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	Benedict XVI in America Berkshire Eagle April 20, 2008 http://www.berkshireeagle.com/editorials/ci_8984433 By expressing his shame in the church's legacy of sex abuse to reporters while flying to the United States last week, Benedict signaled that he would become the first pope to fully address this scandal even before his plane had landed at Andrews Air Force Base. The pope's meeting with five victims of clergy abuse in the chapel of the papal embassy carried significant symbolism beyond the small numbers and brevity of the meeting, and gave Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley the opportunity to present the pontiff with a notebook listing the names of victims of sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese. It exceeded 1,000. The revelation of serial molesters in the Boston Archdiocese blew the lid off the church's clergy sex abuse scandal, prompting victims of abuse in other dioceses across the nation to come forward. The harm these relatively few abusive priests were able to do grew geometrically over the decades because of the refusal of their superiors to confront their crimes. Instead the priests were shuttled from church to church, where they collected new victims among parishioners who had no way of knowing that what was among them. Benedict told the nation's bishops Thursday that the abuse crisis was "sometimes very badly handled," and while Catholics undoubtedly appreciate the acknowledgment, the pope grievously understated the situation. The mishandling of pedophile priests turned a bad but still solvable problem into a shameful scandal, capped by the Vatican's spiriting away of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law one step ahead of the Massachusetts attorney general's office. Cardinal Law's willful ignorance of the pedophiles in his diocese and his angry denials made him the personification of the Church's head-in-sand approach to the scandal in its midst, and his ability to escape punishment while those abused as children on his watch continue to suffer remains a disgrace. In discussing the future recruitment of priests, we appreciate the distinction Benedict made between homosexuals and pedophiles, one that may have escaped the Catholic hierarchy. Catholic leadership still has a long way to go before it catches up with mainstream society's growing acceptance of gays. The pope's kind words about immigrants were welcome at a time when immigrants are scapegoated for all manner of problems in America, but we expected more from Benedict on the closing of churches, a painful issue in many cities, though not in Pittsfield, where the closing of six churches this summer has raised little ire in the Catholic community. The pope, making his first pilgrimage to the U.S., on Friday became the first pope to visit a synagogue in this country when he visited a New York City synagogue whose leader since 1962, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, is a Holocaust survivor who had met two previous popes. This should help heal the fracture between the two faiths that resulted from the Vatican's indifference to the Holocaust, if not its antipathy toward European Jews at the time. Earlier in the day at the United Nations, Benedict observed that the international community "must intervene" if states are unable to protect their residents from harm. Like his predecessors who spoke before the U.N., the pope referred specifically to no countries on Friday, but this statement could be interpreted as his urging of the U.N. to take firmer action in trouble spots like Darfur. If so, this was welcome advice. The world and all of its people can't ignore the suffering of any its people.
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