IJCentral: International Justice Central

By Pam Spees*

On September 13, 2011, eight people of different national origins, ranging in age from 21 to 50-years-old and who suffered rape, torture and sexual assault at the hands of Catholic priests, came together in The Hague with the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to request that the ICC prosecutor launch an investigation into the widespread and systematic commission of these offenses against children and vulnerable adults by priests and others associated with the Catholic church all over the world. Originally from Belgium, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, they delivered to the court more than 22,000 pages of evidence which sets out the policies and practices formed and implemented at the highest levels of the Vatican that facilitate and enable rape.

As detailed in the Article 15 communication, they requested an investigation into the individual criminal responsibility of the four highest ranking officials in the Vatican: Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and Cardinal William Levada. Evidence collected over the past decade and more through investigations around the world has established that the Church’s crime is not simply in failing to act in these cases, which would be bad enough. Rather, one sees a Church in action – busily shifting offending priests from place to place, destroying evidence, silencing and blaming victims, all the while knowingly placing others at risk. Church officials, from the top down, have calculated over and over again that the harm they knowingly enable is an acceptable risk when weighed against the potential for embarrassment of the church.  In April, SNAP and CCR filed a supplemental communication with the prosecutor which provided additional evidence and documentation that had come to light in the seven months since the initial communication was filed, which showed more instances of obstruction of justice, shielding of offending priests, and failure to cooperate with civil authorities on the part of Church officials.

The stories of those who brought the case to the ICC are illustrative of the gravity of the crimes, the facilitation of the crimes by Church officials, policies and practice, and the long, awful arc of injustice encountered in the Church:

- Rita Milla was very devout and considered becoming a nun at the time she was raped by seven priests. She became pregnant as a result. One of the priests urged her to get an abortion and when she refused, she was taken to the Philippines where he had a brother who was a doctor. The priest told Rita’s parents that she was going to study medicine there. The ‘abuse’ became known when Rita nearly died as a result of complications with the pregnancy and her mother learned of the situation. Rita ultimately gave birth to a daughter and paternity tests undertaken years later confirmed one of the offending priests as the father. Another of the priests later confessed and produced a number of letters from the archdiocese of Los Angeles which revealed that archdiocesan officials had been paying him to stay out of the country to avoid legal trouble and scandal. At the same time, the archdiocese was representing to Milla and her lawyers that it had no idea of the offending priests’ whereabouts.

- Emmanuel Henckens was raped by two priests at the age of 12 when he was at a boarding school in Belgium. One of the priests has since died. 

- Benjamin Kitobo of the DRC was raped multiple times by a Belgian priest running a seminary in the DRC, who is now believed to be setting up orphanages in Rwanda.
-Wilfried Fesselman of Germany was sexually assaulted by a priest who was shielded and shifted in an archdiocese which was overseen by Joseph Ratzinger when he served as archbishop of Munich and Freising.

-Phil Saviano was raped repeatedly, from ages 11-12, by a priest in the United States. As an adult, Phil fought to obtain the priest’s personnel file and discovered that at least six bishops had known about the offenses the priest had been committing and that dozens of children had been sexually assaulted in four different states. Still, church officials kept shifting him from one location to another without notifying civil law enforcement authorities, warning parishioners or removing him from the priesthood.

-Megan Peterson, who at 21 was the youngest survivor in the group, was raped multiple times by a priest in 2004 when she was 14-years-old. Megan’s assaults were reported later after she confided to a school counselor who was a mandatory reporter. Prior to that, the priest had been transferred back to India when concerns about his conduct with another teenager were expressed to diocesan officials. Upon his return to India he was believed to be overseeing 40 schools in the Ootacamund Diocese. Church officials in Rome who are responsible for handling allegations of sexual violence by priests were made aware of the case as early as 2005. The local prosecutor brought charges against the priest and sought his extradition, even issuing an Interpol Red Notice.  Officials in charge of these issues at the Vatican had done nothing to ensure his return to the face the charges.

The experiences of Rita, Emmanuel, Benjamin, Phil and Megan, are not unique. In terms of sheer numbers globally, estimates of children and adults sexually assaulted by priests and others associated with the Church are in the hundreds of thousands. But their stories also reveal a dynamic around these crimes that most people find difficult to comprehend, and one that deepens the harm of the assaults—the Church’s protection of offending priests and its calculated indifference to victims.

Indeed, many victims do not survive the effects of these violations which are compounded exponentially by the Church’s response and repeated betrayal. Also included in the documentation submitted were findings by commissions of inquiry and grand juries concerning people who had committed suicides as a result of their sexual assaults and the trauma exacerbated by the Church response.

Rita described the church’s response in her case as feeling like “God hanging up the phone on me.” Another survivor in Poland described it as feeling as though “we’ve lost our grounding on Earth.” When commenting on the widespread offenses in Ireland documented in an Amnesty International report, Frances Fitzgerald, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs in Ireland, observed that such treatment “would be horrifying if it were done to prisoners of war, never mind little boys and girls.” Yet many still question the gravity of these offenses and whether they belong before the ICC.

The communication sets out how these offenses meet the criteria of Art. 7 of the Rome Statute. With respect to the Court’s temporal jurisdiction, the complaint brought forward three complainants against whom offenses were committed since the statute’s entry into force in 2002—Megan Peterson and two others who wished to remain confidential. The wealth of evidence of crimes occurring prior to the Court’s entry into force is relevant and necessary to establish the threshold of crimes against humanity, i.e. that the crimes are occurring on a widespread or systematic basis. (In this case, we believe we have provided enough evidence and analysis to indicate that the offenses are occurring on both a widespread and systematic basis.) Moreover, the policies and practices at issue and which give rise to the individual criminal responsibility of the Church hierarchy predate the statute’s entry into force and continue to this day.

With respect to the requirements of territoriality or nationality jurisdiction, the communication provides ample evidence that the crimes are occurring in many countries which have ratified the Rome Statute in accordance with Art. 12(2)(a). Moreover, three of the persons name in the complaint—Ratzinger, Sodano, Bertone—are nationals of States that have ratified the ICC, i.e. Germany and Italy, and are therefore subject to the ICC’s jurisdiction pursuant to Art. 12(2)(b).

The communication also sets out the ways in which the doctrine of superior responsibility enshrined in Art. 28(b) of the Rome Statute applies to this situation.  Each of the persons named in the communication have held a position in the chain of authority in the Vatican where they failed to exercise control properly over subordinates where they knew or consciously disregarded information which clearly indicated that the subordinates were committing or about to commit such crimes of sexual violence. In descending order, the Pope, the Secretaries of State Sodano and Bertone, and Head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, William Levada (the position formerly held by Ratzinger) had authority over the handling of allegations of sexual violence by priests. Finally, each of them failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within their power to prevent or repress the commission, or to submit the matter to competent authorities for investigation and prosecution. Indeed, the evidence shows that quite often church policy was to make it more difficult for competent civil authorities to investigate and prosecute.

In the weeks after the filing and thanks to an extraordinary level of media coverage globally, SNAP was contacted by hundreds of survivors from 65 different countries who have reached out for support and assistance. These are people who no longer need to feel isolated and alone with their horrific experiences. SNAP now has affiliated survivor support groups in 12 countries. The priest in Megan’s case was finally arrested by authorities in India in early 2012 and is facing extradition to the United States, which is believed to be largely the result of the attention sparked by Megan’s brave participation in the ICC effort.

While the office of the prosecutor at the ICC reviews and considers the evidence and legal basis for the liability of these men, from a survivor’s perspective the effort is already having a remarkable and empowering impact: Survivors are finding each other.

* Pam Spees is a senior attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and lead attorney in the International Criminal Court complaint against the pope for crimes against humanity. Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests: www.snapnetwork.org and Center for Constitutional Rights: www.ccrjustice.org