The Cardinal's letter

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer at The Times. Subscribe to a feed of this blog at: http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/rss.xml March 19, 2010
The Times and the Pope

Damian Thompson of the Telegraph, who is also Editor-in-Chief of the Catholic Herald, asks: "Lord Rees-Mogg, are you proud of the way The Times is vilifying the leader of your Church?"

I am not Lord Rees-Mogg, but I'll answer the question anyway. It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway, that when I write under my own name - as I'm doing here - I'm expressing views that are mine alone. I'm not a spokesman for The Times. And while I am one of the team of Times leader writers, those leading articles - which are always unsigned - reflect the collective editorial view of the newspaper and not the view of the individual writer (who may provide only a first draft, which others then work on).

I don't recognise the picture that Thompson gives, for the uncomplicated reason that it isn't true. Thompson stresses that his criticisms of this newspaper are "not a personal attack by me on Ruth Gledhill [our Religious Affairs correspondent], who veers between sympathetic and wildly hostile coverage of the Church", but his imputation of erratic coverage is plainly a personal criticism. Ruth doesn't write on whim: she writes on the facts and the merits of each case. She is different from me in that respect (and we frequently discuss religious affairs), because my account of the Church and - from his early period in office - Pope Benedict genuinely is consistently hostile. I start from an instinctive wish for the decline of organised religion, which I consider to be - in its liberal as well as authoritarian forms - a force opposed to pluralism and scientific inquiry. How could it be otherwise? The purpose of religion is to explicate and advance revealed truths. Its ethos is therefore different from that of science and rationalism, which seek to discover things rather than to proclaim that the truth has already been found. But even so, I don't reject Catholic social positions completely where they conflict with the liberal standpoint. Though I support free choice on abortion, I'm very uneasy with the notion of legalising assisted suicide.

The Times's editorial position is more nuanced than mine. The paper is critical of the Church's position on Aids (we've condemned the dissemination of "rank, crank pseudoscience" about Aids prevention) and homosexuality. But we've praised the Pope for what we've termed three overdue and welcome initiatives (the leader is from 2008, but we've repeated the point since):

"The Pope's decision to set up a permanent Catholic-Muslim Forum, the first of its kind, is a welcome and imaginative response to last year's call by 138 Muslim scholars for a permanent dialogue with Christendom. It paves the way for an unprecedented Vatican summit in November. The move follows hard on the heels of Benedict XVI's two other momentous initiatives that will have lasting repercussions: his attempt to re-evaluate Martin Luther by emphasising the German priest's intentions to purge the Church of corrupt practices, rather than the schism that he engendered; and the Vatican's overdue admission that Galileo was no heretic but a pioneering scientist."

Nonetheless, Thompson accuses us of coverage that "has the flavour of an anti-Catholic crusade". His evidence is slim. He refers to "Peter Brookes’s revolting cartoons", which is the reason that I've reproduced one of those cartoons (almost certainly one that is in Thompson's mind) so that you can see what he's talking about. It's a minor point, but still worth stating, that the work of a cartoonist is also not the editorial view of a newspaper. My colleague Peter Brookes has drawn many cartoons that are scathing about Britain's military commitment to Afghanistan and Iraq, which are campaigns that The Times has consistently supported. His work is in this newspaper because he is - in my opinion, which is shared by the people who run the newspaper - an extraordinary artist and commentator. Look carefully at the cartoon I've reproduced. You might disagree with or even deplore the message; but is it not a brilliant piece of draughtsmanship and criticism? His point, which requires no caption, is that the Pope is destructively obsessed with condoms. The cartoon captures the Pope's facial features exactly, and it makes him and his views objects of derision. That's not "revolting": it's disrespectful. As such, it's what a cartoon ought to be, and I defy you not to laugh at it.

Thompson's main complaint, however, is our linking the Pope to the scandal of the Church's cover-up of decades of child rape and torture (let's not use the euphemism of child "abuse"). Of that, I'll say only one thing: the letter sent by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to every Catholic bishop in 2001. The Observer obtained a copy of that letter and disclosed its content four years later:

"Ratzinger's letter states that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse has been 'perpetrated with a minor by a cleric'. The letter states 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 orders that 'preliminary investigations' into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger's office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the 'functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests'.

"'Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,' Ratzinger's letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication."




Referring to this letter, my friend Christopher Hitchens wrote this week that:

"Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that."

It's not an anti-Catholic crusade but a simple, unexceptionable statement of fact that Pope Benedict has obstructed justice in its pursuit of evil men who found their opportunity and their sanctuary in the Roman Catholic priesthood.