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	Pope Benedict's Pastoral Letter for Release Tomorrow By Paddy Agnew The Irish Times March 19, 2010 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0319/1224266594242.html THE HOLY See confirmed yesterday that Pope Benedict XVI’s pastoral letter to the Irish, addressing the question of clerical sex abuse, will be released tomorrow. Speaking at his weekly public audience on Wednesday, the pope had announced that he would formally “sign off” on the letter today, adding that it would be released “soon after”. A brief Vatican statement yesterday indicated that “soon after” will in fact be tomorrow morning when the pope’s senior spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi, presents the letter to the world’s media. No other information was available from the Holy See and it was unclear whether Fr Lombardi will be alone or accompanied by a senior Curia figure at the document release. With the Holy See having thus far proved itself leak-proof with regard to the letter, just about all lines of speculation remain good as to the document’s contents. It is not known if, and to what extent, the current sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in the pope’s native Germany will impinge on a document which was originally intended exclusively for the Irish faithful. It is, however, unlikely that the most recent revelations concerning the primate of the Irish church, the Archbishop of Armagh, Sean Brady, will much influence the document. One thing seems clear though, namely that this will be a single-issue document which offers a Holy See reflection on a problem which in recent months has come to assume tsunami proportions for the Catholic Church not only in Ireland, but also in Austria, Brazil, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Vatican commentators believe that much-discussed issues such as a radical reorganisation of Irish church structures and dioceses are unlikely to feature in the pastoral letter. Meanwhile, dissident German Catholic theologian Fr Hans Kung yesterday served up a controversial reminder of the seriousness of the wave of sex abuse scandals sweeping the Catholic Church with an open letter calling for both Pope Benedict himself and the Catholic Church hierarchy to do a mea culpa and acknowledge their responsibilities and failings in relation to clerical sex abuse. Fr Kung also called on the pope to reconsider Catholic teaching on priestly celibacy, arguing that there is a clear link between the Catholic Church’s paedophile problem and priestly celibacy. Furthermore, Fr Kung argued that Pope Benedict should acknowledge his own failings in handling sex abuse cases. He points out that the pope taught in Regensburg for eight years, at a time when he was “fully aware” of the situation regarding the Domspatzen, the boy singers in the Regensburg cathedral choir directed by his brother, Georg, adding: “And here we are not talking about a few little slaps, which unfortunately were normal enough for the time, but rather of serious sexual offences.” Fr Kung also argues that the pope should acknowledge his responsibility for the mishandling of the case of paedophile priest Fr Peter Hullermann, allowed to return to parish duties in Munich during Benedict’s time as Archbishop of Munich in the early 1980s. Fr Kung suggests that the claim that responsibility for the handling of the priest rests with Benedict’s vicar general Gerhard Muller simply does not wash, arguing that Archbishop Ratzinger “was responsible from the administrative point of view”. Finally, Fr Kung argues that, as prefect for 24 years of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department which handles sex abuse cases, Pope Benedict bears more responsibility than any other Catholic priest in the world for the policy of a worldwide cover-up. It is precisely in relation to this cover-up that Pope Benedict should express his own mea culpa.
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