Is Laurie Goodstein Still Ignorant On The Vatican and Sex Abuse Cases

Get Religion highlights a very good conference that happened talking about the Press , the Vatican, and the Sex Abuse Crisis. See Reflections on the Vatican 2010 sex abuse crisis.

Hopefully that will make you go see the entire article that is linked.

After reading that article I have a very huge frustration level toward Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times. It seems that even at this late date she still does not get crucial parts of this story.

Okay, so let’s get to the juicy part. Goodstein said that when she began reporting, she accepted the “Ratzinger the Reformer” idea:

Yet, she said, the 2010 stories upended that narrative, which placed the responsibility entirely on bishops for the failure to report and remove abusers. This year we learned of one case after another, she said, in which bishops were pleading urgently with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Ratzinger to laicize a known molester, and the CDF rejected those requests. And, she added, we were always told that the CDF had nothing to do with these cases until 2001, but that turned out to be false also. In fact, they were handling them all along.
As a footnote, Goodstein said that much of the reporting was based on documents — though she didn’t add this herself, usually documents obtained from victims’ lawyers. Those documents, she said, are the most revelatory evidence we have. The documents come from attorneys, she said, because the church sure is not handing them over.

First off as that no she is wrong on this again.

However let me comment. First of it is not true that CDF "were handling" all these cases all along. How she can still have this viewpoint at this date is beyond me.

The CDF was handling cases relating to the crimes against the confessional (Sacrament of Penance). If a sex abuse case fell into this juridisction the CDF handled it. While I don't know the numbers ,I have to think these were a minority of the cases to say the least. By the way I don't think this was a big secret that these cases were going here as to this juridisdiction issue.

Second Goodstein seems to still be hung up on the Lacize issue. As I noted when this story broke (this broke big time in the Oakland Priest Story) even some of the biggest critics of the Vatican were trying to explain how largely this was viewed as a non issue. That is often priests that are removes from public ministry or just leave are in fact never technically lacized.

In a sense we almost got the idea from reading the media that the Vatican could magically relieve a Priest of all his "priest powers" by signing some document. What was at issue here was in almost all these cases the removal of the vow of celibacy. To repeat the Vatican had a iron clad rule that in most cases no PRIEST that had left or had been removed from active ministry could be dispensed from this vow before a certain age.

As I kept saying I never understood the media fetish with this. So the Church should move heaven and earth to dispense a vow so these child abusing priests can marry and have kids? It never made any sense. Further does not this push by the media on this issue seem shortsighted. I mean it is great PR for the Church because they can "wash their hands" of these Priests by putting them in the legal Lay state. Still is that productive? Maybe they have done it but in the end many of us that have followed sad scandal this since the Diocese Lafayette of Louisiana 80's days though this was a unproductive red herring.

Regardless those "dispensations" cases came in front of the CDF in these cases. That does not mean the CDF was "handling" the actual sex abuse case. Again I am not sure why this NYT's reporter still does not get that.

Thankfully Allen replies:
Goodstein's question thus was: Didn't the reporting of 2010 add something to what we thought we knew?
I said that for me, the reporting fleshed out the picture, but didn't fundamentally alter it.
First, it's still true that pre-2001, most sex abuse cases never reached Rome because bishops relied on informal remedies rather than laicization (which requires Vatican approval, and was seen by many bishops as a cumbersome, expensive, and uncertain process). We already knew that before 2001, Ratzinger's approach to the few cases which reached his desk wasn't notably different from other senior Vatican personnel. Thus to produce a 1985 letter in which he urges caution in laicizing Stephen Kiesle of Oakland, for example, is certainly interesting, but not a paradigm-changer.

That go-slow approach in the 1980s and 1990s, I argued, still has to be balanced against expedited handling of hundreds of cases beginning in 2003, when Ratzinger obtained "special faculties" from John Paul II allowing him to waive a canonical trial and to remove an abuser from the priesthood more efficiently.

One can certainly argue that his awakening came late, and that not enough has yet been done — perhaps especially in terms of matching the new accountability for priests with similar accountability for bishops. The fact remains, however, that the Vatican is today more committed to a "zero tolerance" policy because of Ratzinger's impact, both before and after his election.
If that point sometimes got lost earlier this year, it's probably one part a media failure to keep the whole picture in focus, and one part the Vatican's inability to project a different narrative.

Exactly!! Now what is a mystery here is why the NYT seem obsessed with the CDF. Well it is partly not a mystery because well Ratzinger is now Pope. Also there seems to be underlying theme that Ratzinger was the Dick Cheney VP of the Vatican. He knew all and every detail of what was happening everywhere. That seems like a false narrative to me.

But why not look at all the other Departments and Congregations where these cases seemed to be shipped too. I am not saying they were involved in "cover ups " or that things could not have been handled better. But pre-2003 cases it seems looking there would be more productive.

Anyway the whole thing including the Allen piece is a good read.