Group Says Pope Benedict Is All Talk, No Action, Bernie Tafoya, WBBM, March 19, 2010

Group Says Pope Benedict Is "All Talk, No Action"

By Bernie Tafoya
WBBM
March 19, 2010

http://www.wbbm780.com/Group-says-Pope-Benedict-is--all-talk--no-action-/6615727

Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images

The national director of a priest sex abuse survivors’ group says Pope Benedict has been “all talk, no action” when it comes to the issue of the priest sex abuse scandal that has now erupted in Ireland, Austria and other parts of Europe.

Pope Benedict today wrote a letter to Irish Catholics about the scandal that has exploded in their country. The letter will be read at masses throughout Ireland this weekend. Its contents will be made available Saturday.

Meanwhile, David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), says the Catholic Church hierarchy should have received “an extraordinary wake-up call” when the priest sex abuse scandal rocked the United States more than eight years ago.

Instead, Clohessy says, “Vatican officials responded, essentially, by continuing the same old destructive patterns of denying, minimizing and pointing fingers and shifting blame and doing nothing”.

Clohessy says church leaders are “meticulous” record keepers and there’s no way they could not have known how widespread the priest sex abuse problem is in Europe and elsewhere around the world.

He points to there still not being a “zero tolerance” policy for molester priests outside the United States. He asks, rhetorically, “Who knows how many predator priests are in active ministry across the globe?”

In this country, Clohessy believes the U-S Justice Department should form a unit designed to go after priests who’ve molested children even decades after their alleged crimes. He says such a unit would be on-par with the unit formed in the past 10 years to investigate incidents of racial hate in the South from the 60s.