Apologies and the Catholic Church

On July 19. 2008, Pope Benedict XVI finally apologized to the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in Australia and even called for evildoers to be punished.

Apologies and forgiveness are pieces of the human condition. What the Pope did was the proper thing to do even if there is no way that the life of innumerable victims can be made fully whole again. Not even with hefty monetary compensation, on top of the apology, as that the Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles agreed under duress to make to the victims of sexual abuse by catholic clerics in that diocese.

Cardinal Mahoney acknowledged that the scars could not be erased and life rewound by the $660 million payments to 508 victims of abuse and child molestation when he lamented: “Your life, I wish, were like VHS tapes.”

The Archdiocese of Boston has had 80 priests accused of child molestation in the last 50 years. The Catholic Church of America has with the Los Angeles settlement already agreed to accumulated compensation of $2 billion for sexual victimization by Catholic priests. The pattern appears to disrespect borders. While predation is clearly not a monopoly of the Catholic Church, the cases of pedophilic and hebephilic abuse seem more rampant in the Catholic Church, where celibacy for priests is mandatory.

One therefore is prompted to wonder whether one deviant rule (mandatory celibacy) begets the deviant behavior (sexual victimization of children) and whether one will ever be truly banished without the other.

Catholic Church apologies are not confined to sexual victimization. In 1992, Pope John Paul II apologized for the 1,633 condemnation and subsequent imprisonment of the great Renaissance astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilee.

Galileo held that the Ptolemaic and biblical account of the universe as geocentric (the earth as the center of the universe) was wrong and must give way to the Copernican account of the heliocentric (sun-centered) universe.

The Catholic Church considered his views heretical and clearly subversive of the foundational belief that the Bible is the source of God’s absolute truth. In the historic edict published on March 5 1616, the Holy Office stated that: “The view that the sun stands motionless at the center of the universe is foolish, philosophically false, and utterly heretical, because contrary to the Holy Scripture.”

This view echoed the widespread belief among Catholic theologians that if Copernicus was right, the Bible would be wrong and would lose all its authority. Galileo’s retort was simple but unassailable: “I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo of their use.” No matter. He was found guilty and sentenced to a life of house arrest. Galileo and Copernicus were of course right, and the Catholic Church in 1616 flat wrong.

To uphold such error, the Italian Inquisition condemned Giordano Bruno, an ex-dominican monk also enthralled by the Copernican universe, to be burned at stake in 1600. Bruno taught beyond Copernicus that the universe is infinite, the sun is not its center and the earth is not unique.

No apologies were issued for Bruno and others similarly dealt with but there should have been. The Catholic Church’s iron fist in the service of a false doctrine did for Italy what it did for Spain: destroyed the flowering of the Renaissance in Italy and sent all its pregnant and creative impulses to Northern and Protestant Europe where the seed of pluralism had been sown and given breathing space, if spasmodically, by the Reformation.

Spain was even more interesting since the Catholicism planted in the Philippines was brought over by priests steeped in the Spanish Counter-Reformation. In 1483, Tomas de Torquemada was appointed the Grand Inquisitor of Spain by Isabella and Ferdinand and for 15 years ran a machinery of terror, which snapped the lives of, it is estimated, some 2,000 converted Jews (Maranos) in many an elaborate Catholic ritual called “auto-da-fe.”

Jews were then expelled from the kingdom of Spain in 1492 (the same year Granada and Alhambra, then the most tolerant region in Europe, fell to Isabella and Ferdinand). The ferocity of the Catholic Inquisition in Spain first against Jews (expelled in 1492) and then against Spanish Muslims (Moriscos), the most economically dynamic and mercantile members of the population, effectively sent the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies, including the Philippines, back to the Dark Ages sustained only by gold plundered from the New World. The enormity of the cost to the victims of this moral failing was topped only by the enormity of the cost to the Catholic Church itself: It became synonymous with fanaticism, obscurantism and backwardness.

Yet another moral failure involved the treatment of Jews in the Second World War. Pope John Paul II in 1994 issued the “Declaration of Repentance” for its clergy’s failure in its moral duty to protest the treatment of Jews in the dark days of the war.

In October 1997, the French Catholic Church issued an apology for its deafening silence on the deportation of Jews from France. In 1964, the Second Vatican Council formally repudiated Jewish guilt for Christ’s death (which was the permanent undercurrent to Catholic anti-Jewish frenzy) as a way of atonement for a thousand years of mindless mayhem. All these apologies were called for because as the saying goes: “Humanum est errare.” Along the way, myriads were sacrificed upon the altar of egregious error paraded as universal truth.

Finally, consider usury. Usury is one practice that for centuries was a sin perhaps due to its association with the Jewry. The Second Lateran Council in 1139 promulgated the following: “Furthermore, we condemn that practice accounted despicable and blameworthy by divine and human laws, denounced by Scripture in the old and new Testaments, namely, the ferocious greed of usurers; and we sever them from every comfort of the church.”

Despite the vehemence maintained through centuries, in 1830, the Holy Office with leave from Pope Pius VIII sanctioned justifiable drawing of interest rate. Suddenly, what was sin no longer is. The indefectible and infallible had corrected it. This monumental about face on a doctrinal matter was however the right thing to do. Learning is a very human attribute. The taking of interest is the foundation of modern finance and of modern economic growth.

Today, the Philippines is being torn asunder by the issue of responsible parenthood in view of the proposed bill: “An act providing national policy on reproductive health, responsible parenthood.”

The Catholic hierarchy opposes this bill with the vehemence rooted in absolute certainty. This absolute certainty is blind to the predicament of millions of poor Filipino women. The prevalence of attempted and completed abortions among poor women is very high leading to many dead women and dead fetuses. Conception prevention among these poor women is thus tantamount to abortion prevention and thus pro-life. But the great princes of the church, like Torquemada before them, will not hear the cries. Someday perhaps, the Catholic Church will once more issue an apology to those who needlessly died and those who were born in abject poverty.

The Boston Globe reported on March 13, 2002 that “the scourge of clergy sexual abuse has afflicted virtually every religious denomination: In recent years rabbis, ministers, and gurus have all been charged with molesting children. But the Catholic Church has been hit with many more allegations of clergy sexual abuse than any other faith or denomination.

Recent statistics on the Archdiocese of Boston show “at least 80 priests have been accused of child sexual abuse over the last 50 years, and scholars say as many as 2,000 priests have been accused nationwide. By contrast, Protestant and non-Christian denominations have had so few reported cases that their leaders can generally count them on one hand.”

Raul V Fabella, University of the Philippines School of Economics

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