The Donal Murray resignation: no isolated scandal

Like his Irish colleague Donal Murray last week, Cardinal Bernard Law famously and belatedly "fell on his crozier" in December 2002. Law had engaged in a major cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Boston diocese.

But both men are far from alone among the senior Vatican hierarchy in being forced to resign, either due to their failure to prevent abuse, or engaging in abuse themselves.

The roll call of resignations over abuse allegations in the US that year alone included bishop of Lexington, Kendrick Williams, bishop of Palm Beach, Anthony O'Connell (an Irishman) and bishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee.

A report published in 2004 found that 10,600 children had been abused by priests in the US since 1950, while the diocese of Portland became the first in the world to sue for bankruptcy in the face of compensation claims from clerical-abuse victims five years ago.

Last September, Canadian bishop Raymond Lahey resigned after his arrest for distributing and selling child pornography.

Yet still the scandals emerge.

Just last week, it was reported in the US that the Roman Catholic diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, quietly paid over $20,000 each to two alleged victims who claimed they were abused as teenagers by two priests.

In exchange for the payments, the men agreed not to sue the diocese or the two monsignors, neither of whom have left their posts following the allegations.

In a two-page settlement obtained by the local newspaper the Hartford Courant, the diocese agreed to settle the "disputed claims" in order to avoid "the inconvenience, expense and uncertainty of litigation".

Perhaps another explanation for the approach of the church to such matters is contained in a statement, issued by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, as recently as last autumn.

This argued that the majority of Catholic clergy who committed sex abuse were not paedophiles, but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

As a result, it said it would be "more correct" to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males, than paedophilia.

It also said that the problem of clerical sexual abuse was as big, if not bigger, in other churches.

"As the Catholic church has been busy cleaning its own house, it would be good if other institutions and authorities, where the major part of abuses are reported, could do the same and inform the media about it," Tomasi added.

The Vatican bank scandal

When the body of 62-year-old Roberto Calvi was found hanging from London's Blackfriars bridge in June 1982, his pockets filled with stones and cash, it was to generate a huge financial scandal which reached the highest echelons of the secretive Vatican.

The death of the man known as "God's banker" due to his role as chairman of the private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, followed his disappearance in decidedly murky circumstances from Italy one week earlier.

It soon emerged that the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion, was an influential shareholder in Banco Ambrosiano, which had debts of around $1.5bn when it folded.

An investigation eventually implicated the hugely influential Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, an American born prelate who was head of the Vatican bank from 1971 to 1989.

Calvi himself was known to be personally friendly with Marcinkus, and the bank's missing money turned out to have been loaned to 10 offshore companies controlled by the Vatican bank and Marcinkus.

The church later paid about $250m to creditors as a "goodwill" payment, but declined to concede wrongdoing while admitting "recognition of moral involvement".

Yet far from being open and transparent with the authorities throughout the Banco Ambrosiano inquiry, Marcinkus remained largely hidden in the Vatican, declining to answer questions about the church's role in the creation of the bogus companies.

Later, letters were found that apparently showed he had guaranteed protection to the creditors' investments.

He was formally indicted in 1982. But an Italian court later ruled that he and two others were entitled to immunity from prosecution because they were Vatican employees.

Marcinkus died in the US in February 2006 at the age of 84, but never spoke in detail about the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano.

He also resolutely refused to discuss his associations with other shadowy men in Italian finance.

Meanwhile, two years ago a court in Rome acquitted four men and one woman of Calvi's murder, all of whom were close associates of the dead banker.

The defence had suggested more than once that there were plenty of others who had a motive for Calvi's murder – including some within the Vatican.

'Traditional' sex scandals – the case of Bishop Eamonn Casey

At the time, it was the greatest scandal ever to hit the Catholic church in Ireland.

When it emerged in 1992 that then Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey had fathered a son, the church came under unprecedented media scrutiny, and a deeper questioning of its role as a moral guardian.

But viewed almost 20 years on his sins appear less serious when compared with the far more damaging accusations levelled against clerical sex abusers.

Indeed, Casey's achievements, both as an energetic young curate in Slough, south-east England, and later bishop, were considerable.

They included the establishment of Trocaire, the respected third-world charity, and helping to provide the inspiration for Shelter, the British homeless charity.

Casey and his fellow clergy member, the "singing priest" Fr Michael Cleary, played a prominent role in the triumphant visit of Pope John Paul to Ireland .

But both brought 'shame' on the church with the revelations of their distinctly uncelibate behaviour.

In truth, Casey adopted an approach to Annie Murphy's pregnancy which was thoroughly orthodox in its approach.

Rather than have to deal with censure from the Vatican, he put his former intimate under pressure to avoid scandal by having the child adopted.

His approach in seeking to pay 'hush money' to Murphy, and subsequently repaying more than £70,000 which he had siphoned from Galway diocese funds to support his family, bore all the hallmarks of the secretive approach to such matters amid the Catholic hierarchy.

Casey may have been guilty of a normal sin of the flesh, but he has not been immune from the ongoing clerical abuse scandal rocking the church.

Four years ago, he was accused of sexual abuse by a woman he had known in Ireland.

The Director of Public Prosecutions here eventually decided not to prosecute, while he has also been cleared by a committee of the Irish Bishops Conference in relation to any suspicions of improper behaviour.

But it emerged recently that he is still prohibited from saying mass in public, as a separate Vatican inquiry has not yet cleared him of the allegations.

This is said to be source of considerable "anguish and torment" to Casey, who is in his 80s.

Ecumenism – or improving relations between churches

If the Vatican is seeking to avoid unnecessary controversy and scandal, then someone forgot to tell Pope Benedict – or "God's rottweiler" as he was known when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

He has adopted a continually hardline approach when it comes to a variety of doctrinal issues, not least of these the thorny issue of ecumenism – or greater unity and cooperation between religions.

In an interview with France's Le Figaro newspaper in August 2004, for example, he outlined his opposition to Turkish membership of the EU.

He followed this up with a letter to bishops in which he argued that "the roots that have formed Europe, that have permitted the formation of this continent, are those of Christianity ... Turkey is founded upon Islam... Thus the entry of Turkey into the EU would be anti-historical."

The Vatican attempted to downplay this position in advance of the visit of Ratzinger (who had since become Pope Benedict) to Turkey in 2007, with its spokesman at the time confirming it did not oppose Turkey's joining of the EU .

Yet antipathy to his visit remained, as surveys showed that only one in 10 Turks indicated that they approved of a trip whose primary purpose was actually to encourage ecumenism by improving links between the larger Eastern Orthodox church and Rome.

Their viewpoint will also have been influenced by Benedict's infamous address in Regensburg, Germany, the previous year, in which he quoted Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, from 1391, as saying: "Show me just what Mohammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The decision to use the quote, albeit in the context of a wider 3,900-word address which was intended as an argument for more dialogue between religions, was at best ill-advised and tactless, serving as it did to inflame the Islamic world.

Pope Benedict's belief in the supremacy of the Catholic faith is perhaps best expressed in his notorious Dominus Iesus document published in 2000 which caused offense to Jews and Muslims alike.

"It is also certain that objectively speaking they [all other religions] are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation," it stated.

Just two years ago, Benedict also proclaimed that the reformed or Protestant churches are not churches in the "proper sense", since the "one Church of Christ ... subsists in the Catholic Church".

The July 2007 document also found the Protestant and Christian Orthodox "communities" to be deficient.

Homosexuality

'Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." So wrote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its landmark 1986 "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of homosexual persons".

Under Pope Benedict, the Vatican has adopted an increasingly unyielding approach to homosexuality, culminating in reports last year that he had claimed saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

While several commentators have since argued that his comments were misreported, the Catholic Church under Benedict continues to teach that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It also opposes gay marriage.

Benedict's approach has led to a number of recent embarrassments for the Vatican, not least of these when he was forced to cancel the appointment of Austrian priest Fr Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop of Linz earlier this year.

Critics both in Austria and beyond had complained about various statements made by Fr Wagner, particularly in relation to the Hurricane Katrina disaster which hit New Orleans in 2005.

Writing in a parish newsletter, he said the "amoral conditions in this town are indescribable".

"This is not just any city which has been drowned, but the people's dream town with the 'best brothels and the most beautiful whores'," he added, before suggesting that the hurricane had been a punishment from God for the "spiritual pollution" of New Orleans.

Furthermore, Wagner was on record as describing the Harry Potter book series as "satanic" and as having declared homosexuality to be a curable condition.

Within days of his January appointment, 31 senior priests in the Linz diocese effectively threw down an open challenge to Pope Benedict after they passed a vote of no confidence in Fr Wagner.

But arguably the greatest challenge to the pope's authority came from the cardinal of Vienna, Christoph Schoenborn, an influential supporter of Benedict in the 2005 conclave where he was elected pope. At the time, he was said to have privately expressed his concern at the manner in which the church is being governed by a Pope believed to be acting ever more in isolation.

Meanwhile, those who seek to challenge the church's teachings on homosexuality have been repeatedly silenced by Benedict during his time at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

One of the most notable examples of this is the case of Jesuit theologian Fr John McNeill, who was ultimately expelled by the Vatican from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for his beliefs. He had been a Jesuit for nearly 40 years.

Holocaust denial – the case of Bishop Richard Williamson

It is not often that the all-powerful Pope Benedict XVI, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has been the subject of a public rebuke by the leader of a major western state.

But it was a measure of the anger in his own native Germany over Benedict's decision to welcome back into the church the disgraced bishop and Holocaust denier Richard Williamson, that its Protestant chancellor Angela Merkel did just this last February.

She even accused the Vatican of giving "the impression that Holocaust denial might be tolerated" by welcoming a disgraced bishop back into the church.

In doing so, she was joining a chorus of criticism of the pope among leading German Catholics over the decision, with some openly wondering whether Benedict and the Vatican actually knew what they were doing in attempting to rehabilitate the bishop.

These included his fellow countryman and cardinal, Karl Lehmann, the bishop of Mainz, who described Benedict's decree as a "disaster for all Holocaust survivors" and called on the Vatican to apologise.

In response, the Vatican, as is so often the case, sought to distance itself from the scandal and the views of a man who was excommunicated two decades ago after he was consecrated as a bishop by a conservative Catholic sect, the Society of Saint Pius .

Shortly after the controversy erupted, Benedict declared his "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews and warned against the dangers of denying the Holocaust.

But Williamson's views on the Holocaust had already become known, after they were broadcast on Swedish television a few days before his excommunication was lifted. In it he asserted that historical evidence is "hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in has chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler".

He instead asserted that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, and "not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber".

Williamson subsequently apologised for his views in statements carried on the Zenit Catholic news agency, although a German court later fined Williamson €12,000 for incitement.

Benedict has also faced criticism over his plans to beatify war-time Pope Pius XII, whom many Jews believe could have done more to confront the Nazis.