Pinochet was not a head of state when he was arrested, though, was he?
Rightly or wrongly, the US justified the invasion of Panama as legal under the Panama Canal treaty which guarantees US forces freedom of movement in the country in defense of the Canal. Besides, Noriega was the CIA’s bitch but he got all uppity and shit so they had to take him down.
Did you read the article?
“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” said Stephens. “Geoffrey and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”
This is the long overdue clash of modernity and an institution that took root in the middle ages.
The Catholic Church will outlast modernity.
It’s all well and nice that they hired a solicitor that agrees with them. That means precious little in a world where major powers maintain full diplomatic relations with entities that outright genocide segments of their population.
Pinochet was a former head of state, and to get Noriega we had to invade.
I don’t care what some lawyer says. The Vatican has a special status, and the Pope is essentially a head of state.
What crime? Not exposing priests to the world? Did HE molest children? Or is the crime that it was taken care of internally and not through some other nation’s laws? Or perhaps the crime is simply covering up someone else’s crime, making him a corroborator in some sense? That’s going to be hard to prove.
But let’s assume we can prove it, and decide it IS a crime. Shouldn’t Obama be next, now that we’ve seen the tape of people being wrongly shot at in our own wars? Didn’t Obama continue to hold some innocent people in Gauntanomo? In fact, hasn’t EVERY leader covered up (in the sense of not opening up to the world about it) something that would normally be considered a crime? So why the Pope? I can only assume it’s because of religion.
Dawkins is a blowhard.
Foreign policy isn’t legally considered obstruction of justice.
I agree, but the line will get fuzzy, right? I mean why is that foreign policy, but in other cases it’s ‘war crimes’? And is this just a simple obstruction case? Is the claim just that this is a guy who knew about these crimes but didn’t report them? Or covered them? Why not get everyone along the Catholic chain for this too? All were complicit, right?
Ultimately, though, I’m just not clear on why the Pope is the target, other than the publicity.
Try this one. Spare me a hypothetical:
Change the US boy scouts to have leadership-appointed local management and scout leaders. Scout leader is accused of child molestation; not officially in the court system, comes to light . Local scout troop sends it up the chain and requests he be removed. Head leadership ignores it. Different case; guy is reassigned. Imagine this happens, oh, 500 times.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the local leaderships would all be in jail for obstruction of justice, and the head leadership would at the very least be under indictment for if not explicitly ordering a coverup, creating regulations that led to coverup.
Alternatively, change the above to, say, Build-A-Bear, and imagine the local managements have a significant number of molestation cases cropping up, and the national management just reassigns the accused or ignores the cases. They’d be lucky if they avoided a pitchfork carrying mob lynching the entire board.
What some lawyer thinks is probably relevant to a legal case, and the pope is accused of personally covering up abuse cases (which is a crime), not merely being leader of an organization which did so.
Yeah, the difference in this case is that there is a signed letter by the Pope in which he recommends covering up multiple instances of abuse by a priest.
I assume folks are primarily reacting to this article (and others like it):
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/10/430744/pope-stalled-priests-ouster.html
So what do we have:
A priest molests two boys.
Priest is sentenced by civil authorities to probation. (Probably too light, but this is done by civil authorities in the U.S., not by the church).
There is a case in process within the Catholic church to laicize the man in question.
The future pope writes a letter stating that the arguments for removal are of “grave significance”, but that (per someone else’s explanation), there was a “need to study the case with more attention, taking into account the good of all involved”*.
The bishop was told to provide “as much paternal care as possible” (i.e. keep an eye on the guy, it seems).
Ultimately the priest in question was laicized.
But during that interim while under investigation but before laicization, the priest was not accused of any further child abuse.
===
So we have no apparent cover-up, no more boys abused during the time in question, just the future pope encouraging the folks on the scene to go a bit slowly as far as actually drumming this guy out of the priesthood (remember he’d already been punished by the civil authorities).
Yes, if this came to light in 2010, we might expect stronger and swifter action, both by the civil and religious authorities. But if this is the most they’ve got on the future pope, it’s a mountain out of a molehill situation, IMO.
FWIW, I am Christian but am not Roman Catholic.
Phil, you act like this is an isolated incident, as if there isn’t literally dozens, if not hundreds, of similar cases where the church moved the guilty priest. IE, institiutionalized cover-up of child molestation.
No, he’s pointing out that the “signed letter in which he recommends a coverup” is really no such thing. What’s left is a generalised railing against the Pope as a symbol of the Catholic Church. While the Church as an institution deserves all the contempt it’s receiving, that doesn’t make the Pope any more personally culpable (in the legal/criminal sense) than any other Catholic.
Don’t give me that shit. Put yourself in his shoes. You get a letter saying that there’s a guy in Boston and he’s touching the little boys. You call the number at the bottom of the letter and you go, “Really?” And they go, “Yeah, really?” “Well how do you know?” you say. “He admitted it.” So you’re all like, “Then fuckin’ fire the guy.” End of story. Story repeats about fifty more times over the course of the next week or month or whatever, and you get tired of paying for phone calls and translators to call all over God’s green earth just to be told some guy that works for you is diddling the little ones, so you write a letter and you send a copy to everybody, and I mean everybody, it says, “If any of you are touchin’ kids, you’re fuckin’ fired, turn in your shit and get the fuck out.” Just in case that isn’t enough, you go on to say, “That goes for molesters both caught and uncaught. If I catch you, or someone else catches you after today, not only are you fired, but I will personally guarantee you that you die and burn in hell forever. For most people that’s an insult or an idle threat, but coming from me, that’s a promise.”
That’s what you would do. He didn’t do what you would have done, because he cares less about honesty and the safety of children than you do. Isn’t it nice, sitting there, being holier than the Pope? For most people, that’s a sarcastic insult, but when you’re talking about this Pope, it’s a sad ass fact.
Jason’s analogy convinced me. I still think it’s a publicity stunt by Dawkins, but I’m convinced that the Pope is deserving of arrest, IF such a cover up can be proven. But so should every other complicit person along the chain.
They should arrest god.
What we do have is the following:
Priest ties up and rapes two pre-teen boys. More victims likely.
Priest personally requests to be defrocked.
The local bishop petitions Ratzinger to have the priest defrocked, arguing that (clearly knowing full well where the Vatican’s priorities lie) it would be more of a scandal if the priest remained.
Four years after the request Ratzinger signs a letter saying:
This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favor of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.
So what we have is a man who, when confronted with a priest who admitted tying up and raping two young boys, says his concern is with the damage dismissing him might cause to the Church, and that he is a young priest - 38 years old. Let me say that again: he is concerned about the rapist’s age. If you didn’t already feel sick, the boys he raped were 11-13. He then puts off getting rid of him for another two years, allowing him to continue work.
This article is a good summary of why this is a serious issue.
There’s a timeline which helps to illustrate exactly why Ratzinger’s prevarication is a big deal:
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/04/09/1867364/timeline-of-defrocked-priest-stephen.html
I know this will fall on deaf ears, but this is the Catholic Church, the oldest and longest running organization in the Western world (and possibly the entire world, i’m not sure), founded before the Roman Empire fell. For five hundred years after that it was the undisputed moral authority in the western world; for another five hundred, in western europe. Millions of people have lived and died (many not willingly!) because of it’s doctrines and beliefs.
While i have no opinion on the culpability of the Pope it’s ridiculous to compare the Catholic Church to some random organization with a “religious” bent, like the Boy Scouts. If you don’t recognize the unique role and authority the Pope has in the western world you can at least perceive how your beliefs are not universally held.
Dawkins has a comment on the story page:
Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself.
What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain.