Pontiff in the Slammer

I’ll never forget the morning of March 31, 2001. I was 12 and on vacation in Aspen with my family, getting ready to fumble my way down a set of rutted ski slopes.

Checking the local weather that morning, I turned on the hotel television set, which had already been set to CNN Headline News. Before the screen even warmed up, the initial sounds I heard from the speakers were spasmodic gunfire amidst the muffled hollers of a foreign tongue. This was the morning I watched Yugoslav security forces storm the Belgrade villa of the revolting former president Slobodan Miloševic, eventually leading to his transfer to The Hague on charges related to his rapaciously Hitlerian campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

It was then that I was first convinced of some concept of international justice. As a particularly cynical twelve-year-old (having seen the Rwandan genocide come and go, as well as the humanitarian inaction of the great Western powers of the time), I had become accustomed to a world where the perpetrators and leaders of sadistic massacres and state-sponsored rape never seemed to have their day in court. So when I saw the news footage of the Serbian aggressor’s downfall, I could only think, “maybe we do have a global system that finally nicked the bastard, after all.”

My devotion to the noble causes of universal jurisdiction and the International Criminal Court is still based on this too-rarely vindicated optimism. It was said by anti-apartheid proponent Albie Sachs that, “all revolutions are impossible until they happen; then they become inevitable.” Beyond the much-welcome fall of South African institutionalized racism, this can, of course, be said of the unprecedented successes of international laws and conventions. This can also be said of the revolution of thought that marked the advent of Enlightenment values. The same can be said about the sweeping revolutions of 1989, when social democrats, capitalists, poets, the West, the East, and free spirits alike rejoiced in the evaporation of Soviet totalitarianism (which, at the time, the CIA insisted was still enjoying a booming economy and stability).

And this conquering of “impossibilities” can also be invoked when people say the guilty Vatican leadership is too powerful to ever feel the brute force of accountability or secular justice systems. 

The recent cries to charge Pope Benedict XVI for his role in the global child rape scandal simply do not have to be interpreted as attempts to level a religious institution to the ground. To take the spiritually sympathetic point of view, this is no more an indictment of the average Catholic than child molestation in the American classroom is a fair representation of public education. Any intellectually honest individual must see this as an unraveling of Nixonian obstructions and the cover-up mentality of a hugely influential leader.  

Because of this, I, without apology or a comforting hint of irony, throw my full support behind those (including Richard Dawkins and British solicitor Mark Stevens) who have contacted the International Criminal Court, appealed to British legal authorities, and have taken other landmark steps toward facilitating the warrant for His Holiness’s arrest during his upcoming fall trip to England.

For all the lives he has helped debase, for all the clerically defiled children to whom he did not bother with a moment’s solicitude, and for all the believing Catholics he has betrayed with his inaction, concealments, and criminal disregard, it is time to slap the Bishop of Rome in irons, toss him into the back of a common paddy wagon, and take the disgraced and discredited character downtown.