Sorry to have to start out the reportage on the visit with an NYT report, but it's among the first and most comprehensive available in English:
Pope issues strongest words
to date on abuse
By RACHEL DONADIO
May 11, 2010
LISBON — In his strongest and most direct condemnation of the sexual abuse crisis that has swept the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday said that the “sins inside the Church” posed the greatest threat to Catholicism, adding that “forgiveness does not substitute justice.”
“Attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from outside the Church, but the suffering of the Church comes from inside the Church, from sins that exist inside the Church. This we have always known but today we see it in a really terrifying way,” Benedict told reporters aboard his plane en route to Portugal.
“The biggest weight on the Church doesn’t come from the enemies outside, but is born from sin inside the Church,” he added. “The Church has a profound need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn on the one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice. And forgiveness does not substitute justice.”
In his remarks,
Benedict appeared to distance himself from other Church officials who in recent weeks have criticized the media for focusing on the sex abuse crisis, which they called attacks on the Church. [Not at all! He is speaking as Pope, universal father and pastor. It is not for him to meet concrete attacks head on.
And now, the standard plug-in:]
In recent months, the scandal has underscored an ancient institution wrestling with modernity, bringing to light an internal culture clash between traditionalists who value protecting priests and bishops above all else, and those who seek more transparency.
The crisis has also raised questions about how Benedict handled sex abuse as prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as bishop in Munich in 1980 when a pedophile priest was moved to his diocese.
A traditionalist but also a strong voice within the church calling for purification, Benedict met privately with victims of sex abuse on a brief trip to Malta last month his third such meeting, and in March issued a strong letter to Irish Catholics reeling from reports of widespread sex abuse in Catholic institutions.
But his off-the-cuff remarks on Tuesday were his most direct since the crisis hit the church in Europe earlier this year.
On the plane, Benedict told reporters that the Church had to relearn “conversion, prayer, penance.”
The Pope landed in Lisbon on Tuesday for a four-day trip to Portugal aimed at underscoring several themes of his papacy: the threat posed by secularism in Europe, the dialectic between faith and reason, and the role of ethics in economics.
Portugal has been hard hit by the financial crisis and markets are jittery about its prospects of getting its debt and deficit under control. En route to Lisbon, Benedict told reporters that the financial crisis and the threat to the euro were an opportunity to reintroduce a “moral dimension” to economics.
“The events of the last two or three years have demonstrated that the ethical dimension must enter into economic activity,” Benedict said. “Now is the time to see that ethics is not something external but internal to economic rationality and pragmatism.”
In Portugal, Benedict is also expected to underscore the Church’s stance on social issues. A largely Catholic country, Portugal legalized abortion in 2008 and its Socialist majority Parliament approved a same-sex marriage bill earlier this year, which the president of Portugal has not yet signed into law.
On Wednesday, Benedict is expected to travel to the pilgrim shrine of Fátima on the tenth anniversary of the beatification of two of the three shepherd children who say they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary there in 1917. Pope John Paul II credited the Virgin of Fátima with saving him from death in an assassination attempt in 1981 on the anniversary of the apparition.
Tradition has it that the Virgin revealed three secrets to the Portuguese peasants, which the Vatican acknowledged in 1930. The first was a vision of hell; the second is said to have predicted World War II and warn of the collapse of communism, giving Fátima an anti-communist allure during the Cold war.
In 2000, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect for the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, oversaw the Vatican’s revealing the famous third secret of Fátima after years in which its mystique had grown to cult status for some Catholics.
Disclosing the secret in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, then the Vatican secretary of state and now the dean of the College of Cardinals, said that the third vision was of a “bishop clothed in white,” the Pope, who makes his way through a field of martyrs, which the Vatican interpreted as prefiguring the assassination attempt on John Paul by the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.
In his comments on Tuesday on the sex abuse crisis, Benedict said that the message of the Madonna of Fátima could be extended not only to the “suffering” of John Paul, and therefore of Popes, but also of the suffering of the entire Catholic Church.
Presenting the third secret in 2000, the future Pope said the images of Fátima were not to be taken literally, but rather “synthesize and compress against a single background facts which extend through time.” He added then that the apparitions at Fátima had a central message: “Penance, penance, penance.”
Pope says Church must recognise
"terrifying" truth of abuse
by Philip Pullella
LISBON, May 11 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict said on Tuesday the crisis of sexual abuse of children by priests should make the Church acknowledge the "terrifying" truth that its greatest threat comes from "sin within the Church".
In some of the most comprehensive public comments since the scandal broke two months ago, Benedict told reporters the Church has "a very deep need" to acknowledge that it must do penitence for its sins and "accept purification".
"Today we see in a truly terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin within the Church," he told reporters on the plane taking him to Portugal, in response to a question about the sexual abuse scandal.
In recent weeks, a number of Vatican officials have accused the media of waging a smear campaign against the Church, with one top Vatican official going as far as dismissing reports of a cover up of sexual abuse as "petty gossip". [The herd line!]
The 83-year-old German Pontiff, facing the worst crisis of his five-year-old papacy, said the Church had to seek forgiveness from victims of sexual abuse but also recognized that "forgiveness cannot be a substitute for justice".
The main purpose of the Pope's four-day visit to Portugal is to visit the shrine at Fatima where the Madonna is said to have appeared to three shepherd children six times in 1917.
Pope says Church suffering
comes from within
LISBON, Portugal, May 11 (AFP) – Pope Benedict XVI referred to the paedophile priest scandal rocking the Catholic Church on his arrival in Portugal on Tuesday, saying the Church's "greatest persecution" came from its own "sin".
"Today the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside, but from the sin inside the Church itself," the pope told journalists aboard his plane on the flight from Rome.
Allegations that it for years protected paedophile priests from prosecution in several European countries and in the United States has overshadowed preparations for his four-day visit to overwhelmingly Catholic Portugal. ['Overshadowed'? Only in the minds of MSM outside Portugal, it seems! Because they want it to overshadow everything about this Papacy!]
Wearing an ivory robe with a golden crucifix around his neck,
a tired-looking Benedict, 83, walked gingerly down the gangway steps to be welcomed by Portugal's President Anibal Cavaco Silva and his wife Maria.
The President welcomed the Pope to a "free and plural Portugal" whose people, he said, have "a calling to recognize the value of diversity".
The centre-right President is due to decide next week whether to sign into law a bill passed by Parliament which would make Portugal the sixth country to allow same-sex marriage.
Church authorities in Portugal said Benedict was likely to call on Portugal to uphold Christian values and urge solidarity across Europe's struggling economies.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/05/2010 02:54]