The Pope who saw no evil, heard no evil, and hushed all evil

At first glance, the joint initiative of political journalist and author Christopher Hitchens and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested over crimes against humanity as soon as he sets foot on British soil (a visit has been scheduled for next September) might easily be dismissed as an ambitious media stunt. Both Hitchens and Dawkins are celebrity atheists and the frisson caused by the mere suggestion of the law so much as laying a finger on the Head of the Catholic Church and of the Vatican city-state has already attracted plenty of media attention.

However: imagine Joseph Ratzinger behind bars, as the man who hushed the criminal case of a child-molesting priest for the sake of preserving the image of the Catholic Church, and the media stunt becomes an extraordinary statement about equality before the law and a firm declaration of secularism.

In the 1990s, Ratzinger, while still a cardinal, halted the trial of criminal Fr Murphy, the priest who is believed to have molested around 200 boys at St John's School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, between 1950 and 1974. Ratzinger instigated a cover-up with no apparent sign of either compunction or the slightest sympathy for the victims’ suffering, and despite objections from another archbishop. In fact, the victims were sworn to silence, and the child molester continued to work freely with children in another Diocese.

Fr Murphy was never defrocked, but Dawkins and Hitchens’s action clearly aims at divesting the Pope of the untouchability conferred by holiness, wholly man-made in the State of Vatican.

The State of Vatican itself has pretty unholy origins: it was created in 1929 after negotiations between the notorious dictator Benito Mussolini (then Italy’s prime minister) and the Holy See, which were sealed by the Lateran Accords. As the Vatican is not a full member of the UN, it is possible that the Pope, as a Head of State, is not granted immunity from prosecution, despite the Vatican’s assertions to the opposite. Even if the Pope is recognised as a Head of State, however, he may still be stripped of his immunity if his complicity in the case of mass child abuse is classified as a crime against humanity: according to Article 27 of the Rome Statute Of The International Criminal Court:

‘This Statute shall apply equally to all persons without any distinction based on official capacity. In particular, official capacity as a Head of State or Government, a member of a Government or parliament, an elected representative or a government official shall in no case exempt a person from criminal responsibility under this Statute, nor shall it, in and of itself, constitute a ground for reduction of sentence.’

Not only would it be pretty ludicrous to suggest that the Pope’s complicity to mass child molesting constitutes an ‘act of state’, and as such exempts him from criminal prosecution, but if the Vatican insists on using a legal technicality as a defence for the Pope's unscrupulous treatment of the victims of a serial molester, it will expose flagrantly the principles of the Catholic Church as a travesty of Christian ethics. But then, as Edmond de Goncourt put it, ‘if there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion’.

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