‘‘PUT the Pope in the dock.” These words are not mine, but they will be seen as shocking and even grotesque by many Catholics of my generation. How could things come to this?
And no, the words did not appear in one of the English tabloids. In fact, they were published earlier this month on the front page of The Guardian, one of the world’s most respected newspapers.
Inside that paper, one of its regular columnists argued that Benedict XVI should be answerable under international law for the Vatican policy of protecting paedophile priests and swearing their victims to secrecy.
The suggestion is that an arrest warrant should be prepared prior to the Pope’s visit to Britain, scheduled for 16-19 September.
The chances of such an arrest ever happening are slim to zero, not least because the Vatican insists that the Pope, as a head of state, has immunity from the International Criminal Court.
It is salutary, though, to remember that just recently Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister, cancelled her visit to Britain for fear of being arrested under a warrant obtained by human rights campaigners.
The precedent for this goes back to the arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the former head of state of Chile, in October 1998. He had travelled to the UK for medical treatment, and after a long legal battle the House of Lords, at that time the highest court in Britain, rejected his claim of immunity from prosecution as a former head of state.
None of this is likely to impact on the Pope’s plans to come to Britain in September, when he will visit London, Glasgow and Coventry. In the latter city, he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), a hugely influential figure who converted from Anglicanism in 1845.
However, what all of this clearly demonstrates is that this is now a damaged and malfunctioning pontificate. Some commentators blame the Pope’s advisers. Others say the fault lies with Joseph Ratzinger himself, arguing that the German-born pontiff is cut off from the real life of the people of God.
What is also clear is that in the five years since his election, Pope Benedict XVI has amply demonstrated that he is as much a monarchical pope as his Polish predecessor.
This is hardly surprising given that, since 1981, when he was appointed head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he served as one of Karol Wojtyla’s closest advisers.
In this role, he became the Church’s chief watchdog of orthodoxy in matters of faith and doctrine, and the tough line he adopted with dissident theologians, such as Hans Kung in Germany and Charles Curran in the United States, earned him the nickname of the ‘panzer cardinal’.
But it is other stories from his 24year period as head of the congregation that increasingly cast a shadow over his pontificate. The scandal caused by the spate of clerical sex abuse cases shows no signs of abating, and now reaches to the door of the papal office itself.
And the key question now confronting Benedict XVI is to what extent was he personally complicit in the cover-up of such cases, either during his time as archbishop of Munich (1977-1981) or his period as a cardinal in Rome at the heart of the Vatican’s decision-making processes.
This month, Benedict XVI celebrated the fifth anniversary of his election as pope on 19 April 2005. But his big worry now is the crisis that has mushroomed to the point where it has the potential to leave an indelible toxic stain on his pontificate.