You could fall in love with Pope John Paul II at the drop of a miter.
In 1978, when 58-year-old Karol Wojtyla slalomed onto the world stage as the first non-Italian pope since the Renaissance, everything about him captivated Catholics who felt adrift and conflicted.
The merry eyes. The sunny wit. The moral toughness honed during battles against Nazis and Communists. The former actor and factory worker was a skiing cardinal, a mountain-climbing poet, a kayaking philosopher, a singing author.
Twenty-six years later, the crowds at his funeral yelled “Santo subito!” Sainthood now!
Next Sunday, two days after the Kate and William show, another European spectacle will unfold: Pope Benedict XVI will preside over the beatification for the man he revered, the first time in a millennium that a pope has elevated his immediate predecessor and the swiftest ascension toward sainthood on record.
Hoping to get a P.R. boost by resurrecting John Paul’s magic, Benedict fast-tracked the process, waiving the usual five-year wait before starting.
But it won’t take away the indelible stain left by a global sex scandal that continues to sulfurously bubble as we celebrate Easter. The latest grotesquerie, amid a cascade of victims coming forward in Belgium, was a TV interview with the former bishop of Bruges, who serenely admitted abusing two nephews.
Sex with the first nephew, he said, started as “a game” when the boy was 5 and lasted 13 years. “I had the strong impression that my nephew didn’t mind at all,” 74-year-old Roger Vangheluwe said, smiling. “On the contrary. It was not brutal sex. I never used bodily, physical violence.” He said he abused the second boy for “merely over a year.” He did not think any of this made him a pedophile.
Certainly, John Paul was admirable in many ways. After he became pope, he was a moral force in the fight against totalitarianism, touring his homeland and giving Poles the courage to resist the Soviet Union. When Lech Walesa signed an agreement with the Communists recognizing Solidarity, he used a pen etched with the face of John Paul.
After Communism collapsed, John Paul offered a stinging critique of capitalism, presciently warning big business to stop pursuing profits “at any price.”
“The excessive hoarding of riches by some denies them to the majority,” he said, “and thus the very wealth that is accumulated generates poverty.”
As progressive as he was on those issues, he was disturbingly regressive on social issues — contraception, women’s ordination, priests’ celibacy, divorce and remarriage. And certainly, John Paul forfeited his right to beatification when he failed to establish a legal standard to remove pedophiles from the priesthood, and simply turned away for many years.
Santo non subito! How can you be a saint if you fail to protect innocent children?
For years after the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legion of Christ, was formally accused of pedophilia in a Vatican proceeding, he remained John Paul’s pet. The ultra-orthodox Legion of Christ and Opus Dei were the shock troops in John Paul’s war on Jesuits and other progressive theologians.
There was another reason, according to Jason Berry, who has written two books on the abuse crisis and is the author of the forthcoming “Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.”
“For John Paul,” Berry told me just after returning from Good Friday services, “the priesthood had a romantic, chivalrous cast, and he could not bring himself to do a fearless investigation of the clerical culture itself.
“He was duped by Maciel, but he let himself be duped. When nine people accuse the guy of abusing them as kids, the least you can do is investigate.
“Cardinals and bishops had told him about the larger abuse crisis for years. And he was passive to an absolute fault. He failed in mountainous terms.”
Now the Vatican is like Wall Street, where companies give their most disgraced C.E.O.’s golden parachutes to make up for the stress of outside attack. Except the Vatican gives golden halos.
We are known by our heroes and those we choose to admire.
Pope Benedict has wanted to beatify John Paul, who shielded pedophiles, and Pope Pius XII, who remained silent about the Holocaust as it happened. Meanwhile, Dorothy Day hasn’t been beatified.
Not beatifying or canonizing John Paul would be hugely symbolic, a message far more powerful than the ad hoc apologies and payoffs to victims.
This pope has been better than the last on abuse, Berry said, but “he’s still surrounded by all these cardinals whose hands are dirty in this thing. There are still 16 bishops that were credibly accused who stepped down from public positions but still maintain their titles.
“The Vatican rushed into this beatification, but after they take down the stands, the problems will still be there.”
Vatican approach to child abuse in Ireland absolutely disgraceful, says PM
Enda Kenny has called on the Vatican to repeat its commitment to always following civil law in matters relating to child abuse. Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features
Henry McDonald in Dublin guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 July 2011 18.52 BST
Ireland's prime minister has denounced the Vatican's approach to allegations of child abuse in the republic as absolutely disgraceful.
Enda Kenny said new laws are being drawn up that will make it impossible for anyone – even those high up in the Roman Catholic church – to avoid their obligations regarding reports of child abuse.
"The law of the land should not be stopped by crosier, or by collar," Kenny said.
Kenny called on the Vatican to repeat its commitment that civil law should always be followed. The Irish Catholic church and the Vatican have faced severe criticism over repeated attempts to deal with incidents of abuse behind closed doors rather than by handing over suspects to the Garda Síochána.
The Irish deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Eamon Gilmore, met with the Vatican's ambassador to Ireland to discuss the report's findings.
"There's one law in this country. Everybody is going to have to learn to comply with it. The Vatican will have to comply with the laws of this country," Gilmore said after the meeting.
Gilmore said the report would be debated in the House next Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on the availability of ministers and spokespersons.
He said the failure of the church to co-operate with the law was one of the greatest problems and that the coalition government was determined that there would be consequences for any institution which failed to work with the legal authorities of the state when it came to child abuse.
The Socialist party's Joe Higgins said people were "throwing their hands in the air" at the revelations in the Cloyne report.
A report says Bishop John Magee 'took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008'. Photograph: PA
Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 July 2011 19.03 BST
A devastating report into clerical child abuse in an Irish Catholic diocese has accused the Vatican of being "entirely unhelpful" in dealing with allegations of sexual exploitation.
It also singled out an Irish bishop who was the close confidant of three popes for deliberately misleading authorities in the republic about the church's internal inquiries into children's claims that priests were abusing them.
The investigation into the diocese of Cloyne, which includes Co Cork, said Bishop John Magee had little interest in the way child sex abuse cases were handled until 2008, when the scandal had become international news.
Magee was an extremely powerful figure not only in the Irish church but also in Rome, where he had been a private secretary to three popes, including John Paul I and John Paul II. Magee was the first Vatican official on the scene when John Paul I was found dead in his quarters.
The Commission of Investigation report also said Rome's decision to brand a document on child sexual abuse as unofficial allowed individual bishops "the freedom to ignore" strict guidelines on protecting children.
The authors of the report said the Vatican's actions "can only be described as unsupportive in relation to the civil authorities" – the Garda Síochána and child protection agencies. The 431-page report, launched by the ministers for justice and children, examined allegations made against 19 priests in the diocese between 1996 and 2000.
These claims of abuse were among the most up-to-date against clergy. The report follows other damning reports in other dioceses that found a culture of cover-up and denial in the church hierarchy.
In stinging criticism of Magee, who resigned in March 2010, the report concluded: "It is a remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008, 12 years after the framework document was adopted.
"It became clear during the course of this investigation that Bishop Magee had, to a certain extent, detached himself from the day to day management of child sexual abuse cases. Bishop Magee was the head of the diocese and cannot avoid his responsibility by blaming subordinates who he wholly failed to supervise."
The inquiry, led by judge Yvonne Murphy, said the fact that some child sexual abuse allegations were not reported to police was the diocese's "greatest failure". There were 15 cases between 1996 and 2005 which "very clearly" should have been reported. Yet police were not told about nine cases. "The most serious lapse was the failure to report the two cases in which the alleged victims were minors.
"Given the diocese's knowledge of clerical sexual abuse and its effects on complainants it was wrong of the diocese not to put in place a proper support system for complainant."
Andrew Madden, a victim of sexual abuse while an altar boy in the Dublin archdiocese, said the report proved that, "with occasional exceptions, Catholic bishops cannot be trusted with allegations of child sexual abuse."
The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre described the Cloyne report as a "terrible indictment" of the way the church handled the allegations. Ellen O'Malley Dunlop, of the centre, said: "Here is another report which makes for unbelievable reading in relation to how the Catholic church dealt with allegations of child sexual abuse … in the diocese of Cloyne.
"There is no excuse of being on a 'learning curve' this time. The church's own child protection guidelines were in place from 1996, yet the report tells us time and time again that the implementation of the policies and procedures was inadequate and inappropriate. It was not until 2008 that the diocese began to follow proper procedures.
"The publication of this report will again reopen the wounds of the victims involved and other victims around the country who had similar experiences. It may also trigger people's memories for the first time."
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