Pope Says Sex Scandal Has Hit Unimaginable Dimension

By RACHEL DONADIO

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ROME — Pope Benedict XVI said on Monday that the continuing sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church had reached a “degree we could not have imagined” this year, and that the Church must reflect on its failures, help the victims, and prevent abusers from becoming priests.

“We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred,” the pope told the Vatican hierarchy in a pointed Christmas message. “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.”

In recent months, investigations in Ireland, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have found that clerics had sexually abused children in the past and that the church hierarchy was often found to have covered up the abuse.

Victims have accused the Vatican of not acting decisively and swiftly enough to discipline errant priests and of using complex bureaucracy and uneven application of church law to protect priests over children.

This month, the Vatican published a letter from 1988 that it said showed that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office in charge of handling abuse, had sought ways for swifter punishment for errant priests. At the time, he was unsuccessful.

After the abuse scandal erupted in the United States in 2002, the Vatican introduced fast-track norms for punishing errant priests, and bishops in the United States introduced a zero-tolerance policy, in which priests are suspended at the first accusation of abuse. But victims have called that too little, too late.

The Vatican has said that it is working on a series of guidelines for bishops around the world advising them how to handle abuse cases, including reporting abuse to civil authorities in countries where it is required.

In his remarks on Monday, the pope also thanked “the many good clerics,” and “all those who work to help victims and to restore their trust in the church.”

But he focused on ways the church needed to change.

“We are well aware of the particular gravity of this sin committed by priests and of our corresponding responsibility,” the pope said. But he added that the scandal should be seen “in the context of these times.”

He said that as recently as the 1970s, the devastation of pedophilia was not well understood, and that today’s market in child pornography and sex tourism should also be condemned.

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