By Theunis Bates
AOL News
December 17, 2010
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/20/pope-benedict-church-must-reflect-on-sex-abuse-scandals/
Pope Benedict XVI today called on Vatican officials to examine why the Catholic Church allowed the sexual abuse of children by priests to continue unchallenged for so long, and to push through reforms to ensure such scandals never happen again."We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred," the pope said in his traditional end-of-year speech to Vatican cardinals and bishops. "We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen."
Over the past year, the Catholic Church has been rocked by a series of child sex-abuse scandals in Ireland, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. In many of these cases, it was discovered that high-up members of the clergy had covered up for pedophile priests and that for decades Vatican officials turned a blind eye to the crimes.
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| Pope Benedict XVI pauses as he delivers his message during the traditional exchange of Christmas greetings with the Curia, in the Regia Hall at the Vatican today. The pope called for the Catholic Church to scrutinize itself and root out the truth about mistakes made so it can prevent the pedophile abuse crisis from ever happening again. |
The pope accepted the church's culpability, but he argued that the scandal had to be seen in its correct social "context," one in which many people see child pornography, drug use and human trafficking as perfectly acceptable.
"There exists a market of pornography regarding children that seems to be increasingly accepted as normal by society," he said. "The psychological devastation of children, in which human beings are reduced to a marketplace article, is a terrifying sign of the times."
Benedict went on to say that in the 1970s pedophilia stopped being viewed as an absolute evil and instead became part of a wide spectrum of behaviors that many people believed should be tolerated in the name of relativism.
"It was maintained -- even within the realm of Catholic theology -- that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself," he said. "There is only a 'better than' and a 'worse than.' Nothing is good or bad in itself." He argued that the "effects of such theories are evident today."
Representatives of abuse victims have dismissed that argument as nonsensical. "He is trying to say that the modern world is corrupt and sexually rampant. It is blaming society for what is actually their responsibility," Margaret Kennedy, founder of the U.K.-based Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors organization, told The Telegraph today. "No one in any age has ever thought that adults having sex with children is right."
The belief that the Vatican has failed to properly handle the abuse scandals -- and has instead been more concerned with preserving its own face -- led tens of thousands of Germans to cancel their church membership this year, according to new research by the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper and the DPA press agency.
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The Bavarian diocese of Augsburg, where Bishop Walter Mixa was forced to quit in April over physical abuse and embezzlement accusations, saw some 11,351 believers abandon the church over the past 12 months. In 2009, only 6,953 left the faith.
And in the Rottenburg-Stuttgart diocese -- where five priests and lay employees were jailed for abuse between 1995 and 2010 -- 17,100 Catholics had left the church as of mid-November. That's 7,000 more than in 2009.
"I have never experienced anything like this since my ordination in 1969," Bishop Friedhelm Hofmann of Wurzburg said in an earlier interview. "Every single departure is one too many. I hope that some people will come back to us, once the anger at current events subsides, and when people once again focus on all the good things the church does every day."
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