By Gina Doggett
AFP
February 15, 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jpOQNFn9EjZWeOGd5bvPztGFFmoQ
VATICAN CITY -- Ireland's paedophile priests scandal and its cover-up is a "hard and humiliating challenge", the Vatican said on Monday, as Irish bishops were set to discuss the abuse with Pope Benedict XVI.
Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, celebrating mass with the bishops ahead of the meeting with the pope, said the scandal that has shaken the Roman Catholic Church could be overcome by faith.
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| The pope was to meet with some 24 bishops over the issue |
"Challenges that come from within (the Church) are naturally harder and humiliating," Bertone said in his homily. "Every kind of challenge can become a reason for purification and sanctification as long as it is illuminated by faith."
"Such is the serious challenge facing your communities, which see men of the Church involved in particularly execrable acts," he said.
The some two dozen bishops were to have meetings at the Vatican on Monday and Tuesday over the revelations of child abuse coupled with evidence that Church authorities covered up for paedophile priests for three decades.
The crisis in mainly Catholic Ireland erupted in November with the publication of two shock judicial reports detailing the crimes.
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| The report showed that the Church covered up the abuse for three decades |
One priest admitted to sexually abusing more than 100 children, while another accepted that he had abused minors on a fortnightly basis over 25 years.
Beyond the damage caused to Irish Catholics' confidence in the Church, Bertone said, was a "more dangerous storm," the danger that the scandal could make them "lose faith in God, through discouragement and despair."
"Yes, storms cause fear, such as those that rock the boat of the Church because of the sins of its members. But the grace of conversion and a greater faith can come from these storms," Bertone said.
Repeated revelations of paedophile priests have rocked the Church in recent months following major scandals in the United States and Australia.
Ireland's crisis was followed in January by a scandal in Germany, where an elite Jesuit school in Berlin admitted repeated sexual abuse of teenagers by teachers in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Vatican said Benedict planned to issue a pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics over the scandal.
The letter will be aimed at "restoring confidence" among Irish Catholics and to offer "concrete and effective" ways to prevent a recurrence of priestly paedophilia, a Vatican expert wrote in the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
But an Irish anti-abuse campaigner said Monday that the pope should visit Ireland and meet personally with victims of paedophile priests as he did in the United States and Australia. Related article: Abuse victims want papal visit
Christine Buckley, an abuse survivor herself, said on Irish radio that the pope should apologise in Ireland to "victims of institutional and clerical abuse, given that many of the (Irish) abusers went to countries such as Australia, such as America, where they continued their abuse."
The pope plans to visit Britain in September.
The head of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics already met in December with Ireland's two most senior Catholic churchmen, primate of all Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady and Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.
Afterward Benedict said he shared "the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland (over) these heinous crimes."
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