Changes in church law kept child molesters in priesthood
Associated Press
THE VATICAN
The future Pope Benedict XVI refused to defrock an American priest who confessed molesting numerous children and even served prison time for it, simply because the cleric wouldn’t agree to the discipline. The case provides the latest evidence of how changes in church law under Pope John Paul II frustrated and hamstrung U.S. bishops struggling with an abuse crisis that would eventually explode.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press from court filings in the case of the late Rev. Alvin Campbell of Illinois show Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, following church law at the time, turned down a bishop’s plea to remove the priest for no other reason than the abuser’s refusal to go along with it.
“The petition in question cannot be admitted in as much as it lacks the request of Father Campbell himself,” Ratzinger wrote in a July 3, 1989, letter to Bishop Daniel Ryan of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill.
With the church still recovering from a notable departure of priests in the 1970s to marry, John Paul made it tougher to leave the priesthood after assuming the papacy in 1978, saying their vocation was a lifelong one. A consequence of that policy was that, as the priest sex-abuse scandal arose in the U.S., bishops no longer were able to sidestep the lengthy church trial necessary for laicization.
New rules in 1980 removed bishops’ option of requesting laicizations of abusive priests without holding a church trial. Those rules were ultimately eased two decades later amid an explosion of abuse cases in the United States.
Campbell’s bishop had requested that he be quickly defrocked, in part to spare the victims the pain of a trial, but Ratzinger’s response was in keeping with church law at the time. Bishops retained the right to remove priests from ministry or to go through with a trial and recommend to Rome a cleric’s defrocking, and nothing prevented them from reporting such crimes to police as they should have done, the Vatican has argued.
“Nothing in the new code prevented a bishop from exercising his discretion to restrict ministry or to assign a priest to a job where he was out of contact with the public,” said Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican’s attorney in the U.S.
Campbell’s is one of several decades-old cases to emerge in recent months raising questions about Ratzinger’s decisions and the church law he was following involving abusive priests as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office, a position he took in 1981. The round of scandals worldwide left the Vatican initially blaming the media and groups supporting abortion rights and gay marriage, but recently Benedict has denounced the “sin” that has infected the church.
John Paul’s views on laicizations were made known in a 1979 letter to priests, in which he wrote that their ordination was “forever imprinted on our souls” and that “the priesthood cannot be renounced.”
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