In its long struggle to grapple with sexual abuse, the Vatican often cites as a major
turning point the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly.

The decision, in an apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II, earned Cardinal Ratzinger,
now Benny the Rat, a reputation as the Vatican insider who most clearly recognized the
threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the Roman Catholic Church.

But church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001
decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.

The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became so
concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican convened a secret
meeting to hear their complaints - an extraordinary example of prelates from across the
globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform, and one that had not previously been revealed.

And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has been described
by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices. It was mainly a belated reaffirmation
of longstanding church procedures that at least one bishop attending the meeting argued
had been ignored for too long, according to church documents and interviews.

The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922,
documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of
that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases
undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.