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Arrest the
Pope
Will someone really
arrest Pope Ratzinger? The noted atheist
authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens hope so. Here,
Andy
Armitage looks at what may seem an
audacious exercise.
It’s a satisfying
picture: Pope Benedict XVI sitting in a
police cell awaiting charge, accused of
aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.
It probably won’t happen. Well, it won’t
happen.
And it won’t happen
because the powerful mostly find a way out
of situations like this. In an article in
the Guardian, the writer George
Monbiot (The Age of Consent) quotes a
short but compelling verse:
They hang
the man and flog the woman
That
steals the goose from off the
common
But let the greater villain loose
That
steals the common from the
goose.
’Twas ever thus, alas!
However, the prominent
atheist authors Richard Dawkins (The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for
Evolution) and Christopher Hitchens (God
is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything) are at least giving it a go.
They are going for the “greater villain”.
They’ve asked human-rights barristers to
make a case for arresting Joseph Ratzinger (The
Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and
Religion), a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI, on
charges of covering up sexual abuse in the
Catholic Church.
And, though not
apparently related to this campaign, there’s
an “Arrest the Pope” Facebook group, too.
It emerged in early April
that a 1985 letter bearing Ratzinger’s
signature put the unity of the church before
dealing with a priest who had tied up two
boys and sexual abused them in California.
The Vatican claims
Ratzinger is immune from prosecution because
he is a head of state. But he is not the
head of a state with full United Nations
membership, and so, say Dawkins and
Hitchens, he does not hold immunity and
could, therefore, be arrested when he steps
onto British soil. (The Vatican has what is
known as “permanent observer” status at the
UN.)
In March, according to
the Guardian, Ratzinger said he would
not be “intimidated” by “petty gossip”.
While he didn’t apply this directly to the
scandal, he did say, while preaching in St
Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday, that faith in
God led “towards the courage of not allowing
oneself to be intimidated by the petty
gossip of dominant opinion”.
Central
register
“As Benedict spoke,” says
the Guardian’s website of 28 March,
with a version in the print edition the
following day, “the president of
Switzerland, Doris Leuthard, called for a
central register of paedophile priests to
keep them away from children. In Austria,
the archbishop of Vienna announced the
creation of a commission funded by the
church, but without church representatives,
to look into Austrian abuse claims.”
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Doris Leuthard |
So there is little doubt
that this is a crisis writ large. It is the
biggest catastrophe Benedict has faced or,
probably, will face. It has provided a very
loud and perhaps salutary slap in the face –
and probably several other places – for the
ubiquitous Catholic Church, reminding it
that it no longer has the power it once did,
and that people are actually willing, nay,
itching, to stand up and speak out against
it.
In the US alone, some
11,750 allegations of child sex abuse have
so far featured in actions settled by
archdioceses. Recently, the Pope deigned to
apologise to victims and their families in
Ireland, after a damning report from a
commission headed by Judge Murphy that found
not only that sexual abuse was “endemic” in
boys’ institutions but that the church
hierarchy protected the guilty and, although
they knew they might reoffend, allowed them
to take up new positions teaching other
children after their earlier victims had
been sworn to secrecy.
Perhaps the move by
Dawkins and Hitchens, is the most audacious
act yet. It is not hard to imagine Ratzinger
blinking with shock, doing a double-take,
and feeling baffled by how this protective
shell that he has had around him like an
impenetrable cocoon for most of his adult
life, this barrier against the great Out
There, could crack and crumble. Perhaps he
feels threatened. Let us hope so. He
deserves nothing better.
Threshold of
immunity
But can the arrest ploy
work? Mark Stephens, a solicitor working
with the noted barrister Geoffrey Robertson
towards this end, seems optimistic:
“I’m convinced we can get
over the threshold of immunity. The Vatican
is not recognised as a state in
international law. People assume that it has
existed for time immemorial but it was a
construct of Mussolini, and when the Vatican
first applied to become a member of the UN,
the US said no. So as a sop they were given
the status of permanent observers rather
than full members.”
And it became the last
enduring legacy of Italy’s Fascist era.
Stephens reckons there
are approaches to getting Ratzinger into the
dock. “One is that we apply for a warrant to
the International Criminal Court,” he says.
“Alternatively, criminal proceedings could
be brought here: either a public prosecution
brought by the Crown Prosecution Service or
a private prosecution. That would require at
least one victim to come forward who is
either from this jurisdiction or was abused
here. The third option is for individuals to
lodge civil claims.”
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Geoffrey
Robertson |
Stephens has said he’s
been approached by seven wealthy people who
had given money to the Catholic church and,
says the Guardian, “were dismayed
their money had not only been used to fund
abuse but also buy the silence of victims”.
He thinks these people could potentially sue
the Pope.
In another Guardian
article (2 April), Robertson writes:
In legal actions
against Catholic archdioceses in the US
it has been alleged that the same
conduct reflected Vatican policy as
approved by Cardinal Ratzinger (as the
pope then was) as late as November 2002.
Sexual assaults were regarded as sins
that were subject to church tribunals,
and guilty priests were sent on a “pious
pilgrimage” while oaths of
confidentiality were extracted from
their victims.
As for the Pope’s
reference to the “petty gossip of dominant
opinion”, Robertson says the so-called Holy
See “can no longer ignore international law,
which now counts the widespread or
systematic sexual abuse of children as a
crime against humanity. The anomalous claim
of the Vatican to be a state – and of the
pope to be a head of state and hence immune
from legal action – cannot stand up to
scrutiny.”
It shouldn’t surprise us
that President George W Bush intervened to
protect the Catholic Church in a 2005 test
case in Texas. The case folded because of
Bush’s intercession: he agreed to claim
head-of-state immunity on Ratzinger’s
behalf. A Bush lawyer, John B Bellinger III,
certified that Ratzinger was immune from
suit “as the head of a foreign state”.
Extinguished
by invasion
However, because of
Bellinger’s notorious defence of
Bush-administration
torture policies, his opinion on
papal immunity is “even more questionable”.
“It hinges on the
assumption,” writes Robertson, “that the
Vatican, or its metaphysical emanation, the
Holy See, is a state. But the papal states
were extinguished by invasion in 1870 and
the Vatican was created by fascist Italy in
1929 when Mussolini endowed this tiny
enclave – 0.17 of a square mile containing
900 Catholic bureaucrats – with ‘sovereignty
in the international field . . . in
conformity with its traditions and the
exigencies of its mission in the world’.”
So it’s entirely
laughable that statehood can suddenly be
created, just like that, by such a
unilateral declaration. Robertson uses Iran
as an example, since it could decide to make
Qom a state overnight, or the UK could
provide the same favour for, say,
Canterbury.
The Vatican, then, does
not hold the same status at the UN as, say,
the UK or USA does, although, with its
permanent-observer status, it has been a
signatory to certain matters of legislation,
including – and the irony won’t be lost on
many – the Convention on the Rights of the
Child.
It can also speak and
vote in UN conferences, and has, of course,
promoted its own dogma on abortion,
homosexuality and contraception – as you
would expect.
Trump card
Of course, it’s
ridiculous that this organisation should
have any such status. It’s a church.
It’s an organisation, not a country. Or
should the United Kingdom put forward the
Church of England as a state, perhaps using
Lambeth Palace and its territory? After all,
in addition to senior advisers to the
Archbishop of Canterbury and all the
administrative staff, the palace is
“serviced by a building manager, steward,
cook, gardeners, gatekeepers and cleaners,
all of whom take care of the historic
building and its grounds”, according to its
own website. A few “nationals” of the State
of Lambeth there, then.
Robertson hopes his trump
card, though, will be the International
Criminal Court (ICC), because head-of-state
immunity provides no protection there.
“The ICC Statute
definition of a crime against humanity
includes rape and sexual slavery and other
similarly inhumane acts causing harm to
mental or physical health, committed against
civilians on a widespread or systematic
scale, if condoned by a government or a de
facto authority,” Robertson writes.
“It has been held to
cover the recruitment of children as
soldiers or sex slaves. If acts of sexual
abuse by priests are not isolated or
sporadic, but part of a wide practice both
known to and unpunished by their de facto
authority, then they fall within the
temporal jurisdiction of the ICC – if that
practice continued after July 2002, when the
court was established.”
Meanwhile, the Vatican
has tried to persuade its critics that
homosexuality is behind the scandal. Forget
the fact that some of the abuse has been
carried out against girls, it’s
homosexuality and not, say, celibacy that is
to blame.
Homosexuality–paedophilia link
Yet celibacy puts a
stopper on hormonal imperatives, natural
urges that we all feel. If you prevent the
natural outlet for those urges, is it not
conceivable that they will find vent in
other ways – ways that may not be
acceptable?
Earlier this month, the
Pope’s number two, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone,
ensured more hatred against gays in Chile,
where, according to the popular online
publication Pink News, he told a
press conference: “Many psychologists and
psychiatrists have shown that there is no
link between celibacy and paedophilia but
many others have shown, I have recently been
told, that there is a relationship between
homosexuality and paedophilia.”
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Cardinal Tarcisio
Bertone |
But, if he wants to put
forward a relationship between homosexuality
and paedophilia, there has to be a
corresponding relationship between
heterosexuality and abuse of young girls. Am
I simplifying it too much? I don’t think so.
If a priest is heterosexual and has
paedophile tendencies – or, at any rate,
tendencies towards minors, even if it
doesn’t literally amount to paedophilia –
then is not his heterosexuality connected
with his actions?
It may seem obvious to
say so, and it is. And that renders it
meaningless. If there is more abuse against
boys than girls by Catholic priests, it
could be because the seminaries are all-male
and are likely to attract a disproportionate
number of gay men, even if they are sincere
in wishing to stick to vows of celibacy. So
there are, for a start, more gay men than
straight men ready to be sent out into the
world as priests. Add enforced celibacy into
the mix, and you have problems.
This doesn’t excuse the
behaviour, of course, but it has to be said
in order to go some way to countering the
nonsense that comes from Cardinal Bertone
and his ilk.
It is to be sincerely
hoped that the Dawkins–Hitchens offensive
pays off. It would be good to think that the
Vatican might, one day soon, be stripped of
even its limited status within the UN.
After all, were any other
organisation known to be bursting at the
seems with paedophiles and other abusers of
young people in its care, police would have
long ago raided its offices, seized its
computers, interviewed its staff after dawn
raids.
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