Popes Letter to Irish Will Be Clear and Decisive, The Irish Times, March 16, 2010

Pope's Letter to Irish Will Be "Clear and Decisive"

The Irish Times
March 16, 2010

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0316/1224266350611.html

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, denied media speculation that the abuse allegations sweeping the Catholic Church has left the pope in a state of paralysed anguish.
Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images

ROME: POPE BENEDICT XVI’s forthcoming pastoral letter to the Irish faithful will be “clear and decisive”, according to a senior Vatican figure.

Speaking to the daily Corriere Della Sera yesterday, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, denied media speculation that the abuse allegations sweeping the Catholic Church, in particular the German church, has left the pope in a state of “paralysed anguish”.

“Are you joking? Pope Benedict XVI is forthright, precise, determined and extremely lucid in his analysis . . . Very shortly the pope’s letter to the Irish will be released and I believe it will offer another example of his clear and decisive voice, without pretence. If there was only one case [of clerical sex abuse] in Europe, and unfortunately that is not so, it would be too much.

“These cases cast a shadow over the whole church and we bishops have to deal with them with maximum seriousness. The zero tolerance that the pope has called for is not an optional, rather it is a moral imperative,” Archbishop Fisichella said.

The archbishop provoked controversy last year when he appeared to defend the family of a nine-year-old Brazilian rape victim who had undergone a subsequent abortion.

The Brazilian archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho announced the excommunication of the family, however Archbishop Fisichella called for the girl to be “defended and treated with kindness”.

Speaking of the church’s abuse crisis, he said he will “always be on the side of the victims” since such crimes “cry out for vengeance in the sight of God”.

Regarding the recent wave of abuse revelations relative to the church in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland, the archbishop argued that the pope had become the victim of a media witch-hunt. “It is simply a violence and a lack of civility to involve the pope and the whole church. In particular, the rage against the pope makes no sense.

“His whole career, his life and his writings speak for him. The things that he said two years ago in the USA [during a pastoral visit] were of crystalline clarity, as indeed will be the things he has to say to Ireland.”

Various senior European church figures, most notably the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, have recently appeared to question the concept of a celibate priesthood, linking it in part to the sex abuse crisis. Archbishop Fisichella, however, has defended priestly celibacy. “We are not all repressed people, simply we are people who have freely chosen to dedicate ourselves to the church and to all those entrusted to us,” he said.

“Those few [priests] who commit outrages cause huge damage to the vast majority of priests who live out this dimension with joy and with seriousness.”

Archbishop Fisichella argues that the way forward for the church must involve “a more careful selection of candidates” for the priesthood, providing seminary students with a more thorough “spiritual and academic” preparation.

He argues that such a process has already begun to take place in the North American church, in the wake of the US sex abuse scandal of the last decade.

The archbishop insisted that the pope would not be intimidated by a hostile media.

“The Holy Father will not be intimidated,” he said.

“Rather, because he has such a profound vision of the life and service he must give to all the church and to the world, he will find a way to lead us forward.”