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Apr 23, 2010
The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI against accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests.
The Vatican said such accusations were part of an anti-Catholic “hate” campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Further, the No. 2 official in the Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, blamed the Church’s child-abuse scandal on homosexuality.
“Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true,” Bertone said. “That is the problem.”
Bertone, now the Holy See’s secretary of state but formerly Benedict’s deputy when the future pope, then-called Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, headed the Vatican’s morals office, has himself been swept up in the scandals.
During a May 1998 meeting at the Vatican, Bertone told Wisconsin bishops to halt a church trial against an ailing priest who was accused of sexually abusing 200 deaf children, according to a Vatican transcript. The priest died soon afterward.
Sex abuse allegations, as well as accusations of cover-ups by diocesan bishops and Vatican officials, have swept across Europe in recent weeks. Benedict has been criticized for not halting the actions of abusive priests when he was a Vatican cardinal and earlier while he was the archbishop of Munich in his native Germany.
The mainland European scandals – in Germany, Italy, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland – are erupting after decades of abuse cases in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and other areas.
Benedict has ignored victims’ demands that he accept responsibility for what they say is his own personal and institutional responsibility for failing to swiftly kick abusive priests out of the priesthood, or at least keep them away from children.
But the pope has been protected by a vanguard of senior Vatican prelates who are fending off what they contend is an orchestrated attempt to attack the leader of the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics.
Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, told Vatican Radio, “The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different” agenda.
Also arguing that Benedict’s promotion of conservative family models had provoked the so-called attacks was the Vatican’s dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano.
“By now, it’s a cultural contrast,” Sodano told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. “The pope embodies moral truths that aren’t accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church.”
Also rallying to Benedict’s side, Italian Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, who heads the Vatican City State’s governing apparatus, said the pope “has done all that he could have” against sex abuse by clergy of minors.
The Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, Minnesota-based minister in the United Church of Christ who is faith work director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, described the cardinals’ comments as “diversionary counterattacks” that are an affront both to the victims of clergy abuse and to gays and lesbians.
“It makes me heartsick,” she said.
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