VATICAN CITY
Rorate Caeli
Marco Tosatti
senior religious correspondent for La Stampa
It is difficult to write about something that is vague and has indistinct contours as in an interview with seeming contradictions, but not contradictory in a general sense, such as the latest interview between Eugenio Scalfari and the Pope. But there is an aspect of the conversation that merits attention, because it poses questions of great weight. One of these questions concerns sexual abuse by clerics. At a certain point, in his reconstruction of the conversation, Scalfari writes that he asked how widespread this phenomenon is. The Pope responded, according to Scalfari, in this way:
“Many of my consultants who are in this struggle with me assure me on the basis of reliable data that they estimate that pedophilia in the Church is at the level of two percent. This should have reassured me, but I must say to you that it did not reassure me at all. I consider it on the contrary a most grave matter. The two percent of pedophiles are priests and even bishops and cardinals. And others, even more numerous, know but are silent, they punish but say nothing about the reason for the punishment. I find this state of things unsustainable, and it is my intention to confront it with the severity that it demands.
The sentence ends this way, without the closing quotations marks.
But it is the figure of two percent reported by Scalfari that creates a great deal of perplexity. And one must ask: a) if the Pope really said that; b) who gave him these figures? c) did Scalfari report this correctly? There are 410,000 priests in the world. Two percent of these comes to eight thousand. This is data that contrasts with that which has been accepted heretofore.
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