• a crisis of faith;
• a crisis of confidence;
• a crisis of authority;
• a crisis of leadership; and
• a crisis of dissemination.
Many people experience doubts about their belief in God for a variety of reasons, but when they find themselves in this situation they have little confidence in the ability of the Church and its representatives to help them. And that is understandable, because the authority of the Church itself is at an all-time low; the Church is suffering from a deep crisis of leadership and is virtually incapable of giving convincing witness to its official beliefs or explaining them in a way that can be understood.
Many recent events have combined to worsen the health of the Catholic Church. These events acted upon the Church like a case of chills, sending shivers down its body which – to continue with this analogy – served as warnings of repeated attacks of fever.
Attacks of Fever
The Catholic Church is suffering from an ‘attack of fever’, declared Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, president of the Belgian Conference of Bishops, in September 2010 in Brussels. The conservative expert on canon law, whom the Vatican had appointed as head of the Belgian church in direct opposition to the wishes of the majority, was referring only to a single centre of disease – but one that had become alarmingly visible in Catholic Belgium – the sex scandals. In fact, in 2010 the Catholic Church experienced several fever attacks, which usually alternated with fever-free intervals, especially during the festive season.
The First Fever Attack: Police Investigation of Bishops
In Belgium, an independent investigative committee compiled a document of around 200 pages containing reports of at least 475 cases of sexual abuse of children by clergymen and 19 suicide attempts by victims, 13 of which ended tragically. Ever since the Bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, had to step down in April 2010 after sexually abusing his own nephew, the number of reports made to the police had increased. As the Belgian judiciary suspected an urgent risk of collusion, they ordered that three police raids be carried out on the same day. The first raid occurred during a meeting of the Belgian Conference of Bishops in Brussels: during the raid, all Belgian bishops, together with the Apostolic Nuncio, were detained for several hours and numerous documents were seized by the police; documents were also seized from the private residence of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who had been the Primate of Belgium until the end of 2009; and in Leuven, a centre headed by the child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssen that had been dealing with cases of sexual abuse was also searched. Peter Adriaenssen had spoken of an ‘affaire Dutroux [after the Belgian serial child-abuser Marc Dutroux] within the Belgian Catholic Church’.
These were all unprecedented events in a Catholic country, and they turned up the heat on other bishoprics and, above all, on the Vatican. Subsequently, however, at the urging of the Catholic Church, the Brussels Court of Appeal declared the police operations illegal because the police had acted out of all proportion. However, there can be no question that the investigations exposed rotten areas in the Church: the sexual abuse itself, and the cover-ups initiated by the bishops.
At least Cardinal Danneels immediately apologized in several interviews (as reported by the Associated Press on 30 August 2010 and Reuters News Agency on 8 September 2010) for his ‘errors of judgement’ in not urging the incriminated bishop to step down immediately and in attempting to dissuade the victim, who was the bishop’s own nephew, from immediately making public his charges against his uncle after having kept silent about them for so many years. At the same time, however, Bishop Guy Harpigny, who was given the responsibility of reviewing and dealing with cases of abuse, declared that Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, the head of the Bishops’ Conference, had refrained from issuing a clear statement of apology because the Church feared potential financial claims by victims for compensation.
In any case, it was clear that, even in Catholic countries, the days when the Catholic Church could demand separate jurisdiction and enforce its own laws contrary to those of the state had come to an end.
The Second Fever Attack: The Vatican Called to Account
The Supreme Court in the USA rejected an appeal by which the Vatican attempted to challenge the verdict of a court in the state of Oregon. The Oregon court had declared that the Vatican itself could be put on trial for the sexual abuse carried out by Catholic priests and that, on conviction, it could be forced to pay punitive damages. The US Supreme Court also rejected the Vatican’s argument invoking its legal immunity as a sovereign state. Attorney Jeff Anderson (St Paul, Minnesota), who has been extremely successful in bringing class action suits against individual clerical perpetrators of sexual abuse and whose own daughter had herself been abused by an ex-priest, declared that this verdict meant that, after eight years of obstruction since 2002, the path was finally clear for a class action suit in which the Vatican could be held criminally accountable for its role in concealing cases of abuse. It is expected that such a suit will soon be filed against Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the former Cardinal Secretary of State and current Dean of the College of Cardinals, and against the current Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone. Moreover, a suit could also be filed directly against Ratzinger himself, for he was the man who, according to a detailed report by the New York Times, while he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, abstained from issuing any sanctions against the priest Lawrence Murphy. Lawrence Murphy abused some 200 deaf boys in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1975. Even if the pope as head of state enjoys immunity from prosecution, these are disastrous prospects.
The Third Fever Attack: Exposure of Financial Scandals in the Vatican
In the recent past, the Vatican has come in for much criticism because certain companies with financial ties to the Vatican have been involved in the armaments industry or in the manufacture and distribution of birth control pills. More serious were the revelations of the shady operations of the Vatican Bank which took place under the presidency of the American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (1971–1989), a trusted friend of Pope John Paul II, and which continued behind the back of Marcinkus’s successors Angelo Caloia and Ettore Gotti Tedeschi despite their efforts to stop them. The details of these machinations were exposed in the book Vaticano S.p.A. by the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, published in 2009, and on pages 279–280 of this book I will give a fuller account of them. In 2010, the Vatican was again shaken to the core when the news broke that the Italian authorities had confiscated 23 million euros lodged in an account held by the Vatican Bank at the Italian bank Credito Artigiano, and that a suit had been filed against the new president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, known to have close ties to Opus Dei, and against the bank’s director Paolo Cipriani. In view of the many earlier scandals, all of these separate events probably represent only the tip of the iceberg. Is the Vatican’s ‘national’ independence now under threat, not merely from legal attacks but also financially? And is not the pope himself as the bank’s sole owner legally liable? At least, the new EU guidelines on money laundering now also apply to the Vatican. I will be considering this point in more detail in Chapter 6.
The Fourth Fever Attack: Conflicts within the Top Echelons of Church Leadership
The Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, a former doctoral student of Ratzinger and his protégé since the latter was a cardinal, asserted that the then Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano had been responsible for ensuring that proceedings against the child-abusing Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, Schönborn’s predecessor in Vienna, had been blocked for a long time, even though the Austrian Conference of Bishops had declared that it was ‘morally certain’ of Groër’s guilt. Although the paedophile cardinal resigned in 1995, he