Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
February 27, 2019
The condemnation of Cardinal Pell, arriving
like a bolt of lightning in the wake of the Vatican summit, draws attention to
a truth that there has been a desire to forget for the last fifty years: there
is no possible compromise between the Church and the world, because the world
hates the Church and wants its destruction. This sentence, furthermore,
demonstrates the failure of the strategy of this papacy, which has renounced
exercising the sovereignty of the Church, confiding instead in the
comprehension of the world.
The sovereignty of
the Church is expressed primarily in Her Canon Law. The Catholic Church, inasmuch
as it is a visible society, is endowed by a law, also penal, the law She
possesses to sanction the faithful who have committed violations of Her law. A crime is a violation outside the judicial
order of the Church, distinct from sin, which is, instead, a violation of the
moral order. Thus the Church, “by sole and exclusive right”, has the right to
judge the violation of Church laws and the right to sanction the crimes with
penalties according to Canon Law (can. 1402 §2). Among the many canonical crimes specified by the Code,
are apostasy, heresy and schism (Can.1364),
communicatio in sacris, the profanation of sacred things (can.1376), and
also a series of grave violations against the sixth commandment (can. 1395).
The distinction between sins and crimes does not appear clear to Pope Francis,
who declares “zero tolerance” against civil crimes, such as pedophilia, but
calls for “forgiveness” and mercy for the “sins of youth”, such as
homosexuality, unmindful of the presence of this crime in the laws of the
Church.
For the laws and a large part of mainstream
thinking in Western countries, pedophilia is considered, like rape, an
ignominious crime, not however for the immorality of the act in itself, but for
the violation that these crimes imply for the rights, in the first case, of children,
and in the other, of women. Following
the example of the modern States, the ecclesiastical authorities appear to have
reduced some sins from crimes against morality to crimes against the person: sin
does not consist in violating the natural law, but consists in preventing with
violence, the individual following his personal instincts and tendencies. Today the Vatican authorities are dealing with
crimes such as sodomy as if they were merely private sins, limiting themselves
- in full-blown cases - to requesting penitential expiations, without applying
the penal sanctions these crimes demand.
The only crimes recognized as such are those
sanctioned by the secular States. But even regarding these type of crimes, like
pedophilia, the ecclesiastical authorities are today complying with the
judgments of guilt or innocence from the civil courts, forgoing investigation
and procedure on their own account, except when rendered necessary, in order
not to lose “credibility” - as happened in the “McCarrick case.” However, the reduction of Cardinal Theodore
McCarrick to the lay state, as Sandro Maguister highlighted in a recent article,
is fruit of a merely administrative process,
not a judiciary one. (“Settimo Cielo”, 15 February 2019).
The Church however, has the duty to open a
proper judicial process against those accused of sexual abuses, without
violating their fundamental rights. Indeed,
rights exist not only for those who claim to be victims but also for those who
are accused by the victims. They must be judged according to the norms of Canon
Law, perhaps first by the State, to establish the veracity of the facts. Once
this veracity is established, if identified guilty, they must undergo the
correct sanctions; if identified innocent, they must also be defended even
against the civil authorities of the State.
The Church, which is endowed with its own penal law and tribunals, must
have the courage to challenge the world’s tribunals, being convinced, that it
is not up to the world to judge the Church, but the Church to judge the world.
The moral crisis in the Church
will not be resolved with the so-called best
practices: the practical instructions given by the Organization of Ethics
and Health, a secular organism promoting sexual education, which would like to
include contraception and abortion in all national programs of family planning;
neither by instituting commissions or task
forces of ‘experts’, but [only]through a supernatural vision, which
unfortunately is totally absent in Pope Francis’ speech which concluded the Vatican summit last February 24th. The consequences being that we hear of
greater synodality for the local churches, “open” to contributions from the secularized world and
of the abolition of the papal secrecy, in the interests of “transparency.” The “culture of secrecy” is the one denounced
by Frédéric Martel in his recent booklet aimed at “normalizing” sodomy in the
Church. But what more impenetrable
secrecy is there than the secrecy imposed on priests by the Sacrament of
confession? This seems to be the next stone the enemies of the Church want to
turn over and for which, the sentence of the tribunal in Victoria seems to have
paved the way.
In Australia, in the territory of Canberra, a law has been adopted that
makes a priest indictable if he does not report cases of abuses against minors,
even when the knowledge came during confession.
The law, which applies the recommendations from the Royal Commission (the
commission charged by the Australian government to deal with the sexual abuse
of minors) was approved last June by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory
of the Australian Capital, and extends the mandatory denunciation of the abuse
of minors even to the Church and the activities of the Church, including the
Confessional. Among these
recommendations, there was, precisely, the idea of making the failure of a
priest to denounce molestations and violence against minors, a crime, when he
finds out about them during the Sacrament of Confession. (Acistampa, 29 June 2017).
In the meantime, the United Nations has requested Italy to institute an
investigating Commission “independent and impartial, to examine all the
sexual-abuse cases of children by religious personnel of the Catholic
Church” and are asking “to make it mandatory for everyone, also for
the religious personnel of the Catholic Church, the reporting of any case of
presumed violence of minors to the competent authorities of the State.”
The request was made by the UN Committee for
the Rights of Children and Adolescents, with their headquarters in Geneva.
Lastly, the revision of national Concordats (like the Lateran Treaty with
Italy) was requested, in the part where the hierarchy is released from the
obligation of denunciation. In Italy,
according to the New Concordat of 1984, “The Italian Republic guarantees that
the judiciary authority will give communication to the competent ecclesiastical
authorities by territory of the legal
procedures being advanced against churchmen” (Protocollo addizionale n. 2b).
This principle would now be overturned, since the UN is asking the Vatican for
full cooperation with the civil authorities, who are pursuing abuses in various
countries, providing for example, all the information in possession of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The question of mandatory denunciation to the
civil authorities, on which Father Lombardi affirmed that “it is right that it be a theme dealt with at
this meeting” (editor’s note - the
summit of February 21) opens the door to the request for the violation of the
Sacrament of Confession and papal secrecy.
At one time the State was the “secular
arm” of the Church, now the Church would
practically become a “secular arm” of the State. But a civil law wanting to
impose the violation of the Confessional seal for some crimes, like pedophilia,
would be an unjust law, to which priests should oppose with their “non possumus” even unto martyrdom. It is
this testimony, and not others, that would render the Church credible, before
God, prior to being credible before the world.
However, it would be necessary to overturn the relationship the Church
has been engaged in with the secularized and anti-Christian world for more than
fifty years now.
Translation: Contributor, Francesca Romana
