Pope: Wounds inflicted by sex abuse ‘run deep’

[Weeorphan]

By Alessandra Rizzo
ASSOCIATED PRESS

8:33 a.m. October 28, 2006

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI said the Catholic Church must urgently rebuild confidence and trust damaged by clerical sex abuse, telling Irish bishops on Saturday “the wounds caused by such acts run deep.”

The comments to bishops from Ireland – an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country where all but one seminary has closed following repeated scandals – were the first explicit remarks by Benedict on the subject since he became pontiff. http://www.signonsandiego.com/images/t.gifhttp://www.signonsandiego.com/images/t.gif
March, 2005, Joseph Ratzinger, denounced what he called “filth” in the Church “even among those … in the priesthood.” Those words were seen by many as a possible denunciation of the clergy sexual abuse scandals.

“In the exercise of your pastoral ministry, you have had to respond in recent years to many heart-rending cases of sexual abuse of minors,” the pontiff told the bishops.
“These are all the more tragic when the abuser is a cleric.”

msnbc.msn.com/id/15454744/

Moderator note: Added link and shortened quote to three paragraphs to comply with forum rules.

 

[iserve]

There is only one way to truly fix this problem, and that seems to be ridding our Church of those who continuously defy the magesterium. Clean house of these people- even if it leaves us short-handed. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why it has taken so long to shut the door on those whom we know have no intention of entering without their own agenda. Plus these folks do a great deal of harm in the meantime by attracting that which is undesireable and driving away the desireable. All during my tenure with the Church, the heirarchy continuously turned a blind eye and deaf ear towards this need. Are bishops that cowardly that they cannot face the heat here? Why can’t we attract better men anymore?

 

[Caesar]

The Church must be purged of these men. We must rid ourselves of such people who would do such things and we must reclaim the Church from the claws of scandal and corruption. These pedophile priests and these cowardly bishops should be screaming for mercy before the altars of God.

 

[Crumpy]

You know, these problems didn’t just crop up a few years ago. They stretch back as far as the history of any living priests. I know I heard about such things for decades, and there seemed to be such an obvious conspiracy of silence.

This problem only compounds the other discipline problems in the Church, the skepticism about the Bible and the widespread skepticism about the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

There really ought to be a zero-tolerance policy about the latter, too.

I think we can see the effect all this has had on the length of time it is taking to make assignments to vacant sees in the U.S. The vacancies historically probably had to do with slow means of communications. Now, the delays betray a far greater hesitancy for sure, and more pleas for divine guidance, I hope. And, I further hope it reflects downplaying of political correctness and ideological slant (or, do I have that reversed?).

 

[bones_IV]

Many Bishops and priests excusing themselves from the high sexual standards of the Church’s teachings hence the sex abuse scandal.