Call to treat Vatican as a rogue state

September 9, 2010

Lawyer Geoffrey Robertson says the church must abandon canon law, writes Paola Totaro.

THE Vatican should be treated as a kind of ”rogue state” by the rest of the world until it stops using statehood – and the ancient rules of the canon law – to protect paedophile priests.

So says Geoffrey Robertson, QC, the veteran human rights lawyer and United Nations judge, arguing that the Catholic Church is the only religion permitted under international law to claim the privileges of statehood and its leaders immunity from civil or criminal action.

In his new book, The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse published as a Penguin special in Britain – and in Australia at the weekend – Mr Robertson urges the world to press the Catholic Church into abandoning canon law, the ancient set of ecclesiastical rules that also define disciplinary provisions for offences ranging from sex crimes to ordaining women.

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However, these punishments, sometimes meted out under mediaeval written procedures run by fellow priests, allow ”neither cross-examination and medical examination, nor DNA testing” and ”no punishment worthy of that name”, he says.

”The worst that can happen, other than an order to do penance, is ‘laicisation’; that

is, defrocking, which permits the paedophile to leave the church and get a job in a state school or care home, without anyone knowing of this conviction. Canon law has no sex offenders registry.

”While there can be no objection to an organisation disciplining members for a breach of arcane rules, there is every objection when those breaches amount to serious crimes and the organisation claims the right to deal with them internally without reporting them to the police.

”And that is precisely what the Vatican has been doing: instead of reporting to law enforcement authorities those priests it knows to be guilty of raping children, and to be likely to rape more children in the future, it has been dealing with them under canon law, which demands utmost pontifical secrecy, moving them to other parishes and letting them off with admonitions and unenforceable penances  ¢â‚¬ ¦ usually to say prayers for their victims.”

Mr Robertson told the Herald that canon law is defective in failing to put the interests of children first, in not requiring compensation for victims and in condemning whistleblowers.

One of the cases he discusses is that of the Dapto priest Maurie Crocker, who had to go to his local newspaper to inform on paedophile priests in Wollongong but was ostracised and later committed suicide. ”Some of my family came from Dapto and the story moved me – however hard it is for clergy to inform on their brothers, they must learn that the interests of children are paramount.”

Mr Robertson said: ”The incidence of clerical sexual abuse of children is much higher than has previously been understood – tens of thousands – probably up to a hundred thousand children have been molested by priests since 1981  ¢â‚¬ ¦ This scandal has come about because [the church] under Cardinal Ratzinger [the present Pope], insisted that all child abuse allegations be dealt with under the ‘pontifical secrecy’ provisions of canon law.”

http://www.smh.com.au/world/call-to-treat-vatican-as-a-rogue-state-20100908-151cg.html

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The Case of the Pope

Juliette Hughes

October 9, 2010

THE Case of the Pope presents Catholics with a conundrum. Much of what Geoffrey Robertson says isn’t exactly new to us: the call for renewal has been going on for 40 years, albeit stonewalled by the last two popes. But it takes a great human rights lawyer to show, in the style of a legal document or one of his famous Hypotheticals, what the problem is: if the Vatican is using its rather dodgy provenance as a state in order to pervert the course of justice in other countries, should it continue to enjoy the privileges of statehood?

Robertson argues that to see the Vatican as an impregnable, unaccountable state is problematic; he is the first non-Catholic of such impartiality and standing to take on the argument.

Catholics such as Robert Blair Kaiser have been arguing for years that the people need to take their church back from the bishops and force them to democratic elections  ¢â‚¬” ending the papacy’s fossil autocracy.

Books such as Australian bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church and the American Jason Berry’s Vows of Silence have been keeping Catholics well informed of what the situation is and even proposing what to do about it.

This is not (and never was) a simple in-house problem: crimes have been committed against human rights and that concerns everyone.

What Robertson’s book achieves is to put the mess out there squarely for the rest of the world to assess. He is careful not to demonise Catholicism and praises the good work done by such agencies as the Catholic Overseas Development Agency.

But though Catholics are no better or worse than their non-Catholic fellow citizens, the Vatican “state” that purports to rule their spiritual lives is an Augean stable of secrets and perfidy that presides over financial fraud and harbours paedophile clerics even as it seeks to micro-manage the sexual behaviour of consenting adults.

Robertson investigates the role of compulsory celibacy in all this and finds it part of the problem: the Vatican has shown itself farcically devoid of moral discernment in such matters, for since its official teaching lumps all non-marital sexual activity as sin, paedophilia is just yet another prohibited act in the bafflingly broad spectrum of what the hierarchy considers to be sexual misconduct.

For many, Vatican statehood has been something of a curio, a weird historical artefact. My own great-great-uncle was a Papal Zouave, one of an international brigade of men who went to Italy to fight for the pope in the 1860s. Now that Robertson shows the implications of Vatican “statehood”, something as comic and quaint as my ancestor’s quixoticism has become sad, part of a broader picture that encompasses systemic corruption of the basest kind. He details the relentless manoeuvring at the UN, the diplomatic white-anting that has paid off handsomely for the Holy See but delivered nothing of value to ordinary Catholics.

Recognition of the Vatican as a state has privileged Roman Catholicism over all other religions but ordinary people have not benefited.

The Vatican has exploited its position not only to hamper the UN’s contraceptive programs and the use of condoms against AIDS in Africa but also to indulge in money laundering and other activities that subvert the laws of countries where its adherents live. The most egregious of these transgressions has been the Vatican’s refusal to respect the anti-paedophile laws of other countries. It developed a culture of concealing crimes and a widespread practice of transferring criminal clerics from place to place to commit more.

There have been whistleblowers, but they were often ostracised, even excommunicated (as with Mary MacKillop). Robertson makes regretful reference to the heroic Wollongong priest, Father Maurie Crocker, who was driven to suicide in the 1990s after he publicly supported the victims of two clerical paedophiles.

What the current Pope does not seem to get is that no expressions of personal anguish over the abuses committed on his watch can substitute for what is needed: an acknowledgement that he and many bishops covered up crimes  ¢â‚¬” and a commitment to change.

He expresses sorrow and horror, but never takes responsibility for the cover-ups. In its anxiety to avoid scandal, the Vatican has created far more.

Robertson makes a pointed comparison of Catholic canon law with Islamic sharia law and asks us to consider what would be our reaction if Mecca were declared a sovereign state with a seat at the UN and concomitant diplomatic influence.

Anyone who is uncomfortable with that idea needs to remember his point that the Vatican’s own claim to statehood at the UN rests on the shady and altogether embarrassing Lateran Treaty.

Popes after Italian unification were simply squatters in Vatican City until Mussolini did a deal with Pius XI in 1929.

Now that Robertson has demonstrated the problematic situation of the pope as a head of state, the rest of the world may well wonder why any Catholics stay in the church  ¢â‚¬” or at any rate, why they don’t start suing the soutanes off the cardinals and take it back. For no one can now say that they don’t know how things are.

Juliette Hughes is a practising Catholic.

http://www.watoday.com.au/entertainment/books/the-case-of-the-pope-20101007-169bj.html?from=smh_ft

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Comment from a Facebook friend:

Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard, provided a very strong critique of Robinson’s argument when he appeared on Lateline last week – see http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s3026520.htm. His main points: 1) although past popes failed to act adequately the current Pope has done what he should to address child abuse within the church; 2) it’s the job of civil authorities not the church to prosecute criminal cases; 3) where priests and bishops have sought to hinder prosecution of child abusers they should be prosecuted by civil authorities; 4) in calling for the Catholic Church to abandon canon law Robertson collapses the distinction between church and state.

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Comment:

Geoffrey Robertson’s Catholicism for dummies

[http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=23604]
PAUL COLLINS
Robertson may be a celebrity QC, but historian he is certainly not. He
touts the notion that the Vatican is not a real state and that therefore
Benedict XVI should not be granted immunity from prosecution for his
allegedly covering up clerical sexual abuse. Read more [http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=23604]
| Listen [http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/uploads/media/audio/10/23604.mp3]