Finally, a footnote about the impact of the Castrillón episode: Ironically, resurrecting that 2001 letter may have doomed Castrillón, but it could actually help Pope Benedict XVI.
Throughout the most recent round of media coverage, there’s been a serious mismatch between Pope Benedict’s actual record on sex abuse — as the senior Vatican official who took the crisis most seriously since 2001, and who led the charge for reform — and outsider images of the pope as part of the problem.
While there are many reasons for that, a core factor is that the Vatican had the last ten years to tell the story of “Ratzinger the Reformer” to the world, and they essentially dropped the ball. That failure left a PR vacuum in which a handful of cases from the pope’s past, where his own role was actually marginal, have come to define his profile.
One has to ask, why didn’t the Vatican tell Ratzinger’s story?
At least part of the answer, I suspect, is because to make Ratzinger look good, they’d have to make others look bad — including, of course, Castrillón, as well as other top Vatican officials. Lurking behind that concern is a deeper one, which is that to salvage the reputation of Benedict XVI it might be necessary to tarnish that of Pope John Paul II.
I wish I could recall the source, but I read this may have been concerned with not breaking the vow of the confessional and not a general congratulations for non reportage.
JPII was in office during the fall of Russian and east European communism. Recall that he was from Poland, and surely that factor played a part. Whatever great or little part he played in non-religious historical events, he will be remembered for being there. Thus, among those (even non-Catholics) who are Christian and opposed communism, it will be difficult to sully the memory of JPII.
One thing I read years ago (and I can’t remember where – I’ll try to track it down) right when the priest abuse scandal was revealed in the U.S. was that in Communist countries, whenever one wanted to denigrate or remove someone from their position, one would accuse that person of homosexual tendencies. This was seen as part of the reason JPII was not quicker in responding to the accusations of abuse (the majority of cases in the church being homosexual in nature) – he was working from the old Communist model he knew from Poland that the accusations were being made more for political reasons and were not necessarily true (he thought). If I’m remembering correctly, it goes to show we are all caught in our time and culture and need to be aware of what our own blind spots might be.