VATICAN CITY/IRELAND
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on Jun. 17, 2012 NCR Today
ROME — In a rare video-message to a Eucharistic congress concluding today in Dublin, Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI said that gratitude for the legacy of the Irish church has been shaken “in an appalling way” by revelations of sexual abuse committed “by priests and consecrated persons against people entrusted to their care.”
Benedict acknowledged that the abuse crisis has “undermined the credibility of the church’s message.”
The Vatican released the text of Benedict’s video address this afternoon via an e-mail alert to journalists, with translations in Italian, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, suggesting officials want the message to have a wide distribution.
Catholicism in Ireland has been rocked by one of the largest sexual abuse crises in the world. Starting in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government enquiries established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children in previous decades.
In many cases, those investigations have shown, abusing priests and religious were moved to other parishes to avoid embarrassment or a scandal, assisted by senior clergy. There have been calls for leaders of the Irish church to resign over the scandal.
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