Child abuse scandal spoils pope's feast day (News Feature)

By Peter Mayer Mar 19, 2010, 15:40 GMT

Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI was forced to spend his feast day mulling over a damaging sex abuse scandal that has stirred deep discord within the Catholic Church.

Hours before attending a string-quartet performance on St Joseph day on Friday, Joseph Ratzinger put pen to paper and signed a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics dealing with the widely publicised child sexual abuse involving priests, the Vatican confirmed.

The document, which the Vatican planned to publish on Saturday, was expected to deliver the pontiff's most articulated response to date on the topic.

But many commentators were left wondering whether it would be a case of 'too little, too late.'

Benedict began working on the letter in February, when he summoned Ireland's bishops to the Vatican to discuss a government commissioned report alleging that top clerics had engaged in a cover-up of hundreds of abuse cases dating from the 1970s.

Since that meeting, an increasing number of revelations have surfaced of abuse by priests at Catholic schools and institutions in the pontiff's native Germany, but also Austria, the Netherlands and Brazil.

In Germany, accusations of failure to act decisively against so-called predator priests have veered towards the pontiff himself as his past role as Joseph Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981, has come under scrutiny.

Repeated cases of sexual abuse at least by one priest transferred to the archdiocese during Ratzinger's tenure have come to light.

The archbishop's deputy at the time, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, has taken full responsibility for the handling of the case, saying that Ratzinger was not aware of it.

'But that is hardly an excuse for the Archbishop, who is ultimately responsible for the administration of his diocese,' said Hans Kueng one of Benedict's most vocal critics.

Dissident Swiss theologian Kueng says it is time the pontiff himself apologies for the way the church has handled abuse cases by priests.

'Honesty demands that Joseph Ratzinger himself, the man who for decades has been principally responsible for the worldwide cover-up, at last pronounce his own 'mea culpa,' Kueng wrote in the US-based National Catholic Reporter.

A one-time colleague of Ratzinger - both were appointed by Pope John XXIII as part of a group of experts working on the so-called Second Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s - Kueng pointed to the position Benedict held before his election as pope in 2005, that of the Vatican's main enforcer on matters of discipline.

'In his (Ratzinger's) 24 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from around the world, all cases of grave sexual offences by clerics had to be reported, under strictest secrecy, to his curial office, which was exclusively responsible for dealing with them,' Kueng said.

'Ratzinger himself, in a letter on 'grave sexual crimes' addressed to all the bishops under the date of 18 May, 2001, warned the bishops, under threat of ecclesiastical punishment, to observe 'papal secrecy' in such cases,' he added.

Papal spokesman Father Federico Lombardi in defending the church's handling of the abuse cases denied last week that the instructions contained in the 2001 letter, precluded bishops from cooperating with civil authorities over investigations on such cases.

But criticism has also come from more mainstream Catholic voices than Kueng's.

'Enough. We must seriously clean up our church. The guilty must be condemned and the victims compensated,' German Cardinal Walter Kasper was quoted as saying by the Rome daily La Repubblica, in reference to the scandal.

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, recently ran a column by Italian historian Lucetta Scaraffia, in which she argued that if more women had occupied decision-making roles in the church, the cover-up may not have occurred.

'We can hypothesize that a greater female presence, not at a subordinate level, would have been able to rip the veil of masculine secrecy that in the past often covered the denunciation of these misdeeds with silence,' she wrote.