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  Vatican Sees Campaign Against the Pope

By Rachel Donadio and Nicholas Kulish
New York Times
March 13, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/world/europe/14pope.html

ROME — As new details emerged on allegations of child sexual abuse by a priest in the Munich archdiocese then led by Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican spoke out on Saturday against what it called an aggressive campaign against the pope in his native Germany.

At the same time, a high-ranking Vatican official overseeing internal investigations on Saturday acknowledged that 3,000 cases of suspected abuse of minors had come to its attention in the past decade, of which 20 percent had been brought to trial in Vatican courts.

In a note read on Vatican Radio on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was "evident that in recent days there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tenacity, in Regensburg and in Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse." He added, "It is clear that those efforts have failed."

In Germany, a man whose case has raised questions about the actions of the Munich Archdiocese when Benedict was the archbishop there said Saturday that church officials had told him that the priest who abused him in 1979 would not be allowed to work with children again. Instead, the priest was allowed to resume full duties almost immediately, and went on to abuse more children.

The Vatican also sought to defend the pope against criticism that a Vatican rule requiring secrecy in abuse cases was tantamount to obstruction of justice in civil courts.

Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the director of a tribunal inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal arm, dismissed as "false and calumnious" accusations that Benedict covered up abuse cases when he oversaw investigations for four years as prefect of that congregation before becoming pope.

In a rare and unusually frank interview that appeared on the front page of L'Avvenire, the Italian Bishops Conference newspaper, on Saturday, Monsignor Scicluna acknowledged that the Vatican had received about 3,000 accusations of abuse by priests of minors in the past decade, 80 percent of them from the United States.

Although the number represented only those forwarded to the Vatican, most likely only a fraction of the total worldwide, Monsignor Scicluna's comments were among the most revealing to date about how the Vatican handles these cases, and appeared intended to show that it was confronting the problem.

He said that about 300 priests had been accused of pedophilia in the past nine years. The cases involved both diocesan and other priests and concerned acts committed over the last 50 years, he said.

He said that 20 percent of priests had been tried by the church — mostly in local dioceses but sometimes in Rome — and that some had been acquitted.

Another 60 percent of the cases had not come to trial, largely because of the advanced age of the accused, he said. In those cases, he said the accused faced other "administrative and disciplinary provisions," including being required to live in seclusion and prohibition from celebrating Mass and hearing confession.

In 10 percent of the cases, the pope dismissed the priests without a formal judicial process, and in the remaining 10 percent, the priests voluntarily stepped down.

Even in cases where "there has been no formal condemnation," Monsignor Scicluna said, "no absolution has taken place."

Although his statements were unusually forthcoming for the Vatican, they left open many questions, including whether the priests involved in cases that had not come to trial ever returned to pastoral work.

In the German case, a man who said he was sexually abused by a priest in Essen in 1979 said that when the abuse was reported, the church handled the accusation as an internal matter without notifying the police or prosecutors. In a telephone interview on Saturday, the victim, who asked to be identified as Wilfried F. to protect his anonymity, said the pastor forced him to perform oral sex.

Wilfried F. was 11 years old at the time. His case, and many of the new details on Saturday, were first reported in the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

In the interview, he said the abuse occurred after a vacation trip to the Eifel mountains. He said the priest gave him alcohol, locked him in his bedroom, took off his clothes and molested him.

Although the matter was not reported to the police, he said church officials in Essen told him the priest had been transferred to Munich "and that he would no longer be allowed to work with children."

The archdiocese said in a statement on Friday that the priest was moved to Munich in 1980 for therapy with the approval of Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the man who later became Pope Benedict. But the priest was soon reassigned to pastoral work by Archbishop Ratzinger's deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, and was later convicted of sexually abusing minors. "You see how they just kept moving him around," Wilfried F. said. "He could keep doing it like before."

The archdiocese has acknowledged making "serious mistakes" in handling the case. In a statement, the former vicar general took full responsibility for the decision to reinstate the priest to pastoral work.

The Vatican has said the pope was not involved in the decision.

In the interview on Saturday, Monsignor Scicluna also addressed accusations that the Vatican was obstructing justice by imposing secrecy on reports of abuse.

In 2001, Benedict, who was then in charge of Vatican investigations of abuse allegations, sent a letter to bishops counseling them to forward all such cases to his Doctrine of the Faith office, where they would be subject to secrecy.

Monsignor Scicluna dismissed the idea that secrecy was imposed "in order to hide the facts." Rather, he said, it "served to protect the good name of all the people involved, first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right, as everyone does, to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty."

But he said church secrecy had "never been understood as a ban on denouncing the crimes to the civil authorities."

 
 

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