He's guilty as sin, but ...
Texas court dismisses child-rape conspiracy lawsuit against Pope
by Mary Alice Robbins, Texas Lawyer
Dec. 23, 2005 |
On Dec. 22, U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal of Houston dismissed claims against Pope Benedict XVI in a suit in which three plaintiffs allege that the pope conspired to cover up a seminarian's sexual abuse of them in the mid-1990s.
Rosenthal based her decision in John Doe 1, et al. v. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, et al. on Pope Benedict's head-of-state-immunity, although the suit was filed in 2004 before he was elected pope. Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, alleged in amended motions filed in May that he
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should be dismissed from the suit on several grounds, including immunity.
The U.S. Department of State issued a suggestion of immunity in May, requesting that the pope be dismissed from the suit. "Judicial review of this determination is not appropriate," Rosenthal wrote in the opinion.
"I think it's a shame that our State Department would get involved in an issue that basically involved covering up the sexual abuse of children in this country," says Tahira Kahn Merritt, attorney for two of the plaintiffs.
"We're going to go forward with the case against the archdiocese," says Merritt, of Kahn Merritt & Allen in Dallas.
Robert Schick, a partner in Houston's Vinson & Elkins and an attorney for the archdiocese, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
The plaintiffs alleged in their complaint that Ratzinger "designed and explicitly directed" a conspiracy to fraudulently conceal tortious conduct in connection with Colombian-born Juan Carlos Patino-Arango's alleged abuse of them while he was a seminarian working at St. Francis de Sales Church in Houston. They further allege in the complaint that after the parents of one plaintiff reported the alleged abuse to the archdiocese, Patino-Arango was moved to a "retreat house for abusive priests" and later "secretly spirited" out of this country and sent back to Colombia.
A Harris County grand jury indicted Patino-Arango on a charge of indecency with a child in 2004 and he is a fugitive from justice, according to an Associated Press report.
As alleged in the complaint, Ratzinger sent a letter to all bishops in 2001, reminding them that all proceedings against clerics accused of improprieties with minors should be sent to the tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Jeffrey S. Lena, a Berkeley, Calif., solo who is one of the attorneys representing the pope, says Rosenthal's decision is important because the judge dismissed the case against a head of state notwithstanding the fact that the defendant was not a head of state at the time the suit was filed.
"He still gets immunity," Lena says.
The decision also is important, Lena says, because Rosenthal identified Pope Benedict as head of a foreign state, the Holy See. According to the opinion, the plaintiffs had contended that the pope's motion and the State
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Our comments:
The headline sounds like wacko news, and for many readers it will be inconceivable that someone would sue the Pope over all the child-raping priests.
But pay attention, please. In truth, it's no stretch to say that the current Pope, a/k/a Joseph Ratzinger, is largely responsible for the church's cover-up for who-knows-how-many priests who raped myriad little boys -- exactly as this lawsuit claimed.
Until his recent promotion, Ratzinger ran the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Commonly called the Holy Office, it went by a different, more familiar name until 1965: The Office of the Inquisition. Yes, seriously.
In this office, Ratzinger routinely sent edicts ordering priests, bishops, and nuns to be "silenced" -- to stop outreach to gays and lesbians, to stop questioning church positions on condoms, abortion, and AIDS, etc.
And Ratzinger's office was responsible for handling the ongoing sex scandal, involving hundreds of priests who molested children under the cover of their clerical collars. So what did Ratzinger do?
In 2001, as the decades-long pattern of priests' abuse first started to be reported, he wrote a letter to bishops reminding them that church policy since 1962 mandated that the church itself would investigate, bypassing worldly police authorities, and required victims of priestly abuse to take an oath of secrecy.
According to an article in Britain's Observer, the letter, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood." What the hell would you call that, if not a plain and obvious obstruction of justice?
In layman's terms, Ratzinger ordered a cover-up. Exactly as this lawsuit complains.
But at the Bush administration's request, Ratzinger has been let off the hook.
The Bush administration operates as if it's above the law, and they asked the court to view the Pope the same way, as above the law, unpunishable even for crimes committed before he was Pope. He gets "head-of-state immunity," even though he wasn't head of the church-state when he ordered the cover-up.
After all the sickening stories that have trickled and flooded out over recent years, this is the closest we're going to come to a culmination.
If there's one person who can reasonably be said to have overseen the church's organized non-response, that person really is Joseph Ratzinger. But he won't face justice in this lifetime.
The case against Ratzinger is dismissed, not because he's innocent. Au contraire, the evidence is overwhelming, virtually inarguable, that he coordinated a cover-up of the scandal.
The court's ruling is that the Pope walks -- on a technicality.
Holy Mary, mother of God ...
=Helen & Harry Highwater=
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Department's suggestion of immunity were insufficient because neither identified the pope as head of the Vatican City State.
Lena says Rosenthal's decision recognizes that the pope is entitled to head-of-state immunity as a religious leader.
As originally published
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