Many people have asked for a long time. What did the popes do to curb the incredible amount of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church?
My usual answer is: nothing. This excellent new book by investigative journalist Philip Shenon confirms that the popes ignored abuse and protected abusers every way they could—in the United States and across the world. Shenon’s “investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church,” shows that the popes made numerous terrible mistakes in running the church. I focus on sex abuse because this book helps to explain why Catholicism has avoided responsibility for abuse for so long.
Do you know the last seven popes? They are:
- Pius XII (1939-1958)
- John XXIII (1958-1963)
- Paul VI (1963-1978)
- John Paul I (August-September 1978)
- John Paul II (1978-2005)
- Benedict XVI (2005-2013)
- Francis (2013-present)
The Beginning
Father Marcial Maciel Degollado started the Legion of Christ, a Roman Catholic religious congregation, in 1941. His abuses started in the 1940s and were reported to church authorities by the 1950s. His career could have ended then, but Cardinal Clemente Micara allowed Maciel to remain a priest and also kept the Legion open. After that investigation, by “returning Maciel to power, [that cardinal] enabled a serial child molester to continue his crimes for another fifty years.” The Legion also survived.
In 1962, New Mexico priest Gerald Fitzgerald went to Rome to report “widespread child molestation by priests” to Cardinal Ottaviani. Fitzgerald worried that bishops were moving abusers from parish to parish. New Mexico had long housed disturbed clergymen. Ottaviani wrote Crimen Sollicitationis, a document that told church members how to investigate sexual abuse. Crimen was binding on church officials for many years and often guided their actions. They had to report instances of abuse to the church’s Holy Office. Secrecy, however, was also required. “Although the document did not explicitly order bishops to withhold evidence of sexual crimes from the police, many dioceses read it that way, since that had always been their practice.” Church members would be excommunicated if they revealed this secret information to anyone. Secret meant secret.
This history helps explain why church members have long hidden evidence of abuse from state authorities. Shenon notes that no one replaced Fitzgerald’s concern for the need for the Vatican to oppose abuse after Fitzgerald died in 1969, during the papacy of Paul VI.
Pope Paul appointed Joannes Gijsen as bishop of Roermond, in the Netherlands, because Gijsen was a traditional Catholic. He had said, for example, that he would deny abortion to rape victims. Some said Gijsen should be fired because he was a child molester. Paul did not listen. In 2014, after Paul and Gijsen were dead, the Dutch church said it had known for a long time that Gijsen was an abuser. For example, he had forced a ten-year-old boy to perform oral sex in the 1960s.
John Paul II and His Successor, Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI
“[T]here is clear proof that John Paul and Benedict joined in a wide-ranging conspiracy to shield child molesters from justice.”
Remember Maciel, who was protected in the 1940s? This book reports that one month after John Paul’s election, in November 1978, the Vatican “received a detailed account of Maciel’s pedophilia. The report accused him of molesting at least twenty boys, all identified by name in the document. The evidence had been compiled by Bishop John McGann of Long Island, New York, who began to investigate after taking the confession of a local Mexican-born priest who described the ‘moral torture’ of the sexual abuse he had suffered at Maciel’s hands. (331)” Maciel’s abuse of Father Juan Vaca started in 1949, when Vaca was twelve years old. Another instance of abuse reported and ignored.
Maciel was John Paul’s friend. They traveled together and were friends for the rest of their lives. Not a word of his abuse from the pope. Cardinal Ratzinger closed the investigation of Maciel in 1999. As pope, Benedict changed focus in 2006 and told Maciel to withdraw from public life. There were no apologies or prosecutions, however. In 2009, after Maciel’s death, we learned of 33 other Legion priests who abused at least 175 boys and girls. Nonetheless, Benedict refused suggestions to close the Legion, the religious group that Maciel had started years before.
In June 1981, Oakland, California Bishop John Cummins reported Father Stephen Kiesle to John Paul and Ratzinger. Kiesle had abused at least a dozen children. Ratzinger delayed work on this case. Kiesle was not defrocked until 1987.
Americans now know very well that in 1985, Thomas Doyle, Ray Mouton, and Michael Peterson wrote the most important document about church abuse, The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Catholic Clergy. They predicted the horrible outcomes ahead for the church due to its extensive abuse. But they too were ignored.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a prominent church official before he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. We find out that as Archbishop of Munich, he learned of the many abuse charges against Father Peter Hullermann, who had at least molested an 11-year-old boy. Hullerman was also accused of “indecent advances” toward other boys. Despite warnings that he was a “clear danger” to children, there was no report to the police. Ratzinger allowed Hullerman to continue as a priest, and he continued to abuse boys.
In June 2009, Benedict accepted the resignation of a German-born bishop, Georg Müller, who stepped down after admitting he had molested a nine-year-old boy.
In 2010, charges of abuse were made about priests at the Regensburg, Germany, Domspatzen, which is its boys’ choir. Joseph Ratzinger’s brother, George, was director of the choir from 1964-1994, when a lot of the abuse took place. Joseph Ratzinger lived in Regensburg for many years; he was a professor at the University of Regensburg.
Wasn’t Pope Francis Really Pope John XXIV?
No. “His greatest failure, like that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, was his refusal to grapple with the clerical sexual abuse crisis.”
He was quiet about abuse in his home nation, Argentina, when he was still Bishop Bergoglio. Julio Grassi was one of the nation’s biggest abusers. Bergoglio paid funds to support Grassi against his accusers, and was one of Grassi’s biggest supporters. Bergoglio said Bishop Juan Carlos Maccarone was the victim of a vendetta when Maccarone resigned after being caught on videotape having sex with his 23-year-old chauffeur. Which, apparently, was a regular occurrence.
“His deputies acknowledged years later that Bergoglio demonstrated an astonishing blind spot on the issue.” That blind spot continued.
Francis reopened the investigation of Maciel that Ratzinger had closed in 1999. This investigation was prompted by airing of videos of Maciel with his secret families. He had six children with three wives. The reopened investigation closed without any charges.
Pope Francis appointed George Pell of Australia and Francisco Javier Errazuriz of Chile to his cabinet. Pell was later arrested for abuse in Australia, and Errazuriz was known as a protector of pedophiles. When Archbishop Józef Wesołowski of Poland was accused of abuse in the Dominican Republic, Francis called him back to the Vatican, where he was free to walk around the city, and where Francis thought he should be tried because of his diplomatic immunity. Wesolowski died before any Vatican trial took place. It was alleged that a boy had to give Wesolowski sex before the boy could get his medicine. Francis also protected Father Mauro Inzoli, who was supposed to be defrocked after a church congregation found he had molested boys. The pope allowed him to remain a priest, and, of course, Inzoli continued to abuse.
Francis promoted Argentina’s Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez to be his theologian in Rome despite his poor record handling abuse in Argentina. Fernandez had covered up an abuse case against priest Eduardo Lorenzo. Bishop Zanchetta in Argentina, sentenced to prison for molesting seminarians, was noted as resigning for “health reasons.” Francis took Monsignor Carlo Capella back to the Vatican instead of letting him be charged with child pornography in the United States.
Marie Collins resigned from the pope’s child abuse commission, noting the Vatican “thrives on silence and cover-up.”
Francis led the funeral mass for Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, whom many in the States know from the Best Picture of the Year Spotlight, which showed an archdiocese mired in abuse. Abuse was not mentioned at the funeral.
And, in “what he acknowledged was the single most catastrophic personnel choice of his papacy,” Francis named Juan Barros as a bishop in Chile. Victims of abuse protested that Barros had been a solid supporter of Chile’s notorious pedophile, Fernando Karadima.
Father Marko Rupnik, a Jesuit artist accused of abuse, was invited to be a lecturer at Francis’s event in 2020 after credible allegations in 2019 that he was abusive.
Americans know the most about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 after being reported as an abuser in 1999. He was protected by the popes all those years.
Cardinal McCarrick
In April 2002 McCarrick was invited to a papal conference on abuse because he was “relatively untainted by the sexual abuse scandals.” How would everyone think that? We learn that in October 1999, a dying Cardinal John O’Connor of New York warned Pope John Paul in a letter that Bishop McCarrick should not be promoted or named cardinal because he had abused seminarians. A Roman archbishop also warned against his promotion. McCarrick sent the pope a letter saying he had never had sexual relations with anyone. John Paul promoted him to archbishop and, a year later, to cardinal.
McCarrick became friends with Archbishop Bergoglio, future Pope Francis, in Argentina.
McCarrick raised incredible amounts of money for the church; he “had a reputation as a man with easy access to cash.” The popes were very grateful to him.
Cardinals elect the pope. Cardinal McCarrick participated in the 2005 conclave, even though a New Jersey archbishop had alerted the church of another claim of molestation by McCarrick. The church settled the complaints against his victims, with McCarrick contributing some money to the total. Apparently McCarrick favored Cardinal Bergoglio in 2005, when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected, because Bergoglio knew less about sexual abuse. Post-election, McCarrick sent $250,000 to Pope Benedict as a celebration of his election. The pope extended McCarrick’s work post his 75th birthday, which is the usual retirement age for bishops. Benedict knew something of the allegations, but kept McCarrick in D.C. because of all the great work McCarrick did.
When San Francisco Archbishop William Levada took over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2005, he discovered McCarrick’s lengthy disciplinary files and told Pope Benedict about them. Benedict asked McCarrick to retire, but the reasons were kept secret, so McCarrick enjoyed fond farewells. Another abuse settlement followed. And McCarrick stayed very public.
Then the papal nuncio heard a report that McCarrick’s abuse involved minors, not just seminarians. Again, this was documented in church files but ignored for many years. Church staff completed a long report about the cardinal’s homosexuality, identifying stories from 20 years prior. The church urged McCarrick to live a more retired lifestyle, but McCarrick kept traveling. He even made trips with the pope.
By 2010, there were “bulging files” against McCarrick. “We all knew,” said a New Jersey seminarian. Don’t believe the popes who said they didn’t.
Francis was aware of the abuse allegations when he became pope, and “took no action.” Francis kept his friend around for years, and gave dissatisfying answers when asked about his conduct. “They greeted each other as old friends” when Francis arrived in D.C. in 2015.
The story popped up yet again with claims from another New Jersey man, that “Uncle Ted” McCarrick abused him when he was sixteen. In the fall of 2018, the pope delayed the investigation. The book suggests the investigation was stalled because McCarrick gave the church $25 million for a cancer hospital.
Finally, Francis told McCarrick to live a private life and that he might be excommunicated. Archbishop Vigano later released his timeline, reminding everyone that he had notified Pope Benedict in 2006 and 2008 of McCarrick’s abuse. “Viganò claimed he had warned Francis face-to-face in June 2013, three months after his election, that McCarrick had molested generations of seminarians and that the Vatican had a ‘thick dossier’ documenting the abuse dating back decades, and yet the pope had done nothing.”
Francis ordered McCarrick defrocked in 2019. Note that is twenty years after a dying Cardinal O’Connor warned the church against him.
The church often doesn’t listen.
And the Others
I haven’t even covered all the stories.
A 2010 Dutch report identified 20,000 abused children and ten boys castrated at the order of the bishops. John Paul chose Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer as a bishop and a cardinal, even though people knew of his abuse. John Paul praised him at his death without a word of the abuse. Roger Mahony led Los Angeles through its abuse and settlements of $60 million and $600 million. Scotland’s Cardinal O’Brien was guilty of abuse. There were numerous stories of Ireland’s abuse. You can read the names of German George Muller or Lawrence Murphy, from a school for the deaf in Wisconsin. Cardinal Danneels of Belgium kept Bishop Vangeheluwe’s abuse of his nephew from the police. Pittsburgh’s Cardinal Wuerl and Bishop Michael Bransfield of West Virginia are also mentioned.
The Next Pope
Shenon favors Good Pope John XXIII, who opened the church to the modern world by calling the Vatican Council to Rome. The book is dedicated to “the memory of the man born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (1881–1963), who might have been forgotten.” Shenon suggests there are enough Francis Cardinals in the church now to elect, not a conservative successor, but a new Pope John XXIV.
Maybe? Whether conservative or liberal, we wait to see if the next pope will do anything about child sexual abuse.