Word: churched
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...triumphant return to his Bavarian hometown of Marktl am Inn four years ago - his first since becoming Pontiff - was made all the more poignant by the presence of his older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Five decades after they'd entered seminary together, the new Pontiff and the retired church-choir director stepped with the same soft gait and wavy white hair into the town's tiny riverside chapel. Praying silently side by side, they might just as well have been an aging pair of humble village priests...
...reverberations from the scandal have been felt at the Vatican, where the Holy See spokesman was compelled to respond directly to the abuse allegations - a task that is typically handled by someone on the diocesan level. The spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Tuesday that German church authorities acted "promptly and decisively" to investigate the allegations after they emerged. Neither Lombardi nor the Pope himself, however, has commented on Ratzinger's admissions of slapping young people or failing to address wider suspicions of violence. The head of the German Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who made a public apology...
...College, went public with accusations against two former priests at the institution. Similar allegations then emerged at other Catholic schools and institutions in Germany, including a Benedictine monastery and several boarding schools. German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger condemned the "wall of silence" within the Catholic hierarchy, accusing the church of hiding behind a 2001 Vatican directive that called for cases of abuse to be investigated internally before going to state authorities. "This directive makes clear that even serious abuse allegations fall under papal confidentiality and thus should not be forwarded on outside the church," she said. (See "The Pope...
...Chris Weisner, spokesman for the German Catholic reform organization We Are Church, says the group's sex-abuse hotline has received an average of six calls a day from alleged victims in recent weeks and that 18 of Germany's 27 dioceses have been touched by the scandal. "Abuse is widespread," Weisner tells TIME. "The church is investigating the cases very reluctantly. [But] it has a duty to uphold moral standards. Catholics in Germany are extremely disappointed and angry...
Analysts like Masferrer do believe, however, that the Maciel scandal, especially in the wake of last week's revelations, is having a "devastating impact" on the Catholic Church in Mexico. The Church is already hemorrhaging congregants to Protestant Evangelical sects, and it has seen its clout diminish in areas like the capital, Mexico City, where secular leftists recently passed a law permitting gay marriage. "The politicians can say that the Church officials are in no position to give moral lectures," says Masferrer. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...