Word: vatican
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Amid controversy, the Vatican's instinct is typically to protect the man at the top, particularly when it comes to what is known in both secular and ecclesiastical terms as scandal. That is evident again with a pedophile-priest controversy from the 1980s in Germany that is threatening to draw in the German-born Benedict XVI, even as his countrymen demand that he respond directly. "The Pope was not part of what happened back then, and he shouldn't be part of it now," a Vatican insider tells TIME. "He should offer the greatest silence possible, not because he doesn...
...April 2002, when a similar clergy-sex-abuse storm was ravaging the U.S. Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II summoned all the American Cardinals to Rome for an urgent meeting on the crisis. It was an unprecedented public acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation from the typically insulated Vatican leadership. But reporters who made the trip from Boston, the epicenter of the scandal, were hardly impressed with the Vatican openness. When the postsummit briefing included five senior Church officials but not the embattled leader of the Boston Archdiocese, a Massachusetts TV reporter barked out a question demanding the whereabouts...
...Supreme Pontiff in Rome. On Monday, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung splashed the headline "Benedict XVI Remains Silent" on a front-page story describing how the Pope declined to comment on the growing priestly sexual-abuse scandal in his native Germany during public prayers in the Vatican on Sunday. "The abuse scandal has been a nightmare," Alois Glück, president of Germany's lay organization, the Central Committee of German Catholics, tells TIME. "It's one of the worst crises that we've seen in the Catholic Church here in Germany...
...Vatican issued stern statements over the weekend suggesting there was a plot to smear the Pope. The head of Germany's Catholic Church, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, held a private audience with the Pope at the Vatican on Friday. After their meeting, the head of the German Bishops' Conference said he'd briefed the Pope on the situation in Germany. "With great shock, keen interest and deep sadness, the Holy Father took note of what I had to say," Zollitsch told reporters. The Archbishop said the Pope had encouraged German bishops to proceed with "determination and courage" in investigating the allegations...
...Lombardi insists that church leaders in Germany are committed to addressing the problem. "They have shown a desire for transparency. In a way, they have accelerated bringing the problem to light by inviting the victims to speak up even when the cases dated to a while back," Lombardi told Vatican Radio earlier this week. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of the New York-based Catholic magazine America, says Benedict, too, has been notably more eager than his predecessors to confront the issue of clergy sex abuse, having held an unprecedented meeting with victims on his trip...