Rpt-Sexual Abuse Victims Blast Benedict Papacy

By James Mackenzie
Reuters
February 12, 2013

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-rt-pope-resignsabuse-repeatl5n0bbhvy-20130212,0,4208206.story

ROME, Feb 11 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict leaves office having

failed to stamp out the sexual abuse of children by priests and

with the culture of secrecy that fostered the scandal still in

place, groups representing some of the victims said on Monday.

Bishops Accountability, a U.S. pressure group, said the pope

had apologised frequently for the harm done by priests but had

never taken effective action to rectify the "incalculable harm"

done to hundreds of thousands of children by predatory clergy.

"Benedict's words rang hollow. He spoke as a shocked

bystander, as if he had just stumbled upon the abuse crisis,"

Anne Barrett Doyle, the group's co-director said in a statement.

The festering child abuse scandal broke out well before the

then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took office in 2005 but it

overshadowed his papacy from the beginning, as more and more

cases came to light in dioceses across the world.

Hundreds of victims came forward with devastating accounts

of abuse suffered at the hands of priests sometimes over years

that left them with deep psychological wounds.

The scandal broke in Boston in 2002 when reports emerged of

the systematic cover-up of sexual abuse, with guilty priests

being quietly transferred between dioceses instead of being

stripped of their office and handed over to civil authorities.

The Irish church was also shaken by the revelations of years

of abuse and denial in children's homes, which led to a

diplomatic breakdown between Dublin and the Holy See.

Benedict spoke of clearing out the "filth" in the Church

just before he took office in 2005 and subsequently expressed

"deep remorse" for the damage. But the shock felt throughout the

Catholic world contributed to a steady haemorrhage of members.

"He publicly spoke about the crisis more than his

predecessor but that alone is no achievement," SNAP, another

abuse victims' advocacy group said in a statement.

"That's simply because disclosures of cover-up at the

highest levels became widely documented during his tenure."

"DENIED REALITY"

His fiercest critics accused him of direct complicity in the

cover up aimed at protecting the church's image from the

increasingly vocal accusations of abuse.

"This resignation could not have come soon enough and it

should be followed by the resignations of most of the hierarchy

of the Roman Catholic Church," said Ray Mouton, a campaigner and

author of "In God's House", a novel based on the abuse.

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

before his accession to the papacy as Benedict XVI, Cardinal

Ratzinger had been responsible for investigating sexual abuse

cases and formulating the Church's response to the gathering

crisis since 1981.

He ascended to the papacy just after the high tide of abuse

claims flooded into his office, which worked through some 3,000

cases of sex abuse between 2003 and 2004.

A strict conservative in other areas including in his

attitude to homosexuals, sex outside marriage and the use of

condoms, Benedict was accused of "an attitude towards issues of

sexuality which denied reality" by the Austrian liberal church

group "Wir sind Kirche" (We are the Church).

The scandal continued throughout his time in office. As

recently as last month, the former archbishop of Los Angeles,

Cardinal Roger Mahony, was stripped of all public and

administrative duties after a thousands of pages of files

detailing abuse were made public.