The following is an abridged version of a recent essay from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in which he examines the root causes of the sexual abuse scandals in the Church with special reference to priestly formation.
I. The wider social context
In the 1960s an egregious event occurred, on a scale unprecedented in history. It could be said that in the twenty years from 1960 to 1980, the previously normative standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely, and a new normalcy arose that has by now been the subject of laborious attempts at disruption…. Sexual and pornographic movies became a common occurrence, to the point that they were screened at cinemas at railway stations. I still remember seeing, as I was walking through the city of Regensburg one day, crowds of people queueing in front of a large cinema, something we had previously only seen in times of war, when some special allocation was to be hoped for. I also remember arriving in the city on Good Friday in 1970 and seeing all the billboards plastered with a large poster of two completely naked people in a close embrace. Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought was all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any restraints…. That pedophilia was deemed allowable and appropriate formed part of the physiognomy of the revolution of 1968.
For the young people in the Church, but not only for them, this was in many ways a very difficult time. I have always wondered how young people in this situation could embrace the priesthood with all its ramifications. The extensive collapse of the succeeding generation of priests and the very high number of laicizations were a consequence of all these developments.
At the same time but independently, Catholic moral theology suffered a collapse that rendered the Church defenseless against these societal changes. Until the Second Vatican Council, Catholic moral theology was largely founded on natural law, while Sacred Scripture was only cited as background or for substantiation. In the Council’s struggle for a new understanding of Revelation, the natural law option was largely abandoned in favour of an entirely Bible-based moral theology…. In the end, the hypothesis that morality was to be exclusively determined by the ends of human action chiefly prevailed, without actually using the old phrase: “the end justifies the means”. Consequently, there could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; only relative value judgments. There no longer was an (absolute) good, but only the relatively better, contingent on the moment and on circumstances. The crisis of the justification and presentation of Catholic morality reached dramatic proportions in the late ’80s and ’90s…. Pope John Paul II, who knew the situation of moral theology very well and followed it closely, commissioned work on an encyclical that would set these things right again. It was published under the title Veritatis splendor on August 6, 1993, and it triggered vehement backlashes on the part of moral theologians. Before it, the Catechism of the Catholic Church already had persuasively presented, in a systematic fashion, morality as proclaimed by the Church….
The Pope knew that he must leave no doubt that the the moral calculus involved in balancing goods must respect a final limit. There are goods that are never subject to trade-offs.There are values which must never be abandoned for a greater value and even surpass the preservation of physical life.…
In moral theology, however, another question had meanwhile become pressing: the hypothesis that the Magisterium of the Church should be infallible only in matters concerning the faith itself gained widespread acceptance; (in this view) questions concerning morality should not fall within the scope of infallible decisions of the Magisterium of the Church. There is probably something correct about this hypothesis that warrants further discussion, but there is a minimum set of morals which is indissolubly linked to the foundational principle of faith and which must be defended if faith is not to be reduced to a theory but rather to be recognized in its claim to concrete life….
The uniqueness of the moral teaching of Holy Scripture is ultimately predicated on its cleaving to the image of God, in faith in the one God who showed himself in Jesus Christ and who lived as a human being. The Decalogue is an application of the biblical faith in God to human life. The image of God and morality belong together and thus result in the particular change of the Christian attitude towards the world and human life. Moreover, Christianity has been described from the beginning with the word hodós [Greek for a road, in the New Testament often used in the sense of a path of progress]. Faith is a journey and a way of life. In the old Church, the catechumenate was created as a habitat against an increasingly demoralized culture, in which the distinctive and fresh aspects of the Christian way of life were practiced and at the same time protected from the common way of life. I think that even today something like catechumenal communities are necessary so that Christian life can assert itself in its own way.
II. The effects of this situation on the formation and lives of priests
The long-prepared and ongoing process of dissolution of the Christian concept of morality was, as I have tried to show, marked by an unprecedented radicalism in the 1960s. This dissolution of the moral teaching authority of the Church necessarily had to have an effect on the diverse areas of the Church…. As regards the problem of preparation for priestly ministry in seminaries, there is in fact a far-reaching breakdown of the previous form of this preparation.
In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries. In one seminary in southern Germany, candidates for the priesthood and candidates for the lay pastoral ministry lived together. At meals, seminarians and pastoral specialists ate together, the married alongside the laymen sometimes accompanied by their wives and children, and on occasion by their girlfriends. The climate in this seminary could not provide support for preparation to the priestly vocation.…
As the criteria for the selection and appointment of bishops had also been changed after the Second Vatican Council, the relationship of bishops to their seminaries was very different, too. Above all, a criterion for the appointment of new bishops was now their “conciliarity,” which of course could be understood to mean rather different things. Indeed, in many parts of the Church, conciliar attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behaviour contrary to the faith…. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk….
The question of pedophilia, as I recall, did not become acute until the second half of the 1980s. In the meantime, it had already become a public issue in the USA, and the bishops in Rome sought help, due to the apparent insufficiency of the new (1983) Code of Canon Law…. There was a fundamental problem in the perception of criminal law [within Canon Law] whereby only so-called “guarantorism”, [a kind of procedural protectionism] was regarded as truly “conciliar.” This means that the rights of the accused had to be guaranteed above all, to an extent that de facto excluded the possibility of conviction at all….
I would now like to add, to the brief notes on the situation of priestly formation at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, a few remarks regarding the development of Canon Law in this matter. In principle, the Congregation of the Clergy is responsible for dealing with crimes committed by priests. But since guarantorism dominated the situation to a large extent at the time, I agreed with Pope John Paul II that it was appropriate to assign the competence for these offences to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the title Delicta maiora contra fidem. This arrangement also made it possible to impose the maximum penalty, i.e., expulsion from the clergy, which could not have been imposed under other legal provisions. This was not a trick to be able to impose the maximum penalty, but is a consequence of the importance of the Faith for the Church. In fact, it is important to see that such misconduct by clerics ultimately damages the Faith. Only where faith no longer determines the actions of man are such offenses possible. The severity of the punishment, however, also presupposes a clear proof of the offense — this aspect of guarantorism remains in force….
III. Some perspectives for a proper response on the part of the Church
What is to be done? Perhaps we should create another Church in which everything works out well? Well, that experiment has already been undertaken and has already failed. Only obedience and love for our Lord Jesus Christ can point the way….
Firstly, I would suggest the following: If we really wanted to summarize very briefly the content of the Faith as laid down in the Bible, we might do so by saying that the Lord has initiated a narrative of love with us and wants to subsume all creation in it. The response to the evil which threatens us and the whole world can ultimately only consist in our entering into this love. …. The power of evil arises from our refusal to love God.…We might then say that the first fundamental gift that Faith offers us is the certainty that God exists. A world without God can only be a world without meaning. For where, then, does everything that is come from? In any case, it has no spiritual purpose. It is somehow simply there and has neither any goal nor any sense. Then there are no standards of good or evil. Then only the stronger can assert itself. Power is then the only reality. Truth does not count; it actually does not exist. Only if things have a spiritual reason, are intended and conceived — only if there is a Creator God who is good and wants the good — can the life of man also have meaning.
That there is God as creator and as the measure of all things is first and foremost a primordial need….Western society is a society in which God is absent from the public sphere and has nothing left to offer it. And that is why it is a society in which the measure of humanity is increasingly lost.…
Why did pedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God. We Christians, and priests too, prefer not to talk about God, because such speech does not seem to be practical. After the upheaval of the Second World War, we in Germany had expressly held responsibility before God as a guiding principle in our Constitution. Half a century later, it is no longer possible to include responsibility before God as a guiding principle in the European Constitution. God is regarded as the party concern of a small group and can no longer stand as the guiding principle for the community as a whole. This decision reflects the situation in the West, where God has become the private affair of a minority.
A paramount task, which must result from the moral upheavals of our time, is that we ourselves once again begin to live by God and unto him. Above all, we ourselves must learn again to recognize God as the foundation of our lives instead of leaving him aside as a somehow ineffectual phrase.….
Our handling of the Eucharist can only arouse concern. The Second Vatican Council was rightly focused on returning this sacrament of the presence of the body and blood of Christ, of the presence of his Person, of his passion, death and resurrection, to the center of Christian life and the very existence of the Church. In part, this really has come about, and we should be most grateful to the Lord for it. And yet a rather different attitude is prevalent. What predominates is not a new reverence for the presence of Christ’s death and resurrection, but a way of dealing with him that destroys the greatness of the mystery. ….
In conversations with victims of pedophilia, I have been made acutely aware of this first and foremost requirement. A young woman who was a [former] altar server told me that the chaplain, her superior as an altar server, always introduced the sexual abuse he was committing against her with the words: “This is my body which will be given up for you.”
It is obvious that this woman can no longer hear the very words of consecration without experiencing again all the horrific distress of her abuse. Yes, we must urgently implore the Lord for forgiveness, and first and foremost we must swear by him and ask him to teach us all anew to understand the greatness of His suffering, his sacrifice. And we must do all we can to protect the gift of the holy Eucharist from abuse.
And finally, there is the mystery of the Church. The sentence with which Romano Guardini, almost one hundred years ago, expressed the joyful hope that was instilled in him and many others: “An event of incalculable importance has begun; the Church is awakening in souls.” He meant to say that no longer was the Church experienced and perceived as merely an external system entering our lives, as a kind of authority, but rather it began to be perceived as being present within people’s hearts — as something not merely external, but internally moving us. About half a century later, in reconsidering this process and looking at what had been happening, I felt tempted to reverse the sentence: “The Church is dying in souls.”
Indeed, the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus. One speaks of it almost exclusively in political categories, and this applies even to bishops, who formulate their conception of the Church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms. The crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope….
In this context it is necessary to refer to an important text in the Revelation of St. John. The devil is identified as the accuser who accuses our brothers before God day and night (Revelation 12:10)…. The Creator God is confronted with the devil who speaks ill of all mankind and all creation. He says, not only to God but above all to people: Look at what this God has done. Supposedly a good creation, but in reality full of misery and disgust. That disparagement of creation is really a disparagement of God. It wants to prove that God Himself is not good, and thus to turn us away from Him….
It is very important to oppose the lies and half-truths of the devil with the whole truth: Yes, there is sin in the Church and evil. But even today there exists the holy Church, which is indestructible. Today there are many people who humbly believe, suffer and love, in whom the real God, the loving God, shows himself to us. Today God also has His witnesses (martyres) in the world. We just have to be vigilant in order to see and hear them….
Today’s Church is more than ever a “Church of the Martyrs” and thus a witness to the living God.… I live in a house, in a small community of people who discover such witnesses of the living God again and again in everyday life and who joyfully point this out to me as well. To see and find the living Church is a wonderful task which strengthens us and makes us joyful in our Faith time and again.
At the end of my reflections I would like to thank Pope Francis for everything he does to show us, again and again, the light of God, which has not disappeared, even today. Thank you, Holy Father!