Pope Issues His Most Direct Words to Date on Abuse, Rachel Donadio, The New York Times, May 11, 2010

Pope Issues His Most Direct Words to Date on Abuse

By Rachel Donadio
The New York Times
May 11, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/world/europe/12pope.html?src=me

Speaking to reporters on his plane en route to Portugal, Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday said that the “sins inside the church” posed the greatest threat to Catholicism.
Photo by Vincenzo Pint/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LISBON — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued his most forceful remarks on the sexual abuse crisis sweeping the Catholic Church. He called it “truly terrifying” and, in a marked shift in tone, suggested that its origins lay with abusive priests and with highly placed church officials who for decades concealed or minimized the problem.

The problem, he said, was “the sin inside the church,” and by implication not accusations from victims or the media.

“Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice,” he said, in remarks that underscored the Vatican’s recent if fitful efforts to break with a longstanding practice of handling abuse cases inside the church, rather than reporting abuse to civil authorities for prosecution.

Victims groups said they were still waiting for concrete action more than words, and the Vatican has not yet announced whether it will change its norms for handling abuse. But the pope’s comments, made to reporters on board a plane at the start of a four-day visit to Portugal, were by far his strongest, after weeks in which top Vatican officials sought to minimize the issue, despite new revelations of abuse cropping up around the Catholic world.

“This is as clear an example of the pope changing the Vatican’s public tone as you’re going to see,” said John L. Allen Jr., a Vatican expert and columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

Benedict, who has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against allegations of abuse as archbishop of Munich and later as the head of a powerful Vatican office, said, “Attacks on the pope and the church come not only from outside the church, but the suffering of the church comes from inside the church, from sin that exists inside the church.”

His remarks were at once aimed inside the church — a warning to clerics that crimes would not be tolerated — and outside, indicating for the first time since the abuse crisis had swelled in Europe that he personally understood the depth of the problem. The issue has revealed an ancient institution wrestling with modernity and brought to light an internal culture clash between traditionalists who have valued protecting priests and bishops above all else, and others seeking more transparency.

Benedict’s remarks on Tuesday were the latest in a series of responses by the Vatican to contend with the crisis.

In March, he issued a strong letter to Irish Catholics reeling from reports of systemic sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, but the letter emphasized forgiveness for the perpetrators as much as sympathy for the victims.

Pope Benedict XVI spoke with D. Jose Policarpo, the archbishop of Lisbon, left, and the priest Jose Manuel dos Santos Ferreira at the Jeronimos Monastery in Lisbon on Tuesday.
Photo by Miguel A. Lopes/LUSA, via European Pressphoto Agency

Benedict met privately with victims of sexual abuse on a brief trip to Malta last month, and last week the Vatican took control of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful religious order whose founder was found to have abused seminarians and fathered several children.

But every step forward seemed to be undercut by other Vatican officials, who at turns blamed the media or perceived enemies of the church for the sexual abuse crisis. Most notable among these officials was Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a former Vatican secretary of state and dean of the College of Cardinals. On Easter, Cardinal Sodano dismissed criticism of the pope as “petty gossip,” words that offended many victims.

“The theory is that popes are insulated from understanding public perceptions of the church; it’s their aides who have to correct” a problem, Mr. Allen said. “Here, it’s the aides who have created the problem.”

Benedict’s remarks on Tuesday appeared to show that the pope himself would now be dictating the message.

“Today we see in a really terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the church does not come from the enemies outside, but is born from the sin in the church,” the pope said.

“The church has a profound need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn on the one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice,” he added.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, characteristically played down the idea that the pope’s remarks on sexual abuse represented a change in his thinking. “I would insist on the fact that the pope didn’t change gears,” Father Lombardi said at a news conference late Tuesday.

He said that the pope had expressed his thoughts more deeply in his letter to Irish Catholics, but acknowledged that on Tuesday the pope expressed himself with more “density and clarity” than he had in recent days. The pope, he said, was “more clear and explicit in the way in which he lives and sees the spiritual meaning of this situation of the church with the scandal of pedophilia.”

The crisis has raised questions about how Benedict handled sexual abuse as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, and as archbishop in Munich in 1980 when a pedophile priest was moved to his diocese for treatment.

The pope landed in Lisbon on Tuesday to begin a trip aimed at underscoring several themes of his papacy: the threat posed by secularism in Europe, the tension between faith and reason, and the role of ethics in economics.

Markets are jittery about Portugal’s prospects of bringing its debt and deficit under control. En route to Lisbon, Benedict told reporters that the financial crisis and the threat to the euro were opportunities to reintroduce a “moral dimension” to economics.

Benedict is also expected to emphasize the church’s stance on social issues. A largely Catholic country, Portugal legalized abortion in 2007 and its Socialist majority Parliament approved a bill to legalize same-sex marriage earlier this year, which the president of Portugal has not yet signed into law.

On Wednesday, the pope is expected to travel to the pilgrim shrine of Fatima on the 10th anniversary of the beatification of two of the three shepherd children who say they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary there in 1917. Pope John Paul II credited the Virgin of Fatima with saving him from an assassination attempt in 1981 on the anniversary of the apparition.

Tradition has it that the Virgin revealed three secrets to the children, which the Vatican acknowledged in 1930. The first was a vision of hell, which some interpreted to predict the end of World War I and the start of World War II. The second told of the rise and fall of communism and included an appeal for the conversion of Russia.

In 2000, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, oversaw the Vatican’s revelation of the famous third secret of Fatima, after years in which it had developed a feverish cult status for some Catholics.

Disclosing the secret in 2000, Cardinal Sodano, then the Vatican secretary of state, said that the third vision was of a “bishop clothed in white,” the pope, who makes his way through a field of martyrs, which the Vatican interpreted as prefiguring the assassination attempt on John Paul by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman.