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When a Texas lawyer was digging in Vatican archives in 2003 in the pursuit of cases on behalf of American victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, he found a document titled De Modo Provedendi di Causis Crimine Soliciciones (On the Manner of Proceeding in Cases of the Crime of Solicitation). Bearing the signature and seal of Pope John XXIII, it was written in 1962 by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and distributed to senior clerics all over the world with an order that it was to be kept secret.

The sixty-nine-page document dealt primarily with any priest who tempted anyone in the act of sacramental confession “towards impure or obscene matters.”

Bishops who received the order were instructed to pursue these cases “in the most secretive way.” Everyone involved, including the alleged victim, was sworn “to observe the strictest secret, which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office” under penalty of excommunication. The “worst crime” was defined as “any obscene external deed, gravely sinful,” carried out by a cleric “with a person of his own sex.” The document was described as “strictly confidential” and was not to be published.

Seven centuries before Pope John XXIII authorized the Vatican’s cover-up of sexual abuse of boys and young men by priests, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) stated “right reason declares the appointed end of sexual acts is procreation,” and declared that homosexuality was one of the gravest of the peccata contra naturam or “sins against nature.” But buried in Vatican archives are records of papal misbehavior that included Pope Clement VII having sex with page boys, Benedict IX engaging in both bestiality and bi-sexual orgies, and Boniface VII being described as a “monster” and a criminal. Leo I was a sadist and torturer, Julius III sodomized young boys, Clement VI frequented prostitutes, Anacletus raped nuns, and Paul II liked watching naked men being put on the rack and tortured.

Vatican archives and Church records attest to the problem of priestly sexual misbehavior, the Church’s struggle to stamp it out, and instances of covering it up. One week after the election of the present Pope, Benedict XVI, in 2005, it was reported that in his previous position as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he had issued an order ensuring that investigations into sex abuse claims against priests be carried out in secret. It was alleged “in a confidential letter which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001. It asserted the Church’s right to hold inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to ten years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the Pope’s name before he was elected as John Paul II’s successor).

“Lawyers acting for many abuse victims claimed that the letter was designed to prevent the allegations from becoming public knowledge or being investigated by the police. They accused Cardinal Ratzinger of committing a ‘clear obstruction of justice.’

“The letter, ‘concerning very grave sins,’ was sent from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that once presided over the Inquisition…. It spelled out to bishops the church’s position on a number of matters ranging from celebrating the Eucharist with a non-Catholic to sexual abuse by a cleric ‘with a minor below the age of eighteen years.’ Ratzinger’s letter stated that the church could claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse had been ‘perpetrated with a minor by a cleric.’ The letter stated that the church’s jurisdiction ‘begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age’ and lasts for 10 years. It ordered that the ‘preliminary investigations’ into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger’s office, which had the option of referring them back to private tribunals….

“Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,” Ratzinger’s letter concluded. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order was operating carried penalties, including threat of excommunication.

“The letter was referred to in documents relating to a lawsuit filed earlier this year against a church in Texas and Ratzinger on behalf of two alleged abuse victims. By sending the letter, lawyers acting for the alleged victims claimed, the cardinal conspired to obstruct justice. Daniel Shea, the lawyer for the two alleged victims who discovered the letter, said: ‘It speaks for itself. It’s an obstruction of justice.’…

“Shea criticized the order that abuse allegations should be investigated only in secret tribunals. ‘They are imposing procedures and secrecy on these cases. If law enforcement agencies find out about the case, they can deal with it. But you can’t investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10 the priest will get away with it,’ Shea added.”

When Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to the United States in April 2008, he told reporters on his plane on the way to Washington, DC, that the sexual abuse of children “is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen.” He said, “As I read the histories of those victims, it is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way. Their mission was to give healing, to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”

Drawing a distinction between priests with homosexual tendencies and those inclined to molest children, the pontiff said, “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, which is another thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”

Asserting that anyone guilty of pedophilia “cannot be a priest,” he said that church officials were going through the seminaries that train would-be priests to make sure that those candidates have no such tendencies. “We’ll do all that is possible to have a strong discernment, because it is more important to have good priests than to have many priests,” he said. “We hope that we can do, and we have done and will do in the future, all that is possible to heal this wound.”

The Vatican archives and the annals of Christianity going back almost two thousand years contain accounts of the struggle with sexual misdeeds. In the year A.D. 390, Emperor Valentinian II was strongly influenced by his Christian beliefs when he decreed that men committing sodomy “shall expiate a crime of this kind in avenging flames in the sight of the people.” In eighth-century England, a book that referred to sexual crimes committed by clerics against children, the Penitential Bede, advised that clerics who committed sodomy with children be given severe penalties, depending on their rank. In A.D. 1179, a Church council decreed that clerics who had committed “sins against nature” be confined to a monastery for life or be forced to leave the Church. In the sixteenth century, Pope Pius IV issued the first papal decree condemning solicitation of sex by priests. The next major statement of Church law, Sacramentum Poenitentiae, issued on June 1, 1741, by Pope Benedict XIV, decreed that all attempts by priests to lead congregants into sex be condemned. In 1917, a code was promulgated containing language condemning solicitation. Legislation on the subject of sexual solicitation was issued again in 1922.

At the time of the discovery of Pope John XXIII’s 1962 secrecy edict in 2003, The New York Times News Service reported, “The sex-abuse crisis that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church during the past twelve months has spread to nearly every American diocese and involves more than 1,200 priests, most of whose careers span a mix of church history and seminary training. These priests are known to have abused more than 4,000 minors over the past six decades, according to an extensive New York Times survey of documented cases of sexual abuse by priests through Dec. 31, 2002. The survey, the most complete compilation of data on the problem available, contains the names and histories of 1,205 accused priests. It counted 4,268 people who claimed publicly or in lawsuits to have been abused by priests, though experts say there are surely many more who have remained silent. But the data show that priests secretly violated vulnerable youth long before the first victims sued the church and went public in 1984 in Louisiana. Some offenses date from the 1930s.”

According to Los Angeles Police Department Complaint # BC307934, filed December 17, 2003, from 1955 through 2002 at least twenty-eight priests within the LA Archdiocese inner circle accused or convicted of sex abuse, “occupied the highest positions.” The complaint stated, “Well placed priests including Bishops Juan Arzube and G. Patrick Ziemann ‘used their prominence in the archdiocese administration to cover up for other priests. Priests involved in education such as Leland Boyer and Gerald Fessard utilized their positions of authority to gain access to victims and then to funnel the children they molested into seminaries and the priesthood. These twenty-six priests and likely many others occupied positions such as Auxiliary Bishops, Vicar for Clergy, Vicars General, deans, and teachers at local seminaries and as recruiters for seminaries. The elevation of child molesters to these positions helps explain why so many child-molesting priests were protected by the Defendant Doe Archdiocese, how so many child molesters became priests, and how so many seminarians and priests became child molesters.”

Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota attorney who specialized in sexual abuse civil suits, was aware of more than three hundred civil claims against Catholic priests in forty-three states through 1991, and had handled eighty cases himself. Catholic reporter Jason Berry had tracked at least one hundred civil settlements by the Catholic Church in the years 1984–90, totaling $100 million to $300 million. Roman Catholic canon attorney Father Thomas Doyle estimated that about 3,000 Roman Catholic priests had been pedophiliac abusers of children (an average of sixteen priestly sex abusers per diocese).

Baltimore psychotherapist and former priest A. W. Richard Sipe, author of A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, made a comprehensive study of the sexual conduct of priests. He reported, “Estimated chances that a Catholic priest in the United States is sexually active: one in two.” Sipe studied 1,000 priests and 500 of their “‘lovers’ or victims.” He found that “20 percent of priests were involved in sexual relationships with women, 8 to 10 percent in ‘heterosexual exploration,’ 20 percent were homosexual with half of them active, 6 percent were pedophiles, almost 4 percent of them targeted boys.”

Offices of the national monthly Freethought Today in Madison, Wisconsin, reported receiving three to four newspaper clippings per week from readers detailing a new criminal or civil court accusation against a priest or Protestant minister. It had surveyed reported cases in North America during the years of 1988 and 1989 and found 250 reported cases of criminal charges involving child-molesting priests, ministers, or ministerial staff in the United States and Canada. Of the accused clergy, seventy were Catholic priests (39.5%) and 111 were Protestant ministers (58%).

Although priests made up only about 10 percent of North American clergy, they were 40 percent of the accused. With outcome unknown in about a fifth of the cases, the study found that “88 percent of all charged clergy were convicted (81 percent of priests were convicted)…. A majority of the cases did not go to trial…. Three quarters of all clergy who pleaded innocent were found guilty. About half of the Catholic priests pleading innocent were convicted.”

The study revealed that Catholic priests were acquitted or dismissed of child molestation charges at a higher rate than Protestant ministers. Similarly, Catholic priests received a higher rate of suspended sentences when convicted, and when sentenced, spent considerably less time in jail or prison.

Angela Bonavoglia, author of the book Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church, noted that many Catholic priests around the world—in Mexico, Latin America, Africa, and the United States—were involved in consensual relationships with women. Many other priests were involved in consensual relationships with adult men. “It is obvious that the crisis in the Church is much larger than pedophilia or the sexual abuse of minors,” she wrote. “It is about crimes and criminals, sex and power, yes. But fundamentally, it is about hypocrisy. By forbidding priests who choose to be sexual in mature ways that include commitment, responsibility and respect, and by protecting them from the costs of their sexual exploits, the Church has effectively condoned a clerical sexual free-for-all. That heterosexual and homosexual behavior may thrive in the Catholic priesthood does not reflect anything inherent about homosexuality or heterosexuality but is rather an indictment of the hypocrisy and duplicity of an elite, closed, all-male system, a secret society of sorts that condones, indeed, demands, lying about the reality of one’s sexual life at all costs.”

Asserting that Pope John XXIII’s 1962 document remained in force until May 2001, the authors of the book Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes by Thomas P. Doyle, A.W.R. Sipe, and Patrick J. Wall, presented their account of what they called the Catholic Church’s 2000-year paper trail of sexual abuse. They wrote that the letter was “significant” because it reflected the Church’s “insistence on maintaining the highest degree of secrecy.”

Forty-six years after Pope John XXIII signed De Modo Provedendi di Causis Crimine Soliciciones and pledged the Church to secrecy about sex abuse of youths by the clergy, Pope Benedict XVI in his tour of the United States and in Australia apologized privately to individuals who were abused by priests and frequently spoke publicly on the subject. To a World Youth Day audience in Sydney, Australia, he declared, “These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation. They have caused great pain and have damaged the Church’s witness. I ask all of you to support and assist your bishops, and to work together with them in combating this evil. Victims should receive compassion and care, and those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice. It is an urgent priority to promote a safer and more wholesome environment, especially for young people.”