The great Roman Catholic cover-up

On March 10, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, the Rev Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican,” and that “when one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophile.”

This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.

Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing – indeed endless – scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial.

It was clear, said the Rev Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made “to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.”

He went on to say that “those efforts have failed.”

He was wrong twice.

In the first place, nobody has had to strive to find such evidence: It has surfaced, as it was bound to do.

In the second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the topmost level of the Roman Catholic Church is a process that has only just begun.

Yet it became in a sense inevitable when the College of Cardinals elected, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, the man chiefly responsible for the original cover-up.

(One of the sanctified voters in that “election” was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a man who had already found the jurisdiction of Massachusetts a bit too warm for his liking.)

There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the Pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the accompanying shame and disgrace.

The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody.

In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest.

After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked and forced to perform oral sex on his confessor.

(Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing “abuse”?)