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	Vatican's Latest Move on Pedophile Priests Business Mirror March 15, 2010 http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22969:vaticans-latest-move-on-pedophile-priests&catid=51:world&Itemid=67 VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican's chief prosecutor will remove the statute of limitations for priests accused of child molestation and said it was "false and calumnious" to accuse Pope Benedict XVI of a cover-up. "Practice has shown that the limit of 10 years is not enough in this kind of case," Monsignor Charles Scicluna, promoter of justice of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, said in a Vatican-approved interview with Avvenire. Maltese-born Scicluna is in charge of prosecuting clergy accused of delicta graviora, Latin to mean the most serious crimes, including sexual abuse. Avvenire is an Italian daily newspaper owned by the Italian Bishops Conference and affiliated to the Roman Catholic Church. Benedict has struggled to contain damage to the Church's reputation by allegations of sexual abuse by priests. Bringing the scandal a step closer to the papacy, a German Church report said that when he was archbishop of Munich he took part in the 1980 decision to move a priest accused of molestation to his diocese to undergo therapy. Joseph Ratzinger, who became pope in 2005, was appointed archbishop of Munich in 1977 at age 49, after spending most of his life as a theology professor and Catholic intellectual. He served the Bavarian church until Pope John Paul II transferred him to Rome in 1982 to oversee the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, which polices church dogma. Scicluna defends Benedict from criticism that he did too little too late to tackle sex-abuse cases. Between 1975 and 1985, no cases of pedophile priests were reported to the congregation. Moreover, it wasn't until 2001 that it was clarified by the Vatican's hierarchy that it was Ratzinger's job to deal with these crimes. Asked whether the Church has been too lenient, Scicluna says "it may be that in the past, perhaps also out of a misdirected desire to protect the good name of the institution, some bishops were, in practice, too indulgent towards this sad phenomenon." As leader of more than a billion Catholics, Benedict visited the US and Australia for the first time in 2008 and apologized to victims of abuse. He is the first pontiff to do so. Scicluna's office has dealt with about 300 cases of alleged pedophilia in the past nine years. Between 2001 and 2009, there were 3,000 accusations of sexual wrongdoing, of which 60 percent are reported same-sex attraction while 30 percent are heterosexual. The remaining 10 percent are serious claims of abuse of minors. The US accounts for 80 percent of the priests currently under trial. "Currently we can say that a full trial, penal or administrative, has taken place in 20 percent of cases, normally celebrated in the diocese of origin—always under our supervision—and only very rarely here in Rome," Scicluna said. Bloomberg News
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