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Sex abuse wounds 'run deep'
28/10/2006 22:36 - (SA)
Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI told Irish bishops on Saturday that the church must urgently rebuild confidence and trust that has been damaged by clerical sex abuse scandals, which he said create deep wounds.
The comments were the first explicit remarks by Benedict on the subject since he became pontiff last year.
In March 2005, Benedict, then the Cardinal 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 from Ireland, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation where the church has been damaged by sex abuse scandals over the past decade.
"These are all the more tragic when the abuser is a cleric.
"The wounds caused by such acts run deep, and it is an urgent task to rebuild confidence and trust where these have been damaged," Benedict said.
Benedict told the bishops that as they continue to deal with the problem, "it is important to establish the truth of what happened in the past, to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent it from occurring again, to ensure that the principles of justice are fully respected and, above all, to bring healing to the victims and to all those affected by these egregious crimes."
"In this way, the Church in Ireland will grow stronger," the pontiff said.
- AP
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