VATICAN CITY
All Voices
BY Mike Sarzo
Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI broke a months-long silence Tuesday kept since he left the papacy back in February in order to defend the Catholic Church’s response to child sexual abuse scandals that has roiled the world community for years.
In a letter he wrote to well-known Italian atheist and author Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Benedict denied personal responsibility for the scandal surrounding a potential cover up of wrongdoing by priests.
“I never tried to cover these things up,” Benedict wrote. Regarding the scandal and the negative press the church faced as a result, the former pontiff said the church had to bear responsibility.
“That the power of evil penetrated so far into the interior world of the faith is a suffering that we must bear, but at the same time, we must do everything to prevent it from repeating,” he wrote.
However, instead of citing new ways in which the church could own up to and combat the abuses and strive to prevent such abuses in the future, Benedict copped out.
“The percentage of priests who commit these crimes isn’t any higher than the percentage of other similar professions,” Benedict wrote. “One shouldn’t present this deviation as if it were something specific to Catholicism.”
That misses the point, which is the church has rightly received intense scrutiny for abdicating its responsibility in rooting out and stopping the abuse.
Before he was pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger led the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and was responsible for handling abuse cases. In that role during 2001, he instructed bishops to send cases to his office rather than allow them to reshuffle priests accused of sexual abuse to avoid church trials. In 1988, he asked the Vatican’s legal team for faster ways to remove priests accused of abuse but was denied because it didn’t allow the priests to defend themselves.
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