The Times
June 17, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7127998.ece
More than 200,000 Italian Catholics gathered in St Peter's Square today to offer support to the Pope as he confronts the paedophile priest crisis.
The mass show of support two days after the pontiff's return from a four-day trip to Portugal was organised by Italian bishops. The square was filled with yellow balloons and giant banners reading "Together with the Pope" and "Your Holiness, you are not alone, the whole Church is with you".
The show, unprecedented during the current pontificate, was three times bigger than the crowd that usually attends the square on a Sunday.
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Il Messaggero, the daily newspaper, said that the rally was a "mobilisation of grass roots Catholics", with the Church "showing its muscles" to defend the pontiff after months of controversy has tested his credibility.
Paola dal Toso, one of the organisers, said that although the Church needed purification, many Catholics regarded attacks on the Pope over the sex abuse scandals as "ferocious and excessive".
Addressing the crowd from his window high above the square under cloudy skies, the 83-year-old pontiff urged Catholics to fight the "spiritual evil infecting the Church".
"The real enemy to fear and to fight is sin, spiritual evil, which at times, unfortunately, also infects members of the Church," he said. The remark echoed his admission to journalists on the flight to Lisbon last week that the paedophile scandals were not invented or exaggerated by the "Church's enemies", as some Vatican officials have claimed, but stemmed from sins committed inside the Church itself.
The statement was seen as a sea change in the Pope's strategy in dealing with the scandal. He has been accused by critics of having helped to cover up clerical sex abuse both as Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982 and as head of doctrine at the Vatican before his election as Pope five years ago. Vatican officials deny this and insist that the Pope has done more than any other Church official to "clean up" the Church.
Although the Pope did not refer specifically to sex abuse in his address today, he observed that "in our commitment to spiritual and moral renewal, we can always do better", adding to prolonged applause and cheers: "I thank you with all my heart, dear brothers and sisters, for your warm presence ... Today you show the great affection and profound closeness of the Church and the Italian people to the Pope and your priests."
Tens of thousands of Italians from Catholic associations and movements arrived in Rome on chartered buses and trains for the event, which was also attended by ministers from the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi.
Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman, said that huge turnouts for the Pope on his trip to Portugal — particularly at the Marian shrine at Fátima, the "Portuguese Lourdes" — had amounted to a "strong public response" to criticism of the Pope over his handling of the paedophile crisis. "The vitality of the people's faith demonstrates great hope, despite internal and external difficulties," he said.
In a message on Saturday to the Kirchentag, an ecumenical gathering in his native Bavaria, the Pope said that "bad seeds" among the priesthood should not be allowed to ruin the reputation of the Church as a whole. He said that weeds "exist even in the bosom of the Church", recalling a passage in the Gospels in which Jesus is asked why weeds spring up in wheat fields even when good seed has been sown.
The Pope is to visit Cyprus next month for talks with the Orthodox Church and will spend much of July and August at Castel Gandolfo, his summer retreat south of Rome, preparing for a trip to Britain in September during which he is expected to face protests from gay rights groups. At Fátima he described gay marriage as an "insidious and dangerous" challenge to society.
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