Princes of the Church Live as Princes of the World - 10 May 2002

A commonplace scene at any American airport these days, yet a scene which if we'd had during any recent American war - the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam - we'd have felt this country really is in a war zone.

A line or queue of men and women lined up to go aboard a plane across the Pacific to Taiwan.

They've all been through the detector gateway - all except one, who, like me, points to his chest because he's forbidden to go through the arch for the same reason he can't use a cell phone.

When this first happened a friend said: "Oh my goodness, how about your broadcasting? Hasn't the microphone become a hazardous weapon?"

Strangely I've had to give the same answer to many people - No, a microphone receives an impulse, it doesn't emit one and possibly scramble the beat of your pacemaker.

Entendu? - understood. Back to the line of travellers on their way to Taiwan.

They're shuffling past the last checkpoint on their way into the plane.

They'd gone through the arch but one or two are checked again with a wand detector just in case, while a few feet away a national guardsman, a rifle slung over his shoulder, keeps a sidelong watch.

That's the startling new "we're at war" note.

But then the checked-out passengers reassemble to turn in their boarding passes and go off into the plane's walkway.

One of the queue is a slim, dapper, 50-ish man with sandy gold hair.

Suddenly a hovering security guard - female - steps briskly in his path and without a Good Morning or a how-de-do says five words: "Random check, go over there".

Whoops, why, what?

Only three words this time: "Go over there."

One or two passengers thought they knew the face - was it Robert Redford? Maybe, at last, it was Elvis.

It was neither and the rude lady, who delivered the three-word order, was not to be put off by maybe planted decoys who've been cued to say: "Oh look it's Senator so and so".

The lady performing the random check was pleasant, apologetic and thorough. She went through his briefcase and all was acceptable. Goldilocks went aboard.

He's a businessman and travels to many countries, puts about a hundred thousand miles a year on. Long, trans-ocean trips.

After one of them he developed what long-distance travellers are surprised to develop: a tender, painful spot in a thigh, the calf, the pelvis - a clot, technically known as a deep vein thrombosis.

A blood clot in a vein which can travel around and be, well, deadly.

This had happened twice to our long-distance traveller and by the second time he knew for keeps that the condition can threaten anyone who sits for hours in a plane and doesn't stroll or stretch.

Of course it hits people whose blood tends to clot, a condition most people don't know about until it happens.

If, after such an episode, you discover that you have this tendency then for a time - or like two of my long-distance flying friends, for a lifetime - you go on a blood-thinning drug.

No need to panic next time you fly but getting up every hour, pacing, going to the bathroom, joshing the pretty stewardess - why not? - these are all ways of guarding your health and preventing a clot.

A tiny percentage of flyers get it but a sizeable percentage of regular long-distance flyers.

I should add that the sandy golden-haired, 50-ish traveller was former vice-president to the United States Dan Quayle, and he's now a member of that mysterious profession known as a consultant.

He travels in the interests of, among other corporations, a health advisory firm that publicises the risks of - guess what - deep vein thrombosis!

There is a postscript I must add to the recent talk on the scandal which we saw spreads worldwide, far beyond the Catholic church.

But it was the accident of having televised the criminal trial of a single priest which opened up the appalling range and frequency of paedophilia among Catholic priests in this country. A country in which one American in five is a Catholic.

I didn't go into it way back then in January because the immediate reactions among the populace, religious or non-religious, appeared to me to be hasty and superficial - abolish celibacy, arrest the cardinal of Boston, liberalise the church.

Well you may remember we brought it down, I think, to the crucial question - when and how and under what circumstances can the law of the land, any land, override canon law?

From subsequent letters I was surprised to discover how few people, non-Catholics, knew that the church is indeed - has been for over 80 years - a law unto itself and long ago a clause in canon law faced the problem of paedophilia and said: "A priest who violates his vow of celibacy with a minor is to be punished with just penalties, not excluding ..." - what it appears to consider the extreme penalty - "... not excluding dismissal from the clerical state."

I don't know what those just penalties have been in the past. It's up to the local bishop to say and to enforce.

And of course this is the point at which the outraged Catholic public says, But why can't the district attorney just supplant, oust, the bishop in the name of the law - our law?

I've not yet seen an exposition of this mystery, indeed this week the mystery quickened and deepened.

In the now many revelations of paedophilia and the hiding of it by hush money given by the bishops, if there's been one man marked out for villainy it is Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston.

In the trial of that priest who's now in jail, it came out that his bishop - then Bishop Law - knew of the man's sad and unbreakable habit and moved him after each incident from parish to parish and paid out fortunes to silence the parents or the 150 victims in over 30 years.

Cardinal Law has, throughout a rising public campaign, refused to resign.

This week, however, the cardinal was called on to testify - and I don't believe he was offered anything so peremptory as a subpoena - he was asked to make a deposition presumably in his chambers.

Then we heard that the public prosecutor might be foiled. There was a rumour that Cardinal Law was about to be transferred from his post in the archdiocese of Boston to take up a post in the Vatican, where, of course, he would be immune from civil authorities.

However, it didn't happen, though the confidential word from Vatican correspondents is that the Pope still very much wants to protect the Cardinal from civil, not to mention criminal, punishment.

The cardinal, on Wednesday, then began three days of his deposition in closed court in Boston. And he spent five hours in giving tortured replies to direct questions from lawyers representing 86 plaintiffs - 86 men who claim that the jailed priest had abused them in the past 20 years.

The cardinal was being asked why he'd backed out of a multimillion dollar settlement in hush money to stifle these claims.

Well, he said in effect, there would be no money left in the church to pay off similar claims by about another 70 victims.

These facts - indeed the very substance of the case, is so vivid, so easily and awfully imagined by ordinary people - that you'd never have gathered from the cardinal's responses that we were talking about a human being grossly assaulting another human being.

At one point a lawyer wanted to make one thing clear. Did the cardinal think that the sexual abuse of a young boy by a priest was wrong?

A pause. "Absolutely," said the cardinal.

Otherwise he spoke in what John Maynard Keynes bad-temperedly accused all American professions - politicians, clerics, financiers, lawyers - of talking "a nightmare legalistic mumbo jumbo".

Asked if in 1984, when the cardinal first heard of the priest's inclinations - when in fact he moved the priest into another parish - did he then know that the priest had "a sexually abusive past"?

The cardinal - who could have said yes and the oftener I shifted him the more I knew.

What he did reply was this: "I was aware there was involvement because of the - because of having removed him out of one parish and putting him between assignments before sending him back to another and then necessitating a letter that would not have been necessary unless there had been a problem."

He might have been a CEO of Enron saying why a vice-president had been promoted or demoted or something.

So why did the cardinal go on and on moving the man to different parishes after time and again the man performed the abuse on other boys, to the number of 150?

Oh that, the cardinal said, he really was unaware of what he's come to call "this pathology" because he left it to the bishops of each parish.

Both in Rome and in Boston all the churchly discussion and now the testimony has a weird air of total unworldliness, as if no cleric apart from the Pope, has an inkling that we're talking about something which in our world is crime.

Maybe Peggy Noonan, a former Bush speechwriter - herself a Catholic - has put her finger on it when she wrote the other day: "The princes of the church live as princes of the world.

"They live in great mansions in the heart of great cities, dine with senators and editors. They have grown worldly in the worst sense. They are surrounded by people who serve them, drive them, answer their call.

"They're used to being obeyed. They are detached from life as it is suffered by ordinary people.

I have never seen star treatment ennoble its object".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.