Irish Clergy to Meet Pope over Child Abuse Shame, Gulf Times Qatar, February 14, 2010

Irish Clergy to Meet Pope over Child Abuse Shame

Gulf-Times (Qatar)
February 14, 2010

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=342784&version=1&template_id=38&parent_id=20

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI will seek in a meeting with Irish bishops at the Vatican next week to reassure a nation severely shaken by a paedophile priest scandal.

Revelations of the child abuse, coupled with evidence that Church authorities covered up for paedophile priests in mainly Catholic Ireland for three decades, were contained in an explosive report that led to the resignation of four bishops.

Setting the tone for the meeting with some 30 bishops next Monday and Tuesday, Benedict this week reiterated his condemnation of Catholics who violate children's rights, saying the Church would always "deplore and condemn" such behaviour.

Pope Benedict XVI

Cardinal Claudio Hummes, head of the Vatican department responsible for the clergy, said last month that paedophile priests should be prosecuted as criminals under "ordinary law."

Repeated revelations of paedophile priests have rocked the Church in recent months following major scandals in the United States and Australia.

Ireland's crisis erupted in November with the publication of the shocking government investigation. That was followed in January by a scandal in Germany, where an elite Jesuit school in Berlin admitted systematic sexual abuse of teenagers by at least two priests in the 1970s and 1980s.

That scandal snowballed when a third teacher confessed, more victims came forward and further schools were implicated.

Ireland's bishops met last month, issuing a statement welcoming the pope's summons, saying it came "in the context of the very serious situation that prevails in the Irish Church."

The Vatican said Benedict planned to issue a pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics over the scandal. The head of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics already met on December 11 with Ireland's two most senior Catholic churchmen, primate of all Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady and Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

Afterward Benedict said he shared "the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland (over) these heinous crimes."

The November report by judge Yvonne Murphy said the Church had carried out a cover-up to avoid damaging its reputation and assets.

One priest admitted to sexually abusing more than 100 children, while another accepted that he had abused on a fortnightly basis over 25 years.

The pastoral letter will be aimed at "restoring confidence" among Irish Catholics and to offer "concrete and effective" ways to prevent a recurrence of priestly paedophilia, a Vatican expert wrote in the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

"My guess will be that Benedict will repeat what he said to the Australians and the Americans," another Vatican watcher, John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, said, recalling the pontiff's harsh condemnations of the scandals and his meetings with victims in both countries. In the United States, "many American Catholics eight years later would say that the Church has adopted tough new policies: if any priest sexually abuses a minor he's going to be out of the priesthood," Allen said.