Pope Benedict says sex abuse crisis is 'terrifying'

SPEAKING on the papal plane en route to Portugal yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI called the reality of the sex abuse crisis currently rocking the Catholic Church “terrifying”, adding that the greatest persecution of the church comes from within “because sin exists in the church”.

Answering a series of questions submitted in advance by Vatican reporters, Pope Benedict’s prepared answer on sex abuse represents arguably his most forthright statement on the issue since the crisis flared up again at the beginning of this year. Today, the pope visits the Marian shrine of Fatima.

Asked if the message of the Madonna of Fatima could be extended to cover the suffering of the church today, “including the sins of the sexual abuse of minors”, he answered: “In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the pope or the church don’t come only from outside the church.

“The suffering of the church also comes from within the church, because sin exists in the church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way. The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside but is born in sin within the church . . . ”

In particular, Benedict seemed keen to distance himself from senior Vatican officials who in recent months have argued that the Catholic Church is the victim of an international media witch hunt, promoted by anti-clerical and anti-Catholic lobbies.

At Fatima this morning, the pope will preside over a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the beatification of two of the three shepherd children who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary there in 1917.

Tradition has it that the Virgin Mary revealed three secrets to the children – the first was a vision of hell and the second predicted the horrors of the second World War.

In June 2000, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, revealed that the third secret contained a prophecy about a bishop “clothed in white” who “falls to the ground apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire” – an apparent reference to the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in May 1981.

During his 15-minute exchange with reporters, the pope also touched on some of the themes that are likely to dominate his four-day visit to Portugal such as the role of ethics in economics, the dialectic between faith and reason and the increasing threat posed by secularism in Europe.

Aware that he was travelling to a country hit hard by the global economic recession, the pope suggested that the recent threat to the euro and the financial crisis represented an opportunity to promote a “moral dimension” in economics. He said: “The events of the last two or three years have demonstrated that the ethical dimension must enter into economic activity . . . Now is the time to see that ethics is not something external but internal to economic rationality and pragmatism.”

“We must admit that the Catholic faith . . . was often too individualistic,” the pope said. “It too often left concrete things to the world and thought only of individual salvation and religious affairs without realising that there was a global responsibility .”