Word: vatican
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...personal sympathy for the victims of abuse," says Christian Weisner, spokesman for the well-known Catholic reform group We Are Church. Papal officials, however, defend Benedict's silence. "The Pope was not part of what happened back then, and he shouldn't be part of it now," says a Vatican insider. Indeed, the Vatican has mounted an aggressive campaign to portray the scandals as an attempt to besmirch the Pope and discredit the church as a whole. "Over recent days some people have sought, with considerable persistence ... [to] personally involve the Holy Father in questions of abuse," Vatican spokesman Federico...
...they" are is uncertain. Like conspiracy theorists of every stripe, the Vatican doesn't name its enemies...
Trouble in the Old World The chain of scandals now tightening around the Vatican began in Ireland last year with the publication of two government-commissioned reports concerning sexual abuse by priests and at schools and orphanages run by the church. Four of Ireland's 24 bishops offered their resignation. Since then, the Irish Primate, Cardinal Sean Brady, has admitted he met two young victims of a pedophile priest in 1975 and asked them to sign an oath of silence. The priest went on to molest children for almost two decades before being arrested and sent to prison. Brady...
Within the past few weeks, reports of abuse have been proliferating across Europe - in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Poland, the home of Benedict's beloved predecessor. To Gibson, it is especially damaging to the Vatican that allegations are "coming out now in Bavaria and Austria, in the bastion of Old World Catholicism." (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...
Father, Don't Be Mum The Vatican argues that there's no connection between vows of celibacy and sexual deviance, and the Pope himself, a staunch conservative who recently defended celibacy as "an expression of the gift of oneself to God," is unlikely to budge on the issue...