Benedict in Malta an Effort to Quiet the Abuse Storm, Jeff Israely, TIME, April 19, 2010

Benedict in Malta: an Effort to Quiet the Abuse Storm

By Jeff Israely
TIME
April 19, 2010

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1982974,00.html

Pier Paolo Cito / AP

Pope Benedict XVI knows that a two-day trip to Malta won't miraculously heal the Catholic Church — or save his papacy — from the open wounds of the clergy sex abuse crisis. Even a meeting on Sunday with eight Maltese abuse victims, during which the Pope's eyes reportedly welled with tears, won't stem the bitterness among many Catholics or silence questions about Benedict's alleged mishandling of several specific cases earlier in his career.

Still, as Monday marks five years since his April 19, 2005, election, Benedict's supporters hope that at least the short-term siege is over. "He's showing that he can weather the storm," a Vatican official said on Monday. Though he acknowledges past "administrative" failings that have emerged in recent weeks, the official said, "I think we will be seeing a cementing of great respect for the person of the Pope." (See pictures of the Pope meeting President Obama.)

As with similar encounters with victims on trips to the U.S. and Australia, the 35-minute meeting on Sunday was held in private and was announced only after it was over. Benedict met alone with each of the male victims, all in their 30s and 40s, who say they were abused as boys by priests at a Catholic orphanage. After his talk with Benedict, Lawrence Grech, who led the push for the meeting, said he told the Pope, "You have the power to fill the emptiness that I had. Someone else took my innocence and my faith."

But many victims'-rights groups are demanding more than just occasional pastoral care from the Pope. Three basic questions about the sex-abuse crisis still follow Benedict back to Rome: Will any bishops be punished for their role in allowing predator clergy to go unchecked in the past? Are there plans for unified worldwide church rules aimed at preventing future abuse? And will the Pope confront the cases he is accused of personally mishandling, both from his time as Archbishop of Munich and as a top Vatican official? (See the top 10 controversial Popes.)

In a certain light, the upheaval is one in a series of crises that the Holy See has been forced to manage since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stepped out onto the balcony as the newly anointed Benedict XVI. What was billed as a "transitional" papacy after John Paul II's momentous 26-year reign has been anything but smooth. Perhaps the single biggest firestorm before the current controversy was the Pope's September 2006 speech about Islam that included an insulting historical reference to the Prophet Muhammad. Others have followed: Benedict's telling Brazilian faithful that European conquistadors in Latin America were part of God's great design for Christian salvation; the assertion, as he set off for the papal voyage to AIDS-ravaged Africa, that condoms actually worsen the spread of HIV; the welcoming back to the fold archconservative followers of the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, including one bishop who turned out to be a Holocaust denier.

Still, it is the multiplying effect of the sex-abuse crisis that risks defining Benedict's papacy — and redefining his predecessor's. In the days before the Pope left for Malta, more revelations surfaced, including an Associated Press report of a past, unwritten church policy of transferring abusive priests from one country to another.

But perhaps even more explosive is the case of a 2001 letter written by the then head of the Vatican's office for the clergy, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, congratulating a French bishop who had refused to turn a convicted rapist priest in to the police. "I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration," Castrillon wrote to Bishop Pierre Pican of the northern diocese Bayeux-Lisieux. "You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest." (See "Amid the Abuse Scandal, Benedict's No. 2 Draws Fire.")

Even while Benedict was trying to turn the tide in Malta, Castrillon reportedly told a church conference in Spain over the weekend that Pope John Paul II had authorized him to send the letter to bishops all over the world to hold up Pican as a model. It is a reminder of how much we may still have to learn about what is wrong with the way the church is run and how the sex-abuse crisis has shaken the foundations of the papacy itself.