Richard Owen in Rome
With the clerical sex abuse scandal which has engulfed the Vatican threatening to overshadow Easter, a spokesman for the Pope today said he saw his handling of the crisis as a personal “test”.
The Pope, presiding over a ceremony dedicated to the priesthood, today said Christians "as good citizens" must "keep the law and do what is just and good," while not accepting "a wrong that is enshrined in law”.
He made no mention of the scandals however, instead citing legalised abortion as an example.
Addressing rows of prostrated white robed clergy at St Peter's, the Pope said: "As priests, we are called in fellowship with Jesus Christ, to be men of peace, we are called to oppose violence and trust in the greater power of love”.
The Pope, who is accused by critics of having covered up abuse both as Archbishop of Munich and as head of Vatican doctrine, will this evening wash the feet of 12 priests in a Holy Thursday ceremony at St John Lateran, commemorating the washing of the feet of the 12 disciples by Jesus before the Last Supper.
Asked how the pontiff was bearing up in the face of the storm over sex abuse, Father Federico Lombardi, his spokesman, said "The Pope is a person of faith. He sees this as a test for him and the Church".
Father Lombardi stressed that the pontiff, 82, was in good physical form and fully able to cope with the demanding Easter schedule, which involves a torchlit Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) evening procession at the Colosseum on Good Friday and his Urbi et Orbi (to the City and the World) address on Easter Sunday.
It is not clear whether the Pope will use the address to speak about the clerical abuse scandals. At the Good Friday procession in 2005, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, shortly before he was elected Pope, he condemned “this filth in the Church”.
However this year's meditations on the Stations of the Cross, written by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the former Vicar of Rome, do not refer even indirectly to the current crisis.
The Pope did not refer to it either in his homily on Palm Sunday, instead indicating that he would “not be intimidated” by “chatter”.
Three weeks after the abuse scandal began to encroach on the Pope himself the Vatican's defence strategy has become clear: call for repentance over the past and more effective action in the future, but at the same time discredit “attacks” on the Pope as a media witchhunt and protect him from legal action.
In the wake of the Pope's letter to Irish bishops on their “errors of judgment” in handling cases of priests who rape or molest children, several European bishops have used Holy Week to reflect on the need for repentance.
n Austria Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the Archbishop of Vienna – seen by some as a future Pope - presided over a service for victims of abuse, thanking them for “ breaking your silence," and adding, "a lot has been broken open. There is less looking away. But there is still a lot to do”.
Cardinal Schonborn has announced the creation of a Church-funded but independent commission in Austria headed by a woman to suggest ways to strengthen church guidelines for dealing with sexual abuse.
In Switzerland Catholic bishops said in a statement that Holy Week was “a period of penance, when the faithful are supposed to admit their guilt, examine wrongdoing, find ways to improve and ask God and people for forgiveness”.
The Swiss bishops admitted they had underestimated the problem, saying, "it is important to us that unconditional transparency is brought to the past”.
They urged all abusers to "stand before God and the people whom they have wronged and report to the relevant authorities.”Father Lombardi said the Pope also saw Holy Week as a time of "humility and penitence”.
However Franco Frattin, the Italian Foreign Minister, denounced allegations against the Pope as "scandalous and shameful".
Cardinal William Levada, the Pope's successor as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, went on the offensive, attacking the New York Times for implicating the Pope in a decision in the 1990s not to defrock Father Lawrence Murphy, a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting vulnerable deaf boys.
Cardinal Levada said a lengthy trial for Father Murphy would have been "useless" because the priest was dying by the time his diocese initiated a canonical trial, and said the paper had wrongly used the case to find find fault with Benedict XVI over his handling of abuse cases as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Father Murphy was accused of molesting as many as 200 boys in the confessional, in dormitories, and during field trips while working at a school for the deaf from the 1950s until1974. He died in 1998 at the age of 72.
Cardinal Levada admitted Father Murphy should have been defrocked for his "egregious criminal behaviour." But he noted that when the accusations first arose in the 1960s and 70s, police had investigated the priest but taken no action.
The Cardinal said the New York Times articles were "deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness." A spokeswoman for the New York Times said the paper's reports were based on facts which no-one had questioned.
Cardinal Levada insisted that Cardinal Ratzinger's 2001 Vatican document "Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela," criticised for imposing papal confidentiality on abuse cases, had not forbidden priests or bishops from going to the police.
Instead it had allowed for the Vatican to waive the statute of limitations and had streamlined procedures for investigating cases.
"This in itself has shown the seriousness with which today's Church undertakes its responsibility to assist bishops and religious superiors to prevent these crimes from happening in the future, and to punish them when they happen," Cardinal Levada said on the Vatican website.
The 2001 document was "not, as some have theorised, part of a plot from on high to interfere with civil jurisdiction in such cases”.
The Pope has also been accused of covering up or ignoring sex abuse cases when he was Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.
Reports of past clerical abuse surfaced in the Pope's native Germany in January, since when hundreds of people have come forward with claims of abuse — most dating back decades — in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy as well as Ireland.
However in Italy, where the Catholic Church is deeply embedded in all aspects of society, including schools, youth clubs and hospitals, the Italian bishops' conference ended its annual meeting this week with only a vague pledge of cooperation with the civil authorities.. It praised the Pope’s “firm and enlightened” attitude in dealing with the paedophile crisis.
Today Pietro Forno, the Milan prosecutor for sex abuse cases, told Il Giornale that although he had a “long list” of cases, not one had been brought to his attention by bishops or the clergy because of a “climate of fear” in the Church hierarchy.
Italian media have largely ignored the trial in Rome of an Italian priest accused of sexually abusing seven boys, and the Vatican's own "prosecutor" for clergy sex abuse, Monsignor Charles Scicluna of Malta, recently acknowledged that he was "worried about a certain culture of silence that I see as still too widespread" in Italy.
Critics also say that measures taken to date in Europe fall short of the ”zero-tolerance” policy adopted by US bishops after the clerical abuse scandal exploded there in 2002.
American dioceses have so far paid out nearly $3 billion in settlements and other costs.
William McMurry, an American lawyer, said he had filed a motion in a Kentucky court seeking to take sworn testimony from the Pope on what the Vatican knew about paedophile scandals.
His action follows a lawsuit filed in 2004 by three men who allege they were abused by priests in Kentucky starting as far back as 1928.
The Vatican tried to get the case dismissed, but a judge ruled in 2007 that it should go ahead and ordered "discovery" to begin, a process in which both sides request information and documents from the other side, including questioning of witnesses.
The Kentucky motion alleges that the Pope was aware of clergy sex abuse in the United States and "discouraged prosecution of accused clergy and encouraged secrecy to protect the reputation of the Church," in the 24 years that he led the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
The motion says documents released last week by the New York Times "unequivocally link Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, to child sexual abuse cases in the United States and directly implicate his involvement in the Holy See's decision to cast a shroud of secrecy over clergy sexual abuse cases”.
However Giuseppe dalla Torre, head of the Vatican Tribunal, told Corriere della Sera the Pope enjoyed diplomatic immunity because he was not only leader of the Roman Catholic Church but also a head of state.
Monsignor Jerome Listecki, the Archbishop of Milwaukee, insisted the Pope had "been firm in his commitment to combat clergy sexual abuse, root it out of the Church; reach out to those who have been harmed,and hold perpetrators accountable ".
He believed history would show the Pope had “responded to this crisis swiftly and decisively”
Cardinal Schonborn this week also defended the Pope, saying allegations he had covered abuse were “untrue”. He pointed out that in a case involving his predecessor as Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Groer, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who wanted to take a hard line and not the Pope at the time, John Paul II.
The Austrian church was shaken by allegations in 1995 that Cardinal Groer had molested youths at a monastery in the 1970s.
Three years later, Cardinal Groer relinquished all religious duties and sought exile in Germany. However “Vatican officials” had persuaded Pope John Paul II that the allegations were false and that an investigation would only generate negative publicity for the church, Cardinal Schonborn said. He did not name the officials concerned.
The Pope's defenders also point out that he had ordered an investigation of Father Marcial Maciel, the late founder of the conservative Legionaries of Christ order, who was found guilty of abusing seminarians and fathering at last one child, whereas Pope John Paul II had refused to believe the allegations.
Cardinal Ruini told the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano: “If we are talking about the very grave question of the abuse of minors, then Pope Benedict has already given the correct, indeed I would say complete, explanation in his recent pastoral letter to Irish Catholics”.
Times Online
