The pope is attacking the Belgian police for doing their job: seizing documents and detaining church officials in the course of investigating sexual abuse within the church. While I don't know the specifics of the Belgian situation, I'm not inclined to give the institutional church the benefit of the doubt -- though church officials claim that the police are disturbing the work of an internal committee investigating claims of child abuse, it's not clear why they expect the work of this committee to supersede secular law.
Church officials also say they want to protect the privacy of victims (a valid concern) but it ought to be clear that the demands of justice require secular law enforcement authorities, who are bound by law to protect victims, to undertake this inquiry. Indeed, it is much more likely that the privacy of perpetrators will be protected if the investigation is performed by an organization that has shown it is more than willing to shield wrongdoers from accountability.
The Vatican secretary of state's comparison of the Belgian police to communist thugs and the statement that detained bishops were deprived of food and water (a claim denied by the Belgian government), meanwhile, are just tone-deaf attempts to portray the church as a victim, something deeply disrespectful to those who have actually suffered in this crisis.
When will the pope and the Catholic Church learn that this kind of response is more damaging than truth and repentance?
-- Tim Fernholz
