Cardinal: late pope backed priest-shielding

Spanish media are quoting a retired Vatican cardinal as saying the late Pope John Paul II backed his letter congratulating a French bishop for risking jail for shielding a priest convicted of raping minors.

Web sites of La Verdad and other Spanish newspapers reported Saturday that Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, 80, told an audience at a Catholic university in Murcia, Spain, on Friday that he consulted with John Paul and showed him the letter. He claimed the pontiff authorized him to send the letter to bishops worldwide.

The 2001 letter praised Bishop Pierre Pican, who received a three-month suspended prison sentence for concealing knowledge about the clergyman, the Rev. Rene Bissey, the media said. The priest himself was sentenced to 18 years for sexually abusing 11 minors.

The claims that the offending priest represented just a few bad apples from many years ago and that the Vatican's approach to dealing with them reflected fumbles by an inefficient bureaucracy are becoming increasingly implausible. This behavior has been widely tolerated by the Catholic Church for many years. The leaders in charge from the pope on down have seen their duty in the matter to be the protection of the institution by covering it up.

Now of course institutional cover up is pretty common to all institutions religious, government, business, etc. However, most competent managers see it as a good idea to get rid of people who are creating problems that need to be covered up. That does not seem to be the approach of the RCC. They have gone to elaborate schemes to move the abusers from place to place, even around the globe.

One explanation given is that they had a shortage of priest. I am increasingly inclined to believe that is not an adequate explanation. It is clear that protecting children has never been high on their priorities. The only thing that has induced them to institute protective procedures has been the staggering cost of law suits.

I doubt that we will see many cardinals and bishops writing confessional memories about their personal involvement in the sex abuse cover up, so we will be left to speculate as to what they really thought about it. In light of their long pattern of systematic behavior it seems plausible that they didn't and may not now see that there was really all that much wrong with it. They have systematically rejected most of the developments in the study of human sexuality. For people so determined to live a couple of centuries in the past, it wouldn't be difficult to convince themselves that the children really weren't harmed by it and the whole things is a plot by:

Lawyers

Journalist

Jews

Gays

Communist