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Vatican Bid to Calm Child Abuse Row The Press Association April 14, 2010 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hterkHOJv-3U7LHrLtWjqb1nWzag
The Vatican has tried to defuse growing anger over remarks by the pope's top aide that the paedophile priest scandal was caused by homosexuality and not the church's celibacy rule. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Holy See's secretary of state, outraged gay advocacy groups, politicians and even the French government with his remarks, made on Tuesday in Chile. "Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and paedophilia," the Italian cardinal said. "But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and paedophilia." Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi insisted later that Cardinal Bertone was not talking about paedophilia in society at large, nor making any medical or psychological assertions. Rather he was "evidently" referring to statistics, recently supplied by the Holy See's own prosecutor handling sex abuse allegations against clergy. Nearly immediately after Cardinal Bertone's comments at a news conference in Santiago, Chile's gay rights advocates denounced what they called a "perverse strategy" by the Vatican to "shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility" with a "spurious and disgusting" connection. The French government bristled at what it saw as an offense to human rights efforts. "This is an unacceptable association that we condemn," the French Foreign Ministry said. And the Catholic Church in England and Wales appears to have issued a rare public rebuttal to a senior Vatican figure after it rejected the reported claims. Father Marcus Stock, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales - a key post in the Church - said research showed child sex abuse was "not a question" of sexual orientation. Father Stock said in a statement: "The consensus among researchers is that the sexual abuse of children is not a question of sexual 'orientation', whether heterosexual or homosexual, but of a disordered attraction or 'fixation'. |
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