Pope stirs up victim fury with child sex comments
By John Cooney Religion Correspondent
VICTIMS of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict's claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn't considered an 'absolute evil' as recently as the 1970s. [read full text]
In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI also claimed that child pornography was increasingly considered "normal" by society.
"In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children," the Pope said. "It was maintained -- even within the realm of Catholic theology -- that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a 'better than' and a 'worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself."
The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached "an unimaginable dimension" which required the Catholic Church to accept the "humiliation" as a call for renewal.
Asking how sexual abuse exploded within the Church, the German Pontiff called on senior clerics "to repair as much as possible the injustices that occurred" and to help victims heal their hurts through a better presentation of the Christian message.
"We cannot remain silent about the context of these times in which these events have come to light," he said, citing the growth of child pornography "that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society," he said.
Outraged
But outraged Dublin victim Andrew Madden accused the Pope of not knowing that child pornography was actually the viewing of images of children being sexually abused, and should be named as such.
He said: "That is not normal. I don't know what company the Pope has been keeping for the past 50 years."
Pope Benedict also said sexual tourism in the third world was "threatening an entire generation". Angry abuse victims in America last night said that while some church officials have blamed the liberalism of the 1960s for the church's sex abuse scandals and cover-up catastrophes, Pope Benedict had come up with a new theory of blaming the 1970s. "Catholics should be embarrassed to hear their Pope talk again and again about abuse while doing little or nothing to stop it and to mischaracterise this heinous crisis," said Barbara Blaine, the head of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
"It is fundamentally disturbing to watch a brilliant man so conveniently misdiagnose a horrific scandal," she added.
"The Pope insists on talking about a vague 'broader context' he can't control, while ignoring the clear 'broader context' he can influence -- the long-standing and unhealthy culture of a rigid, secretive, all-male church hierarchy fixated on self-preservation at all costs. This is the 'context' that matters."
The latest controversy comes as the German magazine 'Der Spiegel' continues to investigate the Pope's role in allowing a paedophile priest to work with children in the 1980s when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich.
Anger
It also come only days after Irish abuse victims vented their anger and dismay at the Murphy Commission's disclosure that the Vatican initially rejected a verdict by a Dublin church tribunal to defrock the now jailed Fr Tony Walsh in 1993.
The Vatican proposed a 10-year confinement for Walsh in a monastery, even though he had been diagnosed by psychiatrists as a serial abuser.
It was only when Walsh was imprisoned shortly afterwards that Cardinal Desmond Connell begged the late Pope John Paul II to remove Walsh from the priesthood which was belatedly facilitated by Cardinal Ratzinger, by now the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith dealing with abuse cases.
In his address, Pope Benedict specifically insisted that the church needed to train prospective priests better so that abusers were not ordained, and he committed the church to help heal victims of paedophile priests.
This article was found at:
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/pope-stirs-up-victim-fury-with-child-sex-comments-2468163.html
COMMENT by Perry Bulwer, December 22, 2010
There is a lot that can be said about these latest comments from the pope, but I'll just make one point related to this quote from the article:
The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached "an unimaginable dimension" which required the Catholic Church to accept the "humiliation" as a call for renewal.
There has been child abuse in the Catholic church for hundreds of years. Also, the Vatican has known for decades about this current scandal See the links above and the article about the 1963 letter from a church expert to the pope. The problem was already rampant then. It was already at an "unimaginable dimension" in the early sixties, and grew ever more unimaginable and wide-spread. Where exactly was the line drawn at which the pope and his henchmen would do something, anything, to protect children from beastly priests?
It seems to me that the pope's words can be interpreted to mean that the unimaginable dimension he refers to is not the scope of child abuse, but the scope of press exposure in the information age. Each individual scandal became harder and harder to conceal, and it was only after the individual scandals became a world-wide scandal thanks to intensive media/internet coverage that the church took any action to deal with its humiliation on the world stage.
If the Vatican, Benedict and prior popes had a properly working moral compass they would have done the right thing long, long ago. As it is, church officials are still in denial and still refusing to do the right things.
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