Papal order covers ‘worst crime’
The document indeed describes as “this unspeakable crime” when a priest in the confessional “tempts a penitent toward impure and obscene matters, whether by words or signs or nods of the head, whether by touch or by writing.” (Clause 1).
However, Crimen Sollicitationis reserves the epithet “the worst crime” for when priests and religious sexually abuse trusting, helpless, innocent boys and girls and “brute beasts” such as cats and dogs.
As Clause 73 states: “To have the worst crime, for the penal effects, one must do the equivalent of the following: any obscene, external act, gravely sinful, perpetrated in any way by a cleric or attempted by him with youths of either sex or with brute animals (bestiality).”
So, we can see from this that the Vatican document Crimen Sollicitationis declares the crime of clerical sex abuses “with youths of either sex or with brute animals” as being “the worst crime” when compared with “the unspeakable crime” of soliciting for sex in the confessional.
Rev Garrett therefore correctly concludes that “the implication of Messrs Geaney and Ryan’s allegation (Irish Examiner letters, May 11) is that three popes, namely John XXIII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have all sought to pervert the course of justice in the secular criminal justice system.”
That Pope John XXIII sought to do so is confirmed in the last paragraph of Crimen Sollicitationis:
“Our Most Holy Father John XXIII, in an audience granted to the Most Cardinal Secretary of the Holy Office on March 16, 1962, deigned to approve and confirm this instruction, ordering upon those to whom it pertains to keep and observe it in the minutest detail.”
The “minutest detail” which Pope John XXIII ordered the cardinal, bishops and clergy to keep and observe includes the “detail” in clause 11 in Crimen Sollicitationis which states:
“Indeed by this law the Ordinaries are bound ipso jure or by the force of their own proper duty to have a greater degree of care and observance so that those same matters be pursued in the most secretive way, and after they have been defined and given over to execution, they are to be restrained (from such as the civil authorities) by a perpetual silence, as a secret of the Holy Office, in all matters and with all persons (which includes the civil authorities) as a secret of the Holy Office.”
Rev Garrett’s suggestion that such as Pope John XXIII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are “patently good men” is not the conclusion of the thousands of victims of clerical abuse crimes and their families and friends, most of whom do not wish to be seen either dead or alive within the confines of a Roman Catholic church. That includes me.
Patrick Geaney
13 South Bank Estate
Swords
Co Dublin
