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	Catholics Should Demand Justice - and Answers Vancouver Sun March 24, 2010 http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Catholics+should+demand+justice+answers/2719728/story.html CANADA -- The Vatican needs to do two things to respond to the scandal of sexual abuse, including pedophilia, in the Catholic Church -- and neither of those things involves spin. First, Pope Benedict needs to come clean on just what he knew, and when he knew it, about sexual abuse in the churches of his archdiocese when he was archbishop of Munich during the 1970s and first part of the 1980s. Second, the Pope should put in place throughout the entire Roman Catholic Church, a rule requiring priests to report any incidents of sexual abuse of minors which they learn about, to the police. For too many years, the Church has shielded pedophile priests, speaking solemnly of forgiveness and healing, and moving those priests to other dioceses where, supposedly, they were not in a position to harm anyone further -- but they ended up doing so. Benedict, as Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, in 1979 transferred a pedophile priest who molested a 13-year-old boy out of his parish and sent him for therapy. However, the priest was returned in due time to pastoral duties by Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, who served as deputy to Ratzinger. The priest then went on to commit further sexual offences. Other priests in Ratzinger's archdiocese were also embroiled in sexual abuse accusations. Later, when Ratzinger was elevated to cardinal, he was in charge of disciplining priests for various offences -- bishops worldwide reported 3,000 priests in the past 10 years for sexual abuse, of which 10 per cent were incidents of pedophilia, according to Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's promoter of justice. Indeed, the Pope was busy drafting rules for Irish clergy regarding pedophile priests when the ghost of the Munich scandal rose from the past and began swirling around him. The new rules for the Irish clergy follow on the heels of accusations that Benedict signed a Vatican paper in 2001, instructing bishops to keep mum about the particulars when reporting errant priests to the Vatican. Pedophilia is a crime, and anyone who fails to report it, or who deliberately attempts to protect a miscreant or who keeps back information that belongs in the purview of a criminal investigation, should also face charges. Sexual abuse of children is one of the most abhorrent crimes there is, and the era of coverups and hasty transfers, when protecting priests is a higher priority than seeking justice for the emotionally damaged children they left in their wake, must end. The thousands of cases of sexual abuse in the Church that have emerged over the past few decades have sent a tremor through the world's Catholics, and among the aftershocks is the latest revelation about Munich that demands transparency on Benedict's part about his knowledge of it. A crime is a crime, and the Catholic Church must also be complicit from now on with the courts, in seeing that offences are reported to police and justice is done for the victims.
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