VATICAN CITY – The future Pope Benedict XVI refused to defrock an American priest who confessed to molesting numerous children and who served prison time for it, simply because the cleric wouldn’t agree to the discipline.
The case provides the latest evidence of how changes in church law under Pope John Paul II frustrated and hamstrung United States bishops struggling with an abuse crisis that would eventually explode.
Court documents in the case of the late Rev Alvin Campbell of Illinois show Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, following church law at the time, turned down a bishop’s plea to remove the priest for no other reason than the abuser’s refusal to go along with it.
“The petition in question cannot be admitted in as much as it lacks the request of Father Campbell himself,” Ratzinger wrote in a July 3, 1989, letter to Bishop Daniel Ryan of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois.
With the church still recovering from a notable departure of priests in the 1970s to marry, John Paul made it tougher to leave the priesthood after assuming the papacy in 1978.
A consequence of that policy was that, as the priest sex abuse scandal arose in the US, bishops were no longer able to sidestep the lengthy church trial necessary for laicisation.
New rules in 1980 removed bishops’ option of requesting laicisations of abusive priests without holding a church trial. Those rules were eased two decades later amid an explosion of abuse cases in the United States.
Campbell’s bishop had requested he be quickly defrocked, in part to spare the victims the pain of a trial.
Bishops retained the right to remove priests from ministry or to go through with a trial and recommend to Rome a cleric’s defrocking, and nothing prevented them from reporting such crimes to police as they should have done, the Vatican has argued.
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