Will the Pope now face trial?

[Originally posted at NOW]

The preeminent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC, whose career is so distinguished that he is one of only three experts nominated to the UN’s Internal Justice Council (that is, he polices the world’s police), wrote a regrettably neglected book in 2010 in which he argued that, in his legal opinion, Joseph Ratzinger (known until yesterday as Pope Benedict XVI) ought to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

As Robertson and many others have noted, Ratzinger personally aided and abetted the rape of children – by shielding perpetrators from punishment; bribing victims and their families into silence; and placing unsuspecting children in the “care” of known rapists, who predictably went on to re-offend. This history is extraordinarily well-documented. We have, to take one of dozens of examples, the infamous letter of 2001, penned in Cardinal Ratzinger’s own hand, in which he threatened to excommunicate any bishop anywhere in the world who informed local police of child rape cases, which were to be handled exclusively by the secretive courts of Canon Law (the Catholic version of shari’a), hushed up in “perpetual silence”.

Indeed, so solid is the evidence against Ratzinger that the Vatican doesn’t try to contest it, basing its defense instead on his alleged legal immunity as a head of state.

This defense was always disputed by Robertson, who noted that Vatican “statehood” was premised entirely on a sleazy quid pro quo with the mass-murderer Benito Mussolini.

But after yesterday’s news, that debate no longer matters. Pope Benedict XVI has become Joseph Ratzinger again; a fallible, non-divine, non-King. Robertson is already on the case, so to speak, writing that Ratzinger now loses whatever immunity he might once have claimed, and has thus become completely fair game. His concluding words are tantalizing ones for all who hold the protection of children from rape to be of greater concern than preserving the powers of religious authoritarians:

“There are many victims of priests permitted by Cardinal Ratzinger to stay in holy orders after their propensity to molest was known, and they would like to sue the ex-pope for damages for negligence. If he steps outside the Vatican, a court may rule that they have a case.”

On attending the Pope's Mass

Pope Benedict XVI wields a stick (Alex Rowell)

I’ll say this much for Joseph Ratzinger: no one could accuse him of over-emotive speechmaking. With his barely-audible lethargic croak, rising infrequently and with great strain to a mumble, there is little danger of him whipping a crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust or vengeance. He would, indeed, be incapable of holding an audience of any kind were it not for his claim to be the quasi-divine “vicar” of Christ on earth, with the “infallibility”, “supreme authority” and other special powers that that heady title entails.

Having reached the waterfront venue in central Beirut a full hour before the Popemobile arrived, and having outlasted many a devout Catholic and hardened journalist in staying till the very end under the roasting sun, I think I can fairly claim to have given my first Mass my best shot. Much as when I visited Jerusalem, I went into the experience with an open mind; willing to be taken wherever my emotions moved me. Ignore, to the extent possible, the unspeakable crimes in which the man is complicit, I told myself. Perhaps seeing him live in the flesh, I speculated, would induce some stirring within me, however slight, of the awe, or contentment, or “agape”, or whatever exactly it is that the faithful get out of these things. Even Larkin admitted to an “awkward reverence”, after all.

And yet, here as in the Old City, precisely the opposite turned out to be the case. Once again it squarely struck me that personal exposure to “holiness” only confirms its essential banality. Just as the Western Wall is really just a wall, and the Stone of the Anointing is really just a stone, so a mediocre man in a hat and costume is really just a mediocre man. Non-Catholics already know this, of course, but as the minutes became hours and the postures succumbed to gravity, I wondered how many of “the flock” were privately beginning to suspect it too. Indeed, when the chairs began to empty by the hundreds while the Baba was still on the mic, I might have even felt a twinge of pity for the geriatric if I didn’t remember what infamous villainy he was capable of.

Not that I intend to go into any of that now, nauseating as it was to see a quarter of a million people cheering a paedophile-enabler (in case you’re interested, the authoritative account of Ratzinger’s widely-underestimated role in these crimes against humanity is human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC’s ‘The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse’). My point, as I was saying – which is one I’ve known since childhood, just as every child in the crowd yesterday knew, as did most of the adults if they only had the honesty to admit it to themselves – is that religion is desperately, unrescuably dull.

It might seem like a frivolous criticism, but it’s enough by itself to discredit the whole enterprise. Take humour alone, or rather the lack thereof. As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead pointed out, “The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature”. How can a book without laughter – that famously most efficacious of medicines; “the sunshine”, as Hugo put it, “that chases winter from the human face” – claim to give comfort to troubled souls, let alone pave the way to eternal bliss?  

Or, in the present case, how can God’s own incarnation fail to keep common mortals listening for a mere two hours? How could he be anything less than brilliantly, incomparably captivating? One might have expected the creator of the Universe to be a bit of a personality. (One might also have expected him to be a bit kinder with the weather – I counted no fewer than four limp bodies carried away on stretchers.)

In short, if yesterday were any indication of what the party’s like up in heaven, it underscored once again why most atheists are happy enough to be excluded.