Pope Urges Catholic 'Repentance'

Pope Benedict XVI broke his recent silence on the clerical abuse scandal Thursday, complaining that the church was under attack but saying that "we Christians" must repent for sins and recognize mistakes.

The main U.S. victims group immediately dismissed his comments, saying they are meaningless unless Benedict takes concrete steps to safeguard children from pedophile priests.

Benedict made the remarks during an off-the-cuff homily at a Mass inside the Vatican for members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

"I must say, we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word 'repent', which seemed too tough. But now under attack from the world, which has been telling us about our sins ... we realize that it's necessary to repent, in other words, recognize what is wrong in our lives," Benedict said.

"Open ourselves to forgiveness ... and let ourselves be transformed. The pain of repentance, which is a purification and transformation, is a grace because it is renewal and the work of divine mercy," he said.

Victims of clerical abuse have long demanded that Benedict take more personal responsibility for clerical abuse, charging that the Vatican orchestrated a culture of cover-up and secrecy that allowed priests to rape and molest children unchecked for decades.

Those demands have intensified in recent weeks as the Vatican and Benedict himself have been accused of negligence in handling some cases in Europe and the United States.

"Factual disclosures are not 'attacks' and 'penance' protects no one," said Mark Serrano, a spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the U.S. group.

"When the Pope can't bring himself to utter the words 'pedophile priest' or 'child sex crimes' or 'cover-ups' or 'complicit bishops,' it's hard to have faith that he is able to honestly and effectively deal with this growing crisis," Serrano said in a statement.



The Catholic Church's Pedophilia Defense
There are 4,392 priests and deacons in the U.S. Catholic Church alone who have been charged with allegations of sexual abuse from 1950-2002. As of last week, the Vatican has attempted six different public-relations campaigns to deflect any blame away from Pope Benedict XVI on the stonewalling of the church regarding priest sexual abuse.

Then a letter surfaced, signed personally by Pope Benedict when he was a cardinal, refusing to take action against a pedophile priest. The church’s latest attempt is to blame “gay priests.” In other words, try and blame it on those gays, who we all know abuse little boys.

The church should be protecting children rather than the priests who sexually abuse them. Regardless of what sexual orientation the priest is, he should be dealt with as a man who has raped/abused a child. Instead, the church hides the abusing priest behind bishops, cardinals and, now it has been proven, even the (future) pope.

The money parishioners put into the Sunday plate that has gone to settle lawsuits and legal fees has climbed to $1.5 billion, and that was only until 2006?.

What About the Girls?
Boys aren't the only victims of the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal.

We thought we knew the script in the Catholic-priest sex-abuse scandal. Both the victims and the perpetrators were male. But a recent story in The New York Times seemed to suggest that this scenario ignored a whole segment of victims: young girls. The Times reported on a Catholic priest who was permitted to move to India instead of facing accusations of molesting two Minnesota girls. Meanwhile, Slate's June Thomas asked, "Is anyone else wondering if young women have been left out of this story, and if there's some agenda that's driving that absence?" a question that Andrew Sullivan’s readers have also been discussing. (Slate and NEWSWEEK are both owned by The Washington Post Company.)

In the case of the priest scandal, boys were the victims of sexual misconduct much more often than girls, by a factor of about four to one, says Margaret Leland Smith of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But what has gotten scant attention is the fact that the female victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests tended to be younger than the males. Data analyzed by John Jay researchers, including Smith, shows that even though there were many more boy victims than girls overall, the number and proportion of sexual misconduct directed at girls under 8 years old was higher than that experienced by boys the same age. Specifically, between 1950 and 2002, there were 246 girls younger than 8 who were sexually abused by priests (representing 14 percent of all girl victims), compared with 236 boys (3 percent of all boy victims). However, the most likely age of victims—for girls and boys—was between 11 and 14.

The John Jay study, commissioned and financed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops after the uproar in 2002 over the priest-sex-abuse scandal, also indicates that the girl victims were more likely than boys to be the sole victims of their abuser. Priests who targeted one girl or one boy were more likely to focus on someone older than 14 than those with multiple victims. (Overall, 27 percent of the girls and 34 percent of the boys were between 15 and 17 years old.) The duration of abuse involving a sole victim was more likely to last a year or less. Priests who preyed on multiple children were more likely to continue the abuse for five years or longer. In the case of both boys and girls, most of the abuse occurred between 1960 and 1980, and fell sharply after that, but most of the charges were not reported to authorities until after 1992. Smith says that as the Catholic Church continues to turn over any newly made charges of abuse to the John Jay team, the researchers continue to see the same trends in terms of gender, age, and dates when the abuse occurred.