Benedict's strategy on crisis: 'Pastoral not Political' [John Allen]

[Catholic_Press]

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Valetta, Malta

By meeting privately with sex abuse victims here, but avoiding any public apologies or defense of his record on handling sex abuse cases, Pope Benedict XVI seems to have confirmed his strategy for engaging the fallout from the crisis, one that might be summarized in a sound-bite: “Pastoral, not Political.”

In other words, Benedict is willing to do the behind-the-scenes pastoral outreach he believes the suffering of victims demands, but he is otherwise largely opting out of the wider public debate over the church’s policies on sexual abuse, as well as the critical examination of his past.

At a pastoral level, the logic for today’s meeting with victims was abundantly clear.

Malta has recently been rocked by its own sex abuse crisis, centering on ten men who recently alleged they were abused during the 1980s and 1990s by four Catholic priests at a local church-run orphanage. One of those alleged victims has attributed a horrific crime he committed in 1991, murdering a homosexual man with a hammer and then cutting his body to pieces with a broken bottle, to his experience of abuse at the orphanage.

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