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	Pope Accused of Covering up Sexual Abuse The Star March 25, 2010 http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5404183 [the 2001 document] [in Latin] SWITZERLAND, GENEVA -- Hans Kueng, the dissident Catholic theologian from Switzerland, has accused Pope Benedict XVI of playing a role since 2001 in keeping sex-abuse claims against priests out of the public eye. Kueng's office yesterday confirmed remarks made in a Swiss television interview on Sunday in which Kueng referred to a letter sent in May, 2001, by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the world's bishops. The letter, De Delictis Gravioribus (about serious crimes), instructs bishops to report every case to the Vatican, but to keep such allegations confidential. "There was not a single man in the whole Catholic Church who knew more about the sex-abuse cases than him, because it was ex officio (part of his official role)," Kueng said. Ratzinger became pope in 2005. "He can't wag his finger at the bishops and say, 'You didn't do enough.' He gave the instruction himself, as head of the Congregation of Doctrine of the Faith, and repeated it as pope," Kueng said. The congregation's chief investigator of priestly wrongdoing, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who heads a staff of just nine, defended the Vatican last week, saying it had processed 3 000 cases after Ratzinger's 2001 crackdown on wayward bishops. Scicluna said bishops were never told to hide cases from the police, but merely to keep allegations private so that child victims were not harassed by gossip or hounded by the news media. Kueng could not be reached yesterday to explain why he considered the confidentiality since 2001 to be wrong. Most other critics of the church say the main problem was the failure among many Catholic bishops right up to the 1980s to properly investigate sex-abuse claims and report them to the police and the Vatican. The De Delictis Gravioribus was made public in 2005. Scicluna said it was "utterly obvious" that confidentiality and privacy rules were not meant to encourage bishops to hide sex abuse from police.
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