrong with the Church’s handling of abuse cases, worldwide, in the second half of the last century, and the difficulty of making real reforms stick during the first decades of this one.

In dioceses across the West, and certainly in the United States, it was all too common for priests found to be sexual predators to be handled “pastorally,” which usually involved them being sent for psychological evaluation and treatment, and eventually returned to ministry to abuse again.

Church records from the era are full of examples of quack treatments, like encouraging abuser priests to dress in “mood appropriate colors” during therapy, supposedly helping to “cure” serial abusers of children and justifying their return to ministry. Indeed, in this country, so widespread was the practice of “therapeutic” rehabilitation instead of canonical prosecution that a kind of cottage industry sprung up around it.

Condon goes on to note that Ratzinger, once at the Vatican, “was consumed with dealing with the legacy of exactly the kind of administrative culture the Hullerman case typifies, and which resulted in the abuse of we may never know how many minors.”

This is what he astutely concludes, and please note the focus on transparency:

The extent to which his actions in Munich will now be referenced against his work as prefect and pope to reform the legal way in which the Church handles cases of abuse — for example through the landmark legislation Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela — encapsulates well a problem with which the Church is already all too familiar: How does a hierarchy credibly address a problem which was a creation of its own culture and attitudes to begin with?

There are no easy answers to that question. And, as the current furore around Benedict shows, there are few, if any, reforming heroes with perfect records. But the Munich report, and Benedict’s public engagement with it, does illustrate one important, albeit slow-moving, cultural change which has begun in the Church: transparency.

The extent to which the Church and her leaders are willing to engage frankly and honestly with the failures of the past, near and distant, is crucial to ensuring that legal reforms are met by the culture of accountability needed to make them work.

Indeed, there are no easy answers. On Jan. 26, The Associated Press, quoting Vatican media, did a story on the Holy See’s defense of Benedict’s actions. The Vatican, in full damage control because Benedict still lives there, made the following arguments, as reported by the AP:

The Vatican on Wednesday strongly defended Pope Benedict XVI’s record in fighting clergy sexual abuse and cautioned against looking for “easy scapegoats and summary judgments,” after an independent report faulted his handling of four cases of abuse when he was archbishop of Munich, Germany.

The Holy See’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, provided the Vatican’s first substantial response to the report in an editorial that appeared in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and its media portal, Vatican News. In it, Tornielli recalled that Benedict was the first pope to meet with victims of abuse, that he had issued strong norms to punish priests who raped children and had directed the church to pursue a path of humility in seeking forgiveness for the crimes of its clerics.

“All this can neither be forgotten nor erased,” Tornielli wrote.

The AP story also contained this important context regarding Benedict and his attempt to root out pedophile priests:

Through his secretary, the 94-year-old Benedict has said he would respond to the findings in due time. He has already acknowledged an editorial error in his own submission to the researchers about a 1980 meeting in which a pedophile priest’s transfer to Munich was discussed. Benedict acknowledged this week that he indeed attended the meeting but denied that his return to pastoral work was discussed at the time. The priest later received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.

Tornielli didn’t comment on the details of that case or any other, though he lamented that so much attention had “predictably” been paid in the media to Benedict’s four-year term as archbishop. He focused instead on Benedict’s tenure as prefect of the doctrine office, from 1982-2005, and then as pope, from 2005-2013, when he retired.

While he was prefect of the doctrine office, Ratzinger in 2001 directed all cases of clergy sex abuse to be sent to his office for processing, after he saw that bishops around the world were moving rapists from parish to parish rather than punishing them under the church’s in-house canon law. During the final two years of his pontificate, Benedict defrocked nearly 400 priests for abuse.

On Feb. 6, Vatican News, via its Twitter feed, put out another statement in Benedict’s name that linked to the Holy See’s website. In the letter — posted in various languages, including English — Benedict said:

Amid the massive work of those days – the development of my position – an oversight occurred regarding my participation in the chancery meeting of 15 January 1980. This error, which regrettably was verified, was not intentionally willed and I hope may be excused. I then arranged for Archbishop Gänswein to make it known in the press statement of 24 January last. In no way does it detract from the care and diligence that, for those friends, were and continue to be an evident and absolute imperative. To me it proved deeply hurtful that this oversight was used to cast doubt on my truthfulness, and even to label me a liar. At the same time, I have been greatly moved by the varied expressions of trust, the heartfelt testimonies and the moving letters of encouragement sent to me by so many persons. I am particularly grateful for the confidence, support and prayer that Pope Francis personally expressed to me. Lastly, I would thank the little family in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, whose communion of life in times of joy and sorrow has given me the interior serenity that supports me.

Benedict also addressed legacy in a way, but in a religious context — adding insights and images that many journalists in the mainstream press may not fully understand. This is what he said:

Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life. Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great reason for fear and trembling, I am nonetheless of good cheer, for I trust firmly that the Lord is not only the just judge, but also the friend and brother who himself has already suffered for my shortcomings, and is thus also my advocate, my “Paraclete.”

The aftershocks of this case continue to be felt in the press well into this month and will be for months. It’s important to note that Benedict, a traditionalist, isn’t much liked by the more progressive wing of the Catholic Church. This affects press coverage, of course.

In 2020, the Vatican’s 450-page report looking into the decades-long abuse committed by Theodore McCarrick largely blamed popes John Paul II and Benedict for allowing the former cardinal to rise up the ranks even though it was known that he had sexually abused seminarians.

Pope Francis received none of the blame. At the very least, the press needed to focus on the network of influential cardinals who were personally and professionally linked to McCarrick.

In a recent interview with America magazine, Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit and one of the church’s top experts in the field of protecting of minors and vulnerable people from abuse, noted the following:

“While most attention has been drawn to this, the biggest damage to the church, the most shocking fact, is that none — not a single one, conservative or liberal — of the archbishops of the Munich-Freising archdiocese from 1945 to 2019 has done consistently what he should have done in dealing with cases of abuse.”

America, while interviewing Zollner, also reported the following details that give a view into Ratzinger’s thinking then and now. This is long, but essential:

Father Zollner said the first problem relates to the fact that Benedict in his response said that as archbishop of Munich (1977-82) he was influenced by “the zeitgeist” of that time—whereas hitherto he had always insisted that as Christians we should not be influenced by the zeitgeist because we have moral values and standards that are independent of it. Furthermore, in an April 2019 article, Pope Benedict accused the zeitgeist of the 1960s for the abuse scandals in the church.

A second problem relates to the approach the response took to moral and canonical questions, Father Zollner said. The response, signed by Benedict, states that masturbation in front of girls that does not involve touching is not sexual abuse. Father Zollner said that while some canon lawyers argue that defining sexual abuse as offenses against the sixth commandment avoids reducing it to a narrow legal definition and gives the opportunity to apply it more appropriately to the concrete situation, in this case this point is used to deliberately avoid saying that it is a sexual offense.

A third problem is that Benedict’s response says the bishop is not responsible for a priest who abuses “in private,” meaning when he is not wearing clerical attire and cannot be recognized as a priest. Father Zollner asked whether this means that priesthood is related to clerical attire. Moreover, this response reveals an “inconsistency” with Benedict’s own theology and indeed with the theology of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Because of this, Father Zollner said, “It is certainly not from him, even though he signed it.”

Pointing to a fourth problem, Father Zollner said he found it “astounding” that although Archbishop Ganswein and the lawyers assisting Benedict had received the relevant background documentation, including the minutes of the Jan. 15, 1980 meeting that showed that Cardinal Ratzinger had participated in the gathering where they discussed the Essen diocese’s request to allow an abuser, Father Peter, Hullerman to come to Munich for psychotherapy. Nevertheless Benedict, in his response, “stated on three different occasions that he was not present.”

Ratzinger’s legacy is at stake here, but again, this case is much more complicated than that.

The progressive German church — both then and now — is at a crossroads. The present certainly has issues, such as priests being allowed to marry and growing support — in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — for changing centuries of church teachings on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ issues in general. That’s something Pope Francis will have to deal with. How the press will handle the current pope and these clashes over moral theology will be interesting to watch. For now, it’s Benedict who’s on the receiving end of bad press with his latest blunder potentially damaging his legacy.

This post originally appeared at GetReligion.