BOOKS DAVID GOODALL
QUESTIONS RATHER THAN ANSWERS
The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse
Geoffrey Robertson QC PENGUIN SPECIAL, 672PP, £25 ■Tablet Bookshop price £22.50
G 01420 592974
eoffrey Robertson, the author of this philippic, is a distinguished lawyer who appears to believe that the Catholic Church is on balance
an evil institution; that its “fundamentalist” moral teaching, especially on sexual matters, is subversive of human rights; and that its spiritual leader, the Pope, although ostensibly a figure of “doddering decency”, has connived at the systematic sexual abuse of children by his “employees” on a titanic scale. Despite one or two concessive references to the good done by Caritas and Cafod, and to priests and nuns who “work with courage and dedication for the poor and sick”, the tone and content of his book are difficult to reconcile with the claim in the blurb, that the author “evinces a deep respect for the good works of Catholics and their Church”. He makes his case with a battery of statistics and reports demonstrating the worldwide scale of child abuse by the Catholic Church, and the failure of bishops, and ultimately the Holy See in the shape of Cardinal Ratzinger, to deal properly, openly or effectively with offenders, relying instead on the Vatican’s claim to state- hood and its consequent entitlement to operate its own secretive and inadequate legal system, the Code of Canon Law. Along the way he criticises the “shibboleth” of confiden- tiality in confession, predictably accuses the Vatican of homophobia and attacks its oppo- sition to abortion and to the use of condoms to prevent Aids, all of which, he contends, violate human rights. His central argument is that the Vatican does not meet the criteria for being treated as a state in international law, and that the Pope, as its head, is consequently not entitled to sovereign immunity and could be sued or prosecuted. Canon law has no more validity than the internal regulations of any corporate institution, and the Church therefore has no right to deal with its own criminal malefactors other than by delivering them at once into the hands of the civil authorities. He dismisses
20 | THE TABLET | 11 December 2010
the Lateran Treaty as a disreputable device to prop up Mussolini’s Fascist regime, ques- tions the extent of the recognition which the Vatican enjoys from the UN and maintains that the numerous governments (including our own) which accredit embassies to the Holy See as distinct from their embassies to Italy are simply wrong. His contention is that by presiding over, and operating, the canon law system, first as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to which cases of paedophilia by priests are referred, and lat- terly as Pope, Pope Benedict can be held personally responsible for the mishandling of these cases and for exposing children to this “unforgivable” crime. If he is protected by “sovereign immunity”, the Vatican could be treated as a “rogue state” and its sovereign indicted for crimes against humanity. A review is not the place for a detailed response to Robertson’s case, but it is fair to point out that his evident anti-Catholic bias puts a question mark against the reliability of some of his evidence as well as some of his conclusions. It is difficult for someone who is not an international lawyer to know how seriously to take his arguments against Vatican statehood, except to observe that in practice a political entity is treated as a state if it is recognised as such by a large number of other states, as the Vatican clearly is. More serious, it seems to me, is Robertson’s failure to say much about the wider context in which this apparent increase in paedophiliac crime by Catholic priests has taken place. He mentions that in only 6 per cent of cases which have come to trial have the accused priests been found guilty, but does not consider the pos- sibility that the publicity given to the scandal may have encouraged some unfounded accu- sations. He tells us that the evidence shows “a remarkably higher level of abuse in Catholic institutions” than in others, but does not tell us what the figures for other institutions are. The reports and statistics he quotes do not include the American study by Sam Miller
Geoffrey Robertson: ‘evidently motivated by a
personal animus’ against the Pope
which apparently found that 10 per cent of Protestant ministers in the United States have been found guilty of paedophilia as against 1.7 per cent of Catholic clergy, and that child abuse is more prevalent in schools, youth organisations, sports-training centres and even among doctors (not to speak of families), than it is among priests. He is confident that celibacy bears part of the blame but dismisses the possibility of any link between paedophilia and homosexuality. Referring to the recent Vatican decision to extend the time limitation on allegations of paedophilia from 10 years to 20, he suggests that it makes little sense to allow a victim to complain at 38 but not 39. But he does not mention that the fixed age of consent (which incidentally varies from country to country) means that an action which is an “unforgiv- able” crime one day can become a human right the next; and he fails to refer to the huge change in public attitudes to sexuality and sexual behaviour which characterises the period in which these scandals have taken place, and which has left paedophilia as almost the only form of sexual misconduct to attract serious censure. The paedophilia scandal has done huge damage to both the Church and the priest- hood, and the facts adduced by Robertson cannot be wished away. But we still lack an objective analysis of just what went wrong and why. Has there been an extraordinary outbreak of paedophilia among priests in the last 40 years, or has it been something that always went on but which was by and large concealed? If the former, what were the rea- sons – changes in public attitudes to sexual behaviour, demoralisation and failures of dis- cipline following Vatican II, “clericalism” and insistence on celibacy for the clergy, malad- ministration by the bishops and the Vatican? Has paedophilia been more prevalent in Catholic institutions than in others, or actually less? These and other questions have been dif-
ficult even to pose, let alone answer, because raising some of them looks like a first step to defending the indefensible; but authoritative answers are still badly needed. The Case of the Pope does not provide them. Geoffrey Robertson sits as a judge as well as practising as an advocate, but he is not here in judicial mode. Timed to appear just before the Pope’s visit to Britain, his book seems to have been intended as backing for the protest movement headed by (among others) Richard Dawkins, whose intemperate language about the Pope and the Church has hardly enhanced his credibility as an objective critic. The result is a forceful, wide-ranging and selectively docu - mented speech for the prosecution by a counsel evidently motivated by a personal animus against the accused. We have still to hear the case for the defence.
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