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Email: "Vatican Urges Irish Bishops to “Own Up” to Guilt in Sex Abuse Scandals"

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BY LifeSiteNews.com By Hilary White, Rome correspondentROME, February 16, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The sexual abuse of children is not just a “heinous crime” but “a grave sin which offends God and wounds the dignity of the human person created in his image,” Pope Benedict XVI said today following meetings with 24 Irish bishops. In his remarks the pope also linked the abuse crisis in Ireland to “the more general crisis of faith affecting the Church.”The members of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference are in Rome this week to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and senior members of the Curia to address the scandal of Catholic institutional involvement in decades of sexual, physical and psychological abuse of young people in parishes, orphanages and workhouses. The meetings between the 24 diocesan bishops were held behind closed doors in the Apostolic Palace yesterday and today. A Vatican media release issued today said, “All those present recognized that this grave crisis has led to a breakdown in trust in the Church’s leadership and has damaged her witness to the Gospel and its moral teaching.”Tarcisio Bertone, the Cardinal Secretary of State, opened the talks with a forthright call for the “sinners” among the bishops’ ranks to “own up” to their crimes. The Vatican also said that the meeting was called to help the pope prepare a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics. The bishops were called to give personal account, one by one, to the pope, of their knowledge of or involvement in the abuse that was documented by two government-sponsored reports published late last year. The reports - the more recent of which was called the Murphy Report and which focused on the Archdiocese of Dublin - have shocked and horrified the still strongly Catholic nation and calls for resignations of the bishops named in the reports have come from both the laity and senior prelates. The Murphy Report said that between 1975 and 2004 the bishops operated on a policy of “don't ask, don't tell,” and had “obsessively” hidden child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese. Clogher Bishop Joseph Duffy admitted that there had been a “culture of concealment” in the Irish Church that the reports said was more interested in covering up the evidence of abuse and saving the reputation of priests, then in actually doing anything to stop the abuse. Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi has denied that resignations were discussed at the meetings. Bishop Duffy confirmed this saying, “Precise questions of resignation is not on the agenda of the bishops because that is not our prerogative.”“I would admit quite frankly what everybody else knows, shouted from house tops, that the church has been seriously wounded,” Bishop Duffy said. “This has done an immense damage to the authority of the church as the mouthpiece of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Of that there is no doubt.”In December, the archbishop of Dublin demanded the resignation of four of the bishops named in the Murphy Report. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told Bishops Raymond Field, Eamon Walsh, Martin Drennan and Jim Moriarty, to quit, saying that if they did not he would ask the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops to remove them. Bishop Donal Brendan Murray, a former auxiliary of Dublin, had already announced his resignation as bishop of Limerick. Two more bishops resigned at Christmas, and now, of the five bishops named, only the Bishop of Galway, Martin Drennan, is still in office. Meanwhile, more allegations of abuse of minors by priests over the last several decades are coming forward from Germany. More than a hundred former students at an elite Catholic school in Berlin have come forward with claims of abuse against the Society of Jesus. The German abuse scandal is growing, with investigations into cases of possible abuse in schools in Bonn, Göttingen, in St Blasien in southwest Germany, Hanover and Hamburg and at Alosius college in Bonn. Manuela Groll, a lawyer representing many former pupils, said, “More and more victims are coming forward every day.”Most of these reports and allegations of clerical abuse coincide in time with what many have identified as a general collapse of moral and doctrinal discipline in the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The German claims largely fit this bill, with most of the alleged abuse occurring in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So far, all the German claims fall under the statute of limitations that makes criminal prosecution impossible.  Read related LSN coverage:Limerick Bishop Resigns after Sex Abuse Revelations: Pope Benedict "Deeply Disturbed" by Irish Scandals http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/dec/09121708.htmlIrish Prelate Demands Resignation of Four More Bishops http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/dec/09122203.html http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/vatican-urges-irish-bishops-to-own-up-to-guilt-in-sex-abuse-scandals/

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