CathNews
March 12, 2010
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=20008
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When Cardinal Sean Brady (pictured) , the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, met journalists in Rome after a two-day carpeting by Pope Benedict XVI of Ireland's bishops over sex abuse scandals last month, he appeared contrite.
"There have been failures in our leadership," he told us. "The only way we will regain credibility will be through our humiliation." Lent, Cardinal Brady said, was "a time of penance, and we must begin with ourselves and have a change of heart."
Similar expressions of contrition and "humiliation" can be expected from Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops Conference, when he meets the Pope today as the growing clerical sex abuse scandal engulfs the Pontiff's native Germany.
Even now, though, despite the spread of a scandal that began in the US in 2002 and has since embroiled Ireland, Austria, Germany, Australia and The Netherlands, there is a danger that the Vatican and Pope Benedict have not fully grasped the devastating damage it is doing to the standing of the Roman Catholic Church.
"Papal Whitewash" ran one headline in the Irish press after Pope Benedict's encounter with the Irish bishops. No bishops were sacked, no abuse victims were heard, and the Pope announced no plans to visit Ireland to apologise and to mend fences.
Vatican officials appear bemused by widespread media coverage of the admission by Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's older brother, that he "slapped" choirboys at a Regensburg boarding school where pupils suffered sex abuse at the hands of a "sadistic" headmaster. "This is irrelevant," one said.
But even though Ratzinger claimed not to have been aware of the sexual - as opposed to physical - abuse at the school, his remarks opened a window on to the climate of fear, secrecy, repression, hypocrisy and cover-ups in which sexual abuse took place in Catholic institutions.
The Vatican has only slowly - and reluctantly - moved from refusal to face the problem of clerical sex abuse to attempts to deal with it publicly as the scandals and lawsuits multiply.
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