John Paul II’s record on clerical sexual abuse questioned two days before canonisation

ROME
The Tablet (UK)

25 April 2014 14:03 by James Macintyre

Pope John Paul II’s handling of clerical sexual abuse continued to be a cause of controversy in Rome just 48 hours before his canonisation was due to take place.

In response to a question on Pope John Paul II’s handling of the abuse question at a Vatican briefing on Friday, George Weigel, the late Pope’s biographer, stressed that John Paul II “was a great reformer of the Catholic priesthood” which was “in its worst condition since the sixteenth century.”

He admitted there had been an “information gap” between the United States and the Holy See in 2002 so that the Pope was “living this crisis in real time as we were in the U.S.”

Weigel added: “But once he became fully informed in April of that year, he acted decisively to deal with those problems,” he said.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Vatican spokesman during the time of Pope John Paul II, said at first the Polish Pope did not understand the “cancer” of clerical sexual abuse.

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