Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday blamed the church's own sins for the clerical sex-abuse scandal -- not a campaign mounted by outsiders -- and called for profound purification to end what he called the "greatest persecution" the church has endured.His strongly worded comments placed responsibility for the crisis squarely on the sins of pedophile priests, repudiating the Vatican's initial response to the scandal, in which it blamed the news media as well as advocates of abortion rights and legalizing same-sex marriage for mounting what it called a campaign against the church and the pope. Speaking en route to Portugal, Benedict said the Catholic Church has always suffered from problems of its own making but that "today we see it in a truly terrifying way.""The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church," the pontiff said. "The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness -- but also justice." The comments marked Benedict's most thorough admission of the church's guilt in creating the scandal. Previously he blamed abusers themselves and, in the case of Ireland, the bishops who failed to stop them. He was responding to journalists' questions, submitted in advance, aboard the papal plane as he flew to Portugal. His four-day visit will take him from Lisbon to the famed Fatima shrine to Portugal's second city, Porto. Despite the Vatican's initial defensive response to hundreds of reports of clerical abuse in Europe, Benedict has promised that the church will take action. He has already started cleaning house, accepting the resignations of a few bishops who either admitted they molested youngsters or covered up for priests who did. ...
via Pope Benedict places blame for sex scandals on Catholic Church.
Good. He's starting to get it right... and he looks less like a Sith Lord in this photo than any photo before. It would be useful if he would come around on the issue of birth control too. Clean house and then admit that the need to reduce our population is more important than the need for the church to grow new members.
2 comments:
"Accepting the resignations of a few bishops" is nothing. The Pope needs to stand trial for criminal, institutional, aiding and abetting of child rape.
The charge is that the Vatican swept child rape under the carpet, under Ratzinger's watch. We have him on video refusing to acknowledge the complaints against Father Maciel, a notorious rapist. All the while, Vatican policy was "send all complaints to the Vatican. Do not contact local authorities."
Talk about understatements:
"Benedict said the Catholic Church has always suffered from problems of its own making ... "
Like, where do we begin? the condemnation of its own priests' liberation theology? the official Catholic silence during the Vietnam war? the Korean war? World War II? American's "Manifest Destiny"? The Crusades? The conquistador missionaries?
... How about the politicization and the Romanization of Christianity itself with St. Paul?
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