Benedict makes his own decisions

April 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

VATICAN CITY

Pope Benedict XVI has surrounded himself with a small group of men he feels he can trust, but he acts very much on his own.

That isolation and shunning of advice have frequently created problems and are increasingly under scrutiny as the clerical sex scandal inches closer to him.

Early on in his five-year-old papacy, Benedict provoked a furious reaction from Muslims when he linked the Prophet Muhammad to violence in a speech Vatican officials said he wrote himself.

Then he enraged Jews for the “unforeseen mishap” of being unaware that a bishop whose excommunication he lifted was a Holocaust-denier. The pope similarly is unlikely to have known that his personal preacher, during a solemn Good Friday sermon, would compare the uproar over the church’s sex-abuse scandal to persecution of Jews.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi — who has frequently had to put out these fires — said Saturday that such a comparison was not the line of the Vatican, the Catholic Church or even the intent of the preacher himself, Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa.

That the Vatican has had a communications problem during Benedict’s papacy is fairly well-established. Amid a swirling scandal at the pope’s feet, Lombardi recently said he hadn’t spoken to the pontiff about his letter to Irish Catholics and that his information on Benedict’s views on it was secondhand.

Though part of the problem is Benedict’s reserved personality, perhaps more to blame is a culture of secrecy at the Vatican, rooted in church history for centuries, and its tendency to shun being held accountable to the secular world.

The Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who has testified in U.S. court cases about Vatican secrecy and sex abuse, has written about the medieval-era canonical concept of the “privilege of the forum” — whereby clerics accused of crimes were tried by church courts, not civil courts.

“There is a cult of secrecy in the Catholic Church. It’s a paranoid culture,” Doyle, who worked as a canon lawyer in the Vatican’s U.S. nunciature in the 1980s, said in an interview Saturday.