Well, this is a rather dramatic turn of events. The article’s title is a bit of an exaggeration as Richard Dawkins has since clarified that the idea came mainly from Christopher Hitchens and he never actually said that he would personally arrest the Pope, but the basic facts remain the same. Two lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, will try to bring the Pope to justice for his role in covering up child abuse cases involving clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. They will either convince the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch a civil suit of their own or have the case referred to the International Criminal Case.

The case will of course be complicated by the embarrassment that this will bring to the British government and the fact that the Pope is the head of state of the Vatican City, but the current plan is for something to be ready by the time of the Pope’s planned visit to the UK in September later this year. This may end up as being no more than a publicity stunt and the British atheists seem to happy if all that they’ve managed to achieve is to force the Pope to cancel the trip.

I’m not really up to writing about the specifics but here are some links for anyone interested to follow up with:

1. This article has details about the specific case that they’re going to try to charge the Pope with because he personally made the decision not to defrock the offending priest before he became the Pope against the recommendations of the local diocese.
2. This blog post covers the same case and points out that Benedict XVI was reluctant to defrock the priest because he was so young at the time. Presumably, this is at least partially due to concern that the Roman Catholic Church is finding it hard to recruit priests and that firing him would deprive the church of many more years of service. It also highlights that the Pope’s sympathies lay mainly with the abuser instead of the victim, perhaps out of the conviction that the church should try to save those who have sinned and to forgive them if they have repented.
3. This article outlines the general policies set out by Benedict XVI before he became the Pope on how the church should deal with child abuse cases. In particular, he recommended that such cases should not reported to the legal authorities. Instead, bishops were instructed to pressure both the victim and the perpetrator to not talk about the case and to threaten them with excommunication if they tried to. Bishops were also instructed that all child abuse cases should be managed directly by Rome and that these instructions were so secret that they should be kept locked in a safe at all times.

Finally, just to point out how out of touch the church is with public sentiment, here are some articles detailing some of the reactions from members of the clergy to these events:

1. In response to the proposal by the legislature in Connecticut to lift the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases, allowing cases from more than 30 years ago to be criminally prosecuted, US, the bishops have pleaded with their congregations to oppose these changes in the law. They claim that this would put all church institutions at risk and undermine their mission.
2. In Italy, a retired bishop said to the influential Roman Catholic website Pontifex that these child abuse allegations are being orchestrated by the Jews and that this is an all out assault from these “God-killers” to destroy the Roman Catholic church. He also basically explains that Hitler had good reasons for trying to exterminate the Jews.
3. In response from criticism from some parties that child abuse cases are so common within the Roman Catholic Church because of the requirement that all priests must be celibate, the Vatican’s Secretary of State has claimed that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia but that there is a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. I’m not sure how this construes a defense of the church, but he definitely seems to be saying that gays are more likely to be pedophiles, which is patently ridiculous.