Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague
"'Only' 10% of abuse accusations against priests are proven to be true."
The ambivalent view of the Catholic hierarchy towards child sex abuse by priests was brought into sharp focus a few days ago when Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague, Czechia, accused Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich of 'harming Pope Benedict XVI's reputation' and calling on Marx to "take responsibility" for the report which revealed that the then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich and Freising was complicit in allowing four paedophile priests to continue practising as priests in his archdiocese.
Ratzinger was later promoted to Cardinal and transferred to Rome as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, i.e., the then Pope John-Paul II's enforcer. It was in that post that he earned a reputation as the Pope's Pitbull and is widely believed to have tried to supress the growing claims that the Catholic Church was complicit in thousands of cases of child sexual abuse to protect the Church and avoid paying compensation to the victims.
Under his tenure, Catholic clerics were forbidden from revealing any information to the authorities which might harm the reputation of the Church on pain of excommunication, even if revealing such information was required by law in the host country. In effect, Ratzinger was telling Catholic clerics and other in holy orders that they owed allegiance only to the Church and ultimately to the Pope in the Vatican, and were therefore above the law of their host country.
The report also revealed that Pope Emeritus Benedict had appeared to try to mislead the enquiry by denying he was present at a meeting in 1980, during which the transfer of a convicted paedophile priest (Priest X in the report) from the diocese of Essen to the archdiocese of Munich was discussed - a denial that was later withdrawn when minutes of the meeting recording his presence were produced, but only after Pope Benedict had first tried to dismiss then as evidence only that something had n written down [sic] and not that he was present or was aware of the discussion.
Pope Benedict then claimed he had misremembered the meeting and still claims to have no recollection of discussing the case.
Cardinal Duka's curious argument appears to be that the then Archbishop Ratzinger had 'no jurisdiction' and that the investigation which revealed his complicity should not have been commissioned by the German. In a published statement, he says:
Munich betrayal for the second time
The publication of the Pope's letter is indeed a glimpse into the soul of the priest, the bishop and the Pope, who retrospectively evaluates his life, but no longer has the strength to comment on all his specifics.
The following is an analysis of the above-mentioned experts, who show us line by line how the so-called goodwill works in the Archdiocese of Munich. It is one of the biggest disappointments I have experienced in our Roman Catholic Church. To defile a person, to injure him unfairly and not even give him the opportunity to appreciate in his favour this so-called goodwill, which must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, because it does not give the possibility of legal delay? I ask: what is it?
In my article, published in the German magazine Die Tagespost, I point out the following fact: that from all enrolment, every priest who studied ecclesiastical law, even a layman who graduated from the Faculty of Theology and attended an ecclesiastical law course, must understand that the then archbishop [of] Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, had no jurisdiction and no way to deal with the case - Priest X was the priest of the diocese of Essen.
That is why I protest and I really dare to call the Archbishop of Munich, his curia, but also the President of the German Episcopal Conference, to take responsibility for defaming and tarnishing the reputation of Pope Benedict XVI.
Dominik Cardinal Duka, Archbishop of Prague
But the accusation was not that, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Joseph Ratzinger had jurisdiction over 'Priest X' when he was predating on children in Essen, but that he was complicit in the removal of Priest X to his own jurisdiction in the archdiocese of Munich, where he was allowed to continue as a priest with access to more potential victims, and that he did nothing to inform the authorities or take steps to protect children in his archdiocese from a known predatory paedophile. The transfer of offending priests into other diocese where their reputation was unknown, was a standard way of covering up their crimes and facilitating their continued access to new, unsuspecting, victims.
And Duka's misleading apologetic does nothing to address the other three cases in which the report found Joseph Ratzinger to be complicit.
Duka himself is no stranger to accusations of being complicit in child abuse cases, so probably has some sympathy with the beleaguered Pope Benedict XVI. According to
this report in Agenzia Nova, in 2019 he was suspected:
[…]of having covered up a case of sexual abuse that took place within the Dominican order. This was revealed by the information portal "Seznam.cz". The alleged victim, who remained anonymous, claims to have been abused for many years during his training to become a priest, and to have informed Cardinal Duka about him in time. However, the latter did not act in any way. The priest responsible for these abuses later left the Dominican order due to other allegations from many other alleged victims and died before facing trial. Cardinal Duka admits he remembers the event but justifies his failure to react because the priest at the time would have sworn on the cross that the young victim was lying. Duka says he is ready to cooperate with law enforcement.
In other words, Duka took the word of the priest and assumed his victims were lying, so did nothing to prevent him abusing more victims until the complaints became too many to dismiss them all as lies.
It's obvious from this and his attack on Cardinal Marx, that this odious Cardinal still thinks the most important thing is to protect the Church even at the expense of its victims, and suppress information about sexually predatory priests, and that his first instinct is to believe their victims are liars rather than believe an ordained priest would do such a thing. Clearly, he has learned nothing from the thousands of proven instances of abuse that have swamped Christian churches and bankrupted so many Catholic diocese with claims for compensation, and so is likely to allow it to continue under his watch.
There is no word so far of any action from Pope Francis, either in sanctioning Pope emeritus Benedict XVI for his negligence and attempt to mislead the German enquiry, or against those senior clerics who publicly display this readiness to tolerate paedophile Catholic priests and to dismiss their victims a liars.
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