By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Even though they admit to having little hope of success, a group of victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have filed a complaint against the pope, the Vatican’s secretary of state and two other high-ranking Holy See officials with the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing them of committing crimes against humanity.
The Guardian is reporting that the complaint was filed at The Hague on Tuesday and accuses the pope and other officials of failing to prevent or punish perpetrators of the abuse, and of engaging in the “systematic and widespread” practice of concealing the crimes throughout the world. The complaint names Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state; Cardinal Tarcissio Bertone, now secretary of state, who previously served at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the organization that handled sexual abuse cases under then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as well as his predecessor, Cardinal William Lavada, current head of the CDF.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a U.S. based organization that is representing the victims in the case, claims to have letters and documents to prove that Vatican officials refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies who were seeking suspects. They claim that the pope, as head of the Catholic Church, is ultimately responsible for the sexual abuse of children by priests and for the cover-ups that occurred, saying that he and others have “direct and superior responsibility” for the crimes of those ranked below them.
“The point of this is to look at it from a higher altitude,” said Pam Spees, human rights attorney with CCR. “You zoom out and the practices are identical: whistleblowers are punished, the refusal of the Vatican to co-operate with law enforcement agencies. You see the protection of priests and leaving them in the ministry and because of these decisions other children are raped and sexually assaulted.”
She said: “It’s not only the facts of the abuse but the way that the church deepened the harm in sometimes irreparable ways.”
Barbara Blaine, president of the U.S.-based Survivors Network of those Abused by priests, who is under scrutiny herself for defending a psychiatrist who worked for her organization who was convicted of possession of children pornography, said going to the court was a last resort.
“We have tried everything we could think of to get them to stop and they won’t,” she told The Associated Press (AP). “If the pope wanted to, he could take dramatic action at any time that would help protect children today and in the future, and he refuses to take the action.”
However, the Vatican’s U.S. lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, called the complaint a “ludicrous publicity stunt and a misuse of international judicial processes” in a statement to the AP.
The odds against the court opening an investigation are considered enormous as the prosecutor has received nearly 9,000 independent proposals for inquiries since 2002, when the court was officially created. Aside from that, the court doesn’t investigate crimes that occurred before its 2002 creation and most of the abuse cases in the U.S. occurred before that date. According to a study commissioned by the U.S. bishops from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, abuse claims peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society in general gained awareness of the problem.
Another problem for the complainants is that the Holy See is not a member state of the court, which means prosecutors have no automatic jurisdiction there, even though some of the cases cover alleged abuse in member countries.
The prosecutor’s office said in a statement to the AP that the evidence would be studied. “We first have to analyze whether the alleged crimes fall under the Court’s jurisdiction,” it said.
Shortly after walking into The Hague to deliver boxes of documentations, Spees conceded that she was “not hopeful” the court would ever launch an investigation.
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Photo is of the Hague skyline.
