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  Pope Urges Irish Bishops to Confront Sex Abuse

By Elisabetta Povoledo and Alan Cowell
The New York Times
February 16, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/europe/17pope.html

In this photograph provided by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI stood with Irish bishops during their meeting at The Vatican on Tuesday.

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI urged Irish bishops on Tuesday to show “determination and resolve” in confronting the sexual abuse scandal convulsing the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland but made no explicit call for the punishment of those who perpetrated what he called a “heinous crime.”

After two days of closed-door conversations between the pope and Irish bishops, a Vatican statement said the scandal had ignited a “grave crisis,” which had “led to a breakdown in trust in the church’s leadership.”

But the statement seemed unlikely to satisfy victims of abuse who had called for more resignations of senior clerics involved in covering up decades of sexual abuse of children and young people by priests.

Even as the Vatican talks were under way, John Kelly, the founder of a victims’ group called Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, wrote in a letter to the pope made public in London, “The secular powers in Ireland appear paralyzed to bring to civil justice some of those who carried out acts of horrific abuse as well as those who assisted by acts of omission or even outright collusion after the fact.

“In addition, the religious orders to whom those persons belong remain intact and continue to operate within and outside the state,” the letter said.

Four Irish bishops have offered their resignations in the wake of the scandal, but the pope has accepted only one. A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the issue of further resignations by bishops “was not addressed” in the talks at the Vatican, The Associated Press reported.

The pope met individually with 24 Irish bishops after a report last November that said the church in Ireland had concealed child abuse in Dublin for almost 30 years to 2004. A separate report in May described decades of sexual and physical abuse of children studying at church-run residential schools in the country.

The talks were a prelude to the publication of a pastoral letter from the pope to Irish Catholics, which, the statement said, would be issued some time in the next few weeks. The document will be the first papal utterance of its kind dealing specifically with pedophilia, Vatican experts said.

In the talks with the pope, “the bishops spoke frankly of their sense of pain and anger, betrayal, scandal and shame expressed to them on numerous occasions by those who had been abused,” the statement said.

But the bishops insisted that “while there is no doubt that errors of judgment and omissions stand at the heart of the crisis, significant measures have now been taken to ensure the safety of children and young people.”

The bishops had also promised “their commitment to cooperation with the statutory authorities” in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland “to guarantee that the church’s standards, policies and procedures represent best practice in this area.”

The statement continued, “The Holy Father observed that the sexual abuse of children and young people is not only a heinous crime, but also a grave sin which offends God and wounds the dignity of the human person created in his image.

“While realizing that the current painful situation will not be resolved quickly,” it said, the pope “challenged the bishops to address the problems of the past with determination and resolve, and to face the present crisis with honesty and courage.”

 
 

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