The Dish

"Because for most of the time they have been, and you know, I don’t mean any disrespect, but they’ve been treason media," – Michele Bachman, on the coverage of parliamentary procedures.

The psychiatrist who warned Ratzinger's archdiocese about pedophlle priest Peter Hullerman goes public:

“I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,’” the psychiatrist Werner Huth said in an interview Thursday. “I was very unhappy about the entire story.” Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times. Dr. Huth said he issued the warnings — explicit, both written and oral — before the future pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, left Germany for the Vatican in 1982. In 1980, following abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy.

Here is where things start unraveling for the Pope:

The psychiatrist said in an interview he did not have any direct communications with Archbishop Ratzinger and did not know if the archbishop knew about his warnings. Though he said he spoke with several senior church officials, Dr. Huth’s main contact at the time was a bishop, Heinrich Graf von Soden-Fraunhofen, who died in 2000…

In the minutes taken by the priest in charge of the parish at the meeting with the parents, he noted that they “would not file charges under the current circumstances” in order to protect their children…. Spared prosecution after his transgressions in Essen, which according to the statement released by the diocese he “did not dispute,” Father Hullermann instead was ordered to undergo therapy with Dr. Huth. The archdiocese said that order was approved personally by Archbishop Ratzinger.

So we are asked to believe that, as archbishop, Ratzinger personally approved an order for a priest to be transferred to Munich for therapy, after his archdiocese had been repeatedly and explicitly warned that this priest was a danger to children – but that Ratinger had no idea what that therapy was about, and bears no responsibility at all for the acts of abuse committed then and thereafter by this protected child-rapist.

Yes, it appears that this is what we are being asked to believe.

Juan Cole goes another round. Chait goes after Cole.

Chris Beam answers:

No.

The Code of Canon Law has no provision that allows a pope's removal from office— for any reason, even poor health or psychological trauma. That's because, according to church law, there is no higher authority than the pope: He "possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely." A pope may resign, but his resignation must be "made freely," and he doesn't have to tender his resignation to any particular authority. (The last pope to resign was Gregory XII, who did so in 1415 to end the battle for the papacy known as the Western schism.)

Dahlia Lithwick doesn't see why not:

Polls show that 80 percent of the country hated the Citizens United decision, overturning several precedents and some major campaign finance law when it first came down and they still hate the ruling six weeks later. It was surely bad manners for the president to attack the court as the justices sat, quietly napping, before him at the State of the Union. But I don't see where it was bad politics.

Jeffrey Rosen looks to history and agrees:

The greatest appeal of Court-bashing for Obama is that it can be based on a principled vision of economic populism and judicial restraint. … Obama could gain all the benefits of Court-bashing while avoiding all of the dangers, arguing plausibly that conservatives have betrayed their long-standing principles by using narrow Court majorities to reverse their defeats in the political arena. In this kind of fight, the Roberts Court doesn’t stand a chance.

Via the Columbus Dispatch, from yesterday:

Barbie Latza Nadeau looks at the numbers:

Like a similar church sex scandal that rocked the United States in 2002, the European phase is being handled quietly and swiftly by promises of change and financial compensation to the victims. In the United States, more than $1 billion has been paid to victims of abuse. Most claimants receive somewhere between $5,000 and $500,000, depending on the length and level of abuse. Others have received millions, especially those who were abused by multiple priests over a period of years. Dioceses in Ireland have already earmarked more than $1 billion to pay for the sins of their clergy and the other countries are tallying up the bill.

Jonathan Bernstein replies at length.

John Allen studies Ratzinger's record on abuse. Brandishing Allen's article as a bludgeon, Carl Olson whacks my Benedict blogging:

[T]he attempts by many pundits, talking heads, and celebrity "conservative" homosexuals to place nearly all blame on Benedict XVI is frustrating (to put it mildly), but hardly surprising. Some simply jumble the facts about what really happened (or didn't happen) during Ratzinger's time in Munich, and then glibly write this sort of nonsense: "If this person headed a secular organization, or if he were a politician, he would be forced to resign." When was the last time you heard someone call for the resignation of the Secretary of Education, the head of the National Education Association, or of any teacher union for the widespread and increasingly prevalent sexual abuse of children in public schools?

As Allen reports, Benedict has, since 2003-2004, taken very concrete steps to address sexual abuse by priests, to investigate reported incidents, and to identify abusers. Compare that with a 2004 study issued by the Office of the Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education (PDF format) that flatly states, "There is no research that documents teacher union attempts to identify predators among their members."

This is spin, as a full reading of Allen's piece – which is well worth absorbing in full – makes plain. It's odd, isn't it, that Ratzinger, who has always insisted on total top-down clerical authority, was utterly unaware of the case that no one disputes he signed off on. How do we know he had no idea of what he was doing in such a sensitive case?

The cleric who served as Ratzinger's vicar general in Munich, Gerhard Gruber, assumed "full responsibility" for the original 1980 assignment, insisting that there were more than 1,000 priests in the archdiocese at the time and that Ratzinger entrusted that kind of personnel matter to subordinates.

That settles it, then. A priest found guilty of raping an eleven year-old within Ratzinger's archdiocese was transferred to Munich for therapy by Ratzinger without his having any idea of why this was happening. Sure. He has no responsibility, right? And knew nothing, right? Mark Shea piles on:

Everything that I've seen so far makes it pretty obvious that Benedict is one of the good guys here and that the recent fracas in the Euro press is a pretty transparent attempt to blame the guy for things he is not only not guilty of, but rather zealously trying to stop, as Allen makes plain.

The man who covered for Maciel for years and who in 2002 imposed total secrecy on the process is now the "good guy"? Dreher's judgment:

Rome's inability to discipline bishops, or unwillingness to, now must be faced. On the scandal, though, Joseph Ratzinger is not Karol Wojtyla, and is in fact a great improvement in this area. Don't forget that. But again, the job is not finished. Yet.

Wojtyla and Ratzinger were joined at the hip. They both enabled Maciel. They both covered up as much as they could. They both refused to take responsibiilty. Here's "the good guy" as recently as November 2002, with respect to the sex abuse crisis in America:

In the church, priests are also sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower. In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than one percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information or to the statistical objectivity of the facts. Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated, that there is a desire to discredit the church.

Sorry, guys. But the denial won't work any longer.