Geoffrey Robertson QC, The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, 2010, Penguin Books, London

In September 2010, Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, made a State Visit to the UK in his capacity as a Head of State. The State in question is “The Holy See” whose only physical territory is a small piece of land, the Vatican, in the middle of Rome, home to a few clerics of the Roman Catholic Church. Its recognition as a state came about as a result of a sordid deal in 1929 with the Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini. Although technically different entities, the “Vatican” is for most people synonymous with “The Holy See” and is the more familiar term.

This apparently insignificant entity has diplomatic relations with 178 countries and has special observer status at the UN. It manages this by claiming to speak on behalf of Catholics worldwide. No other religion is accorded this status, and as a religious organisation the Vatican ought to be treated at the UN as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) like the International Humanist and Ethical Union and many much bigger NGOs.

TheCase of the Pope, published a few days ahead of the papal visit, is a blistering attack on this anomalous status of Vatican and the use (or misuse) it makes of it. “Its army of diplomats exploits this privileged status relentlessly, in UN conferences and agencies, to promote its dogmas – to the diminishment of women and divorced couples and the demonization of homosexuals. Statehood enables it to obstruct efforts to combat HIV/AIDS through the use of condoms, and to condemn any family planning measures that smack of toleration of abortion (even to save the life of the mother)”.

The author, Geoffrey Robertson, is a very distinguished lawyer and author, with a strong record in the field of human rights.[1]He analyses at some length why the Vatican fails to meet the internationally recognised criteria for statehood.

The book’s main focus is on the scandal of child abuse within the church, which has rocked the western world and which will probably continue to produce fresh revelations in Africa and Latin America, and the responsibility of the Vatican for what has happened.

The essence of the child abuse scandal is not that child abuse occurred within the church; unfortunately child abusers are to be found in all walks of life. What is really at issue is how the church handled the complaints of abuse. As Robertson says, “tens of thousands of children throughout the world have been sexually abused by priests who have mostly been secretly dealt with by an ecclesiastical law that provides no real punishment and gives them ample opportunity to re-offend. Astoundingly, this has not been recognized as a human rights horror by the UN’s ineffectual Committee charged with the oversight of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child” or by states … that issue reports tracking serious human rights violation”. The church persistently did its best to keep the abuse hidden, failing to report the crimes to the secular authorities of the countries where they occurred, and swearing victims to secrecy on pain of excommunication.

This behaviour within the church “came about because of directives from the Vatican – specifically from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)” (the former Inquisition), whose head from 1981 to 2005 was Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope. “At the direction of the Vatican, wrongdoers were dealt with in a manner that protected them from exposure, silenced their victims, aided and abetted some to move on to commit further offences, and withheld evidence of their crimes from law enforcement authorities. In effect, the church has in many countries been running a parallel system of criminal justice, unbeknownst to and deliberately hidden from the public, police and parliaments”.

The Vatican in general and the CDF in particular made strenuous efforts under Ratzinger to suppress reports of abuse. Only under severe pressure from the courts and the media have they attempted any reform, and they have not apparently extended these attempts to those parts of the world where the church is less likely to be subject to criticism. In fact they have sent many known clerical child abusers from the west to countries in Africa and Latin America.

Ratzinger has expressed shock and horror over the scale of the child abuse where it has been exposed publically, but either he was totally incompetent in his role as Prefect of the CDF if he was genuinely ignorant of what was going on, or he is simply being disingenuous. He has also lashed out at various scapegoats such as secularism and the acceptance of homosexuality, trying to blame the crimes within the church on modern society. But the truth is that clerical abuse of children has been going on for centuries. The problem for Ratzinger and the Vatican is that some parts of modern society are no longer prepared to take the church uncritically at its own estimation, but expect to hold it to the same basic standards on human rights as any other organisation.

Robertson says: “The Vatican’s pretension to statehood cannot be separated from its child abuse crisis, because that crisis has exposed the fact that the church has operated a parallel, para-statal jurisdiction, forgiving sins that host states punish as crimes”. It is surely time to give up this pretence that the Vatican is a state. He suggests that if the Vatican hangs on to its status then it should be held to account as a state with the Pope as its head.

This book is recommended reading for anyone interested in human rights and also for those fighting various forms of religious privilege.