Vatican City, Dec 2, 2010 / 12:02 pm
Previously unseen correspondence shows Pope Benedict XVI taking an active concern for “more rapid” prosecution of abusive priests, over two decades ago.
A letter from 1988, published for the first time on Dec. 2 in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, details the cardinal and future Pope's concern that Church officials were not able to act quickly enough to implement existing penalties in cases of priestly abuse.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger raised these concerns about how the Church was handling some priests' “grave and scandalous conduct” in a letter to Cardinal Jose Lara, then president of a Pontifical commission on canon law, on Feb. 19, 1988. At the time, the future Pope Benedict XVI was serving as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Cardinal Ratzinger noted in the letter that canon law allowed such priests to be punished through the immediate penalty of “reduction to the lay state.” But, he complained, the “complexity of the penal process” required by canon law presented “considerable difficulty” for local bishops attempting to revoke the priestly status of offenders.