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Alan Dershowitz Defends Pope Benedict

Benedict XVI has “Done More to Protect Young Children” Than Any Other Pope According to Harvard Law Professor

The Harvard Law School professor & criminal appellant attorney Alan Dershowitz has defended Pope Benedict XVI while speaking to a television news programme in Australia. Dershowitz travelled to the continent to take part in a debate with the lawyer & activist Geoffrey Robinson QC who has waged a campaign to have the Pope tried under international law as culpable for the abuse of children by Catholic priests.

Robinson (a dual citizen of Australia and Great Britain) is well-known in legal and intellectual circles, where he has defended the use of kangaroo courts to try and convict alleged perpetrators of great crimes: his 2005 book The Tyrannicide Brief defended John Cooke, the solicitor general who prosecuted Charles I of England for treason. The Australian academic has also defended the practice of more powerful nations waging war against smaller ones to prevent the latter from committing crimes against humanity, and has argued in favour of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dershowitz told the Australina Broadcasting Corporarion’s Tony Jones that Robertson’s attempt to have Pope Benedict tried before under international law was “wrong”.

International law deals with war crimes, it deals with systematic efforts by governments to do what happened, for example, in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, in Darfur and Cambodia. This is not in any way related to that. … This is not a crime against humanity, this is a series of crimes by individual priests and others throughout the world and failures by institutions to come to grips with it quickly enough.

Prof. Dershowitz said he thought Benedict has “probably done more to protect young children since becoming Pope than any previous Pope”.

I think that many people who know him very well think he that he had a real wake-up call when he took that job and he saw how extensive the abuse was within the Church and throughout society, and he took steps, took steps that a churchman should be taking, steps to try to rid the Church of people, he changed the rules as to reporting these things to civil society and I think on balance he did a fairly commendable job.

Dershowitz blamed prosecutors for failing to properly exercise their legal authority by trying alleged abusers:

Law enforcement had no barriers to going in and aggressively prosecuting these crimes. And many prosecutors just refused to do it. They may have been afraid of the Church, they may have been afraid of their constituents, but you don’t blame the Church when law enforcement fails to prosecute. …

But that’s not the fault of the Church. Their job is to apply canon law; the secular society’s job is to apply civil and criminal law. If there was a failure to apply the criminal law, it was a failure by law enforcement officials. …

When you had bishops or cardinals, if there were any, who took efforts, took steps to get priests from one jurisdiction into another, that would be criminal conduct.

In conversation with Mr. Jones, Prof. Dershowitz said that there are several factors in the history and nature of the Catholic Church which allowed the abuse crisis to thrive and which prevented a swift response by church authorities.

[O]ne of them is obviously confidentiality. The confidentiality of the priest-penitent relationship is very crucial to the Church. Now, Geoffrey Robertson doesn’t like that, but as non-Catholic — we’re both non-Catholics — we’ve no right to tell the Church how to conduct its business.

It’s also a Church that believes very strongly in rehabilitation, reconciliation, forgiveness and ultimately leaving it to God to judge.

And third, it’s a Church that moves very, very slowly. It’s the old story of when Mao was once asked, “Was the French revolution a success?” He said, “Well, it’s too early to tell.” And the Church deals in issues not by years or even by decades, but by centuries and millennia. And to expect the Church to move as quickly as other more facile institutions is to misunderstand the nature of the Catholic Church.

Dershowitz also questioned why the Catholic Church was singled out for attention, calling abuse “a very widespread problem” and citing “comparable abuses in other religious institutions, in schools, parental abuse of children”.

My children went to a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was an abusive teacher and the principals didn’t report and there was an investigation at the school and they were fined.

This is a common problem – when institutions try to protect their members because think that there are two sides to the story and they also wanna make sure that their members are getting fair and due process.

The Harvard professor said child abuse was “one of the most under-reported crimes in history” but also that it is “over-reported” and that he worried about the rights of those falsely accused of child abuse.

I’m very concerned that Geoffrey Robertson, who’s a great lawyer, is a little insensitive to the rights of priests and others falsely accused, and there have been many such cases as well. There has to be a balance struck.

But, the lawyer noted, “the Pope has said this: truth is its own virtue. The truth should come out.”

Published at 2:52 pm on Monday 4 October 2010. Categories: Australia Benedict XVI Tags: , .
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