Europe

Home page

Europe

Pope spreads blame for church’s humiliating record on child abuse by priests

22 December 2010 03:08 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. An unimaginable number of child sex-abuse reports this year was a humiliation the church must accept as an exhortation to truth and renewal, Pope Benedict XVI has said, APA reports quoting smh.com.au website.

The Pope used his annual speech to Rome’s cardinals and bishops to urge the church to reflect on how it let the abuse happen. But he also blamed the influence of the secular morality of child pornography and sex tourism, and a form of moral relativism that influenced Catholic theology in the 1970s.

’’We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred,’’ he said. ’’We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen.’’
Advertisement: Story continues below

The Pope said the church was well aware of the gravity of this sin committed by priests, and of the church’s responsibility. But nor could he be silent about ’’the context of these times’’.

’’There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society,’’ he said on Monday. ’’The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times.’’

He also said he heard from bishop after bishop in developing countries how sex tourism threatened an entire generation, while the problem of drugs was extending ’’its octopus tentacles around the entire world’’.

He criticised moral relativism from the 1970s that discarded absolutes, leaving only a ’’better than’’ and ’’worse than’’. ’’Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist.’’

The Pope was pessimistic about the future, saying: ’’For all its new hopes and possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political structures cannot function.’’

A Catholic ethicist, Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, said the Pope’s use of the 12th-century saint Hildegard’s vision of the church as a battered woman, her garments rent and torn by priests’ sins, was a powerful metaphor for the church’s suffering caused by paedophile priests. He said the Pope could not blame secular culture, because the culture did not stoop so low as to advocate abusing children, but he was right to criticise situational ethics because child abuse was always an absolute wrong and never justifiable.

Victims’ advocates were sceptical yesterday. Helen Last, of In Good Faith, said: ’’These statements we continually get are just crocodile tears until they open their files and processes to secular authorities.’’

Ms Last said it was encouraging if the Pope put the interests of children first, because that had not been the church’s practice for the past 20 years.

The Melbourne historian Dr Bernard Barrett, who has researched clerical sexual abuse, said it did not begin in the 1970s but spanned the church’s 2000-year history and remained a deep-seated problem.