VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The man who served as Blessed John Paul II’s spokesman and media adviser told reporters that the late pope did not initially understand the gravity of the clerical sexual abuse crisis, but once he did he immediately took strong steps to deal with it.
Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who served as papal spokesman into the first months of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy, also said the church’s canonical process against Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, began under Pope John Paul, but was not concluded until after his death, so the late pope could not have known for sure the allegations were true.
Meeting reporters at the Vatican April 25, both Navarro-Valls and George Weigel, a biographer of Pope John Paul, were asked about the pope’s knowledge of and reaction to the clerical sexual abuse crisis.
Navarro-Valls told reporters that when the abuse crisis became public, “I don’t think he understood” how serious it was, “but I don’t think anyone did.”
Calling clerical sexual abuse a “cancer,” Navarro-Valls said it became known publicly “in a geographically limited area, the United States, and with isolated cases,” many of which were reported around 2000, but “had taken place 20 or 30 years earlier.”
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