When Christopher Hitchens gets it right, he really gets it right, and when President Obama gets it wrong, he gets it really wrong. Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General and Obama’s pending nominee to the Supreme Court, and her office are also quite wrong…Wrong about what, you ask? It seems that both the president and the office of the solicitor general are siding with the Vatican on the child rape cases. The Vatican claims that they are a sovereign state immune from prosecution in the many cases in which the Pope is named as a defendant for remaining complicit or covering up the crimes, and the Obama administration is advising the Supreme Court to agree with them. Hitchens calls bullshit on this one, I have to wholeheartedly agree…
It is not usually considered polite to mention that the majority of Supreme Court justices are practicing Roman Catholics. (Writing about this delicate matter during the argument over the nomination of John Roberts, I did warn that there might come a day when it could pose a double conflict of interest, both in respect of church teachings and in respect of the Vatican’s decision to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston after he skipped town to avoid a subpoena. This was before it came to light that the current pope had been so deeply and personally involved in the church’s strategy of delay and obfuscation.) We will soon have a Supreme Court that contains no Protestants and no secularists and which is being asked to rule on a matter central to the religious beliefs of a majority of its members, who are bound to regard the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger as the vicar of Christ on earth. If they now take refuge in the lesser claim that he is the bureaucratic head of a foreign government, will that serve to assuage their consciences?
That’s exactly what this is – a conflict of interest. This illustrates exactly why the separation of church and state is so essential. Judges are supposed to remain impartial, and the court system is supposed to uphold truth and justice above all else, but if even the country’s highest court is in the pocket of the Holy See, what chance does justice have in these cases? A real judge puts their own personal beliefs and biases aside when deciding a case, but in a country where one cannot even get elected unless they believe in a widely-accepted god, how can we expect them to truly remain impartial? The questions don’t end there…
To give just one example that has not so far had the attention it deserves, the State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state. It enjoys, for example, only the status of an observer at the United Nations. Very well then, if the Supreme Court rules that it is a sovereign government, then it necessarily follows that it must be subjected to official scrutiny on its rights practices, which in international law include the treatment of children. It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration gets itself off the horns of that dilemma. (It is also perhaps a pity that this question was not resolved earlier, so that we could have had an official U.S. government report on, say, the open complicity of the Catholic Church and the papacy in sheltering the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda.)
Didn’t know about that last one? There’s good reason for that; the Church does what it wants and thinks that it answers to no one – not even god, apparently, and they’re particularly good at persuading the media (and its overall Christian bias) to cover it up, or at least not talk about it, which is essentially the same thing. As the Vatican are hypocrites in everything else, this next part should come as no surprise…
This all arises because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling that effectively lifted the Vatican’s immunity under a 1976 law (the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which governs the extent to which foreign entities can be pursued on American soil). The case involves an Oregon victim who was molested by a priest who had been moved, after previous offenses, from parishes in Ireland and Chicago. Other plaintiffs in other states such as Kentucky and Wisconsin have asked the courts to view offending priests and complicit bishops as employees of the Vatican, thereby illustrating the general responsibility of the papacy. The church’s response to this has been especially absurd, claiming that the pope exercises only spiritual authority and not managerial control. The first thing to say about this is notice how it abolishes the church’s other claim to be a political and accountable state! Then ask yourself what would happen to a priest or bishop who expressed doubts about the Vatican’s teaching on abortion or divorce. He would soon find that Rome was very interested in disciplining him. It was Joseph Ratzinger himself who invited Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson all the way from Argentina and back into the fold in an attempt to conciliate Catholicism’s more reactionary wing. It was Rome that gave shelter and succor to Cardinal Law after the long disgrace of his tenure in Boston. Suddenly we are asked to believe that the church is not really responsible for the actions of those who have a sworn duty of obedience to its headquarters? This will not wash. State or no state, the church is a highly disciplined multinational corporation that allows little or no autonomy to its branches and can no more be the judge in its own cause than British Petroleum.
That’s the Catholic Church for you – using weasel words and half-assed excuses whenever they’re asked a tough question. Of course, this is the religion that is so busy hating gays, women, and other religions that they just don’t have any hate left in their little black hearts for child molesters, so I guess we shouldn’t expect much in terms of logic and reason. What we should expect, however, is our lawmakers to uphold the law. Obama and Kagan (who is Jewish, by the way, so she has one less excuse to side with the Vatican) couldn’t be more wrong on this one, and if the Supreme Court ignores these clear cases of human rights violations, then we are no better than the countries we invade in the hope of making them more like us.
