By Richard Owen and David Sharrock
The Times
March 19, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7069220.ece
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| The Pope hopes his letter will help healing process |
The Pope’s letter to the Irish faithful will be released today and read at Sunday Mass in an attempt to defuse the spiralling scandal over clerical sex abuse.
However, the pastoral letter has already been judged a failure by many after a week in which the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, apologised for his role in covering up the activities of a notorious paedophile priest.
Another bishop was found to have bought a victim’s silence by signing off on an out-of-court settlement with a confidentiality clause. Cardinal Brady said that he would spend the rest of Lent considering his own future after demands for his resignation.
Vatican sources said that the Pope’s letter would not only call for “repentance and healing”, but would outline measures to ensure that such grave crimes were not repeated. The pontiff has said that he hopes the letter “will help in the process of repentance, healing and renewal”.
However, it is unlikely to have been redrafted to take account of this week’s events in Ireland and it will fail in its purpose if it does not include an apology.
Meanwhile, One in Four, Ireland’s leading campaign group for victims of sexual abuse, issued its own papal letter, setting out what it said survivors deserved to hear. Its version of the Pope’s letter reads: “I want to say clearly and unequivocally that the Catholic Church at the highest levels has always known about the clerical sexual abuse of children.
“We have pursued a deliberate policy of cover-up, protecting sex offenders in order to avoid scandal, with no regard for the safety of children ... For this I am deeply sorry.”
Amid growing calls for a nationwide police investigation, another bishop said that he believed more cases of clerical sexual abuse would emerge.
Bishop Donal McKeown said that there was still no civil obligation to report abuse allegations to the Irish authorities.
The Northern Ireland Executive meanwhile said that it was urgently considering options for dealing with historic institutional and clerical child abuse, including a full state inquiry.
Further allegations of child abuse by Catholic clergy have come to light in the Pope’s native Germany, as well as in Austria and the Netherlands.
The head of the German Catholic Church was accused yesterday by a victim of sexual abuse of failing to notify prosecutors about a predator priest. In a report to be broadcast on television on Monday the victim accuses Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of having “covered up” for the priest, who preyed upon at least 17 children.
A spokesman for the Archbishop’s diocese said that church officials had “acted in a consistent manner and very rapidly”, forcing the priest into retirement before the accusations against him were proven.
The Pope himself was dragged into a separate row after the German press disclosed that during the future pontiff’s time as Archbishop of Munich, another known paedophile priest was allowed to move into his diocese to “undergo therapy”. Werner Huth, a Munich psychiatrist, told The New York Times that he repeatedly warned officials in the Munich archdiocese about Father Peter Hullermann, who was fined and given an 18-month suspended sentence for sex offences in 1986.
Catholic authorities say that the Pope was not involved in the decision to allow Father Hullermann to resume his duties after his Munich “therapy”. Father Hullermann was suspended this week at his current parish, Bad Tolz, in Bavaria, for violating an undertaking not to have contact with children or young people.
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