Pope John Paul II: The Halo and the Cover Up

        In the movie “True Confessions,” Cardinal Danaher (Cyril Cusack) tells Father Des Spellacy (Robert De Niro) to transfer Msgr. Seamus Fargo (Burgess Meredith) to a distant desert parish against Fargo’s wishes.  To justify the transfer, Cardinal Danaher states that Fargo must be moved “For the good of Holy Mother Church.”  “For the Good of Holy Mother Church”; how often, I wonder, was that phrase was uttered by bishops as they protected pederast priests by transferring them to different churches once potential publicity of their crimes against children made their continued presence in a parish an “inconvenience” for church officials?
        This Sunday, May 1, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate a mass of beatification for Pope John Paul II.  Yet, blighting the halo that is forming around John Paul’s head is a terrible sin of neglect. (See James 4:17: “Therefore to that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”)  As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her Sunday, April 25, New York Times’ column, John Paul chose ignore the lamentations of the vulnerable as mounting evidence of almost ubiquitous sex abuse infected the entire Catholic Church.  For him, the plight of the victims must have mattered less than “the good of Holy Mother Church,” which meant protecting priests who had serially abused and, in many cases, raped children.
        There are apologists who defend John Paul, claiming he did not know the magnitude of child abuse.  And there are those so determined to see him canonized that they argue that “beatification isn’t a ‘score card’ on how John Paul administered the church but rather recognition that he led a saintly life.”  (Associated Press, January 14, 2011.)   The Associated Press also noted in the same January 14 report that “while John Paul himself was never accused of improprieties, he has long been accused of responding slowly when the sex abuse scandal erupted in the United States in 2002. Many of the thousands of cases that emerged last year involved crimes and cover-ups during his 26-year papacy.”
        If his general hesitation to punish priests who abused children isn’t enough to convince Catholics that John Paul’s beatification is a mistake, then his specific conduct regarding Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, most certainly should.  By 1989 or 1990 the latest, the Vatican had been alerted to this priest’s crimes of rape and abuse brought against him by seminarians under his authority.  Yet, even when compelling evidence demanded action and justice, no inquiry was initiated; instead, orders were issued that no investigation or trial be conducted, orders which most certainly came from John Paul himself.
        Of course, it is quite impossible to alter the near idolatrous adulation many Catholics feel for Pope John Paul II or persuade them that his beatification will evoke for thousands nightmares of the torture they suffered year after year as the Church ignored their cries for help and systematically obstructed justice.  In fact, relentless stories of sex abuse by priests have made faithful Catholics yearn for something spectacular to relieve their anxiety, disgust, and loss of faith in their church leaders.  The beatification of John Paul offers a specious distraction from the depravity that has soiled the Catholic leadership even as it attempts to create a preternatural hero who might levitate the Church above the sordid complicity involving its multiple attempts to cover up sex crimes.  It won’t, however, sweep the dirt of its shamefully criminal behavior under a shroud of saintliness proposed for a pope who was a good man in many ways and an abject failure by far in the way that mattered most.