The lasting legacy of the late Pope Benedict was the influence he exerted over the direction of the Catholic Church for 22 years, from being head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until his resignation as Pope.
During these years, he consolidated immense personal power which he used to ruthlessly silence dissent and theological opinion different from his own.
He will be remembered for his silencing of at least seven Irish priests because of their open-minded views on gay people and the ordination of women. It was not just Irish theologians who were silenced and excommunicated, but over 100 international liberation theologians as well.
In his confronting of clerical abuse within the Irish church, he looked for scapegoats rather than admitting it was a structural problem. He scapegoated the Irish bishops and the loss of faith in Ireland for clerical sex abuse, as outlined in the Ryan and Murphy reports.
His commission of inquiry into Irish clerical sex abuse, led by Archbishop Seán Patrick O’Malley – at which I gave evidence – was a whitewash as it reported widespread doctrinal dissent in the Irish church as a cause rather than an effect of clerical sex abuse. He refused to accept that clerical sex abuse and its cover-up had anything to do with Vatican policy.
Yet in 2001, with the authority of Pope John Paul II, he sent secret letters to every bishop in the world instructing them not to report any credible allegations of clerical abuse to the civil authorities, but to forward them to the Vatican instead.
It was the failure of the Vatican to hand over reports of clerical sexual abuse in the Cloyne diocese to the Irish authorities that led to the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, delivering his Dáil attack on Vatican hyprocisy and intransigence.
Even in his retirement, Benedict became a focus of those who resisted Pope Francis’s new openess. His death signals the demise of a repressive Catholic Church.