Author: Greg Burke

A company called NeoStem will be announcing a joint project with the Vatican on Tuesday to promote research in adult stem cell therapy.

It’s not often that the Vatican gets directly involved with a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and while the Catholic Church is not making a financial commitment in the deal, it is a kind of “Vatican Seal of Approval.”

The charitable arm of the biopharmeceutical company, the Stem for Life Foundation, will be working together with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture to try to show the promise of adult stem cell research in treating disease.

The Catholic Church has long opposed research on embryonic stem cells, arguing that such work means destroying life.

“There are terrible ethical and moral problems with the use of embryonic stem cells,” said Fr. John Zuhlsdorf of the Catholic Online Forum. “To use them you have to kill an embryo. This is not a problem with adult stem cells.”

Fr. Robert Gahl, professor of ethics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said the Vatican should be congratulated for working with NeoStem.

“This is an ethical approach to discovering new cures for thousands of diseases, even including degenerative conditions,” Gahl told FoxNews.com. “Tens of thousands of patients have already been successfully treated and the further promise of this research is truly exciting.”

Fr. Thomas Berg of the Westchester Institute, a Catholic think tank, said the initiative is an example of a Vatican department thinking out of the box – at least by Vatican standards – and trying to engage the world of biotechnology.

“I think we should all welcome this announcement as a sign that the Church is indeed trying to engage that culture in a positive way,” Berg told Fox.

Italians are essentially crazy about three things: food, fashion and football. Football, of course, being what Americans call soccer.

People don’t normally kill each other over food and fashion, but in Europe, at least, they do over football, and it happened this weekend in Italy.

The Champions League final was played in Madrid between the Milan-based Internazionale and Bayern Munich. Internazionale won the game 2-0 with two beautiful goals by the Argentine striker Diego Milito.

A lot of people in Italy hate Internazionale, also known as Inter, especially fans of cross-town rival A.C. Milan and  the one-time powerhouse Juventus, based in Turin.

For two grown men watching the game at a bar in Turin, the tension was just too much. One was an Inter fan; the other a passionate follower of Juventus, which just finished a horrendous season, not winning a thing.

Inter had just sewn up its third title of the year with the Champions League victory, so when the Juve supporter said that Inter wasn’t really an Italian team, since its coach and almost all of its starting line-up were foreigners, that was just too much for the Interista.

After some pushing and shoving, the Interista took out a knife and stabbed the other man. A 63-year-old was dead, and a 60-year-old hauled off to jail.

It brought back to mind a quote attributed to former Liverpool coach Bill Shankly: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has triggered an interesting legal question: can you put the Vatican on trial in the United States?

Lawyers for victims in Louisville, Kentucky are trying to do just that. But the Vatican is shooting right back, filing defense motions today arguing that bishops based in the U.S. – who have direct responsibility for their priests – are not “employees” of the Vatican.

I spoke Judge Andrew Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News Channel, and he told me there’s no evidence that American bishops are agents of the Vatican with respect to personnel matters.

More importantly, Judge Napolitano said, the Vatican is a sovereign state, which means it’s protected.

“International law and American federal law insulate sovereign countries from lawsuits anywhere, except where the sovereign countries have consented to be sued,” Napolitano said. The only countries to which the Vatican has given that consent are Italy and Vatican City itself.

Lawyers for plaintiffs have collected nearly $3 billion from Catholic dioceses in sex abuse cases across the country. The Catholic Church has what lawyers like to dig into: deep pockets.

So why try to put the Vatican in the dock? Maybe the lawyers try to do it for the deep pockets, but it also gets a lot of press. It hasn’t happened yet, so every attempt keeps people talking.

A Belgian bishop resigned on Friday after admitting to abusing a young man decades ago. The resignation came one day after an Irish bishop was forced to step down for failing to report pedophile priests when he was in Dublin.

Both men were made bishops – considered successors of the apostles in Catholic teaching – by Pope John Paul II.

Pope Benedict accepted the resignation of Bishop Roger Joseph Vangheluwe of Bruges, Belgium, and Vangheluwe issued a statement saying he profoundly regretted what he had done to the young man, a minor at the time.

“Over the course of these decades I have repeatedly recognized my guilt towards him and his family, and I have asked forgiveness,” the bishop’s statement said, “but this did not pacify him, and it did not pacify me.”

Vangheluwe, 73, steps down two years before the normal resignation age of 75, admitting that the victim “is still marked by what happened.”

The Archbishop of Brussels, Andre-Mutien Leonard, said that with the resignation, the Catholic Church wants to turn a new page “with respect to the not-so-distant period in which the Church, and others, preferred the solution of silence or concealment.”

After two bishops stepping down this week, more could be on the way. Other Irish bishops are expected to resign because of the scandal, and a German bishop has offered his resignation after admitting to physical, not sexual, abuse in an orphanage decades ago.

While Benedict has found himself under fire for allegedly mishandling abuse cases, both as Archbishop of Munich and as a Vatican official, the bishops being forced to step down bring the scandal closer and closer to his predecessor.

Most of the bishops serving now were named during the 27-year papacy of John Paul II. Vangheluwe, for example, was made a bishop on 1984, six years into the papacy of John Paul II. The Irish bishop who stepped down Thursday, James Moriarty, was also a John Paul II appointment, having been made a bishop in 1991.

I ran into a group of more than 30 pilgrims from the United States who have been stuck in Rome since Saturday, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be getting out until next Tuesday.

Thanks to the volcanic ash covering much of Europe, they’ve had a 10-day extension to their trip. They had been to the Shroud of Turin, and were supposed to leave from Milan, but got on a bus to Rome, thinking it would be easier to get out of here. No such luck.

Many are from Wyoming and Montana, and Jackson Hole has never seemed so far away. They’re keeping spirits up, though, enjoying the good weather and the good ice cream.

“When you’re visiting things like the Shroud of Turin, and seeing the nails from the cross at the church of the Santa Croce, it’s like you’re getting to share a little bit of this,” said the group’s chaplain, Father Joseph Geders.

“It’s one of those occasions where life is just taken out of your hands,” Geders said.

It gets tiring when you want to be home, but it could be worse. At least they’re in a hotel, and not just camped out at the airport.

While they were making the best of a tough situation – one woman was trying to plan a two-day trip to Venice – a long delay can also be extremely serious. One woman has her 78-year-old mother who needs to get her pacemaker battery replaced, which involves a surgical operation.

Many of the pilgrims had purchased trip insurance before leaving. While most were happy about that, a couple complained that their insurance company was hardly coughing up enough for an extra 10 days.

While the Pope made only what might have been a veiled reference to the sex abuse crisis in speaking to reporters on the plane on his way to Malta, talking about the Catholic Church being “wounded by our sins,” he did meet privately with a small group of victims after Sunday Mass.

Ten men claim to have been abused by three priests at a Catholic orphanage in Malta, and eight of them met with the Pope.

A Vatican statement said Benedict prayed with the victims and assured them the Catholic Church is doing all in its power to “bring to justice those responsible for abuse.”

The Pope, who has come under increasing fire in recent weeks as clerical sex abuse cases come to light across Europe –- including several in his native Germany – had already met with victims on trips to both the United States and Australia.

He said in his letter to Irish Catholics in March that he would meet with more victims in the future, and it could become a regular part of his travel schedule. In addition to Malta, four more short trips are planned for the 83-year-old Benedict this year.

While Benedict did not address the abuse question directly on his short visit, the Archbishop of Malta, Paul Cremona, said at the start of Sunday mass with Benedict that the Catholic Church had to be “humble enough to recognize the failures and sins of its members,” and that it should not seek privileges.

Ireland has been the country hardest hit by clerical sex abuse in Europe, and critics claim much of the problem has stemmed from the privileged position the Catholic Church once held there, enabling it many cases to help cover up crimes committed by priests.

In an apparent reference to the sex abuse crisis, Pope Benedict said Thursday that it was time for the Catholic Church to do penance for its sins.

While the Vatican has not released the pope’s entire homily from a mass with the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the Vatican newspaper, the Osservatore Romano, reported that Benedict said Christians have often avoided the word penance, since it seems too harsh.

“Now, under the attacks of the world that speak to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace, and we see that it’s necessary to do penance, to recognize what’s wrong in our life,” Benedict said.

“The suffering of penance, that is, of purification and transformation, that suffering is a grace, because it’s renewal; it’s the work of divine mercy,” he said.

Pope Benedict has come under increasing pressure to speak out about the sex abuse crisis in the Church, and especially in his native Germany. His most extensive comments came last month in a letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

Benedict marks five years as pope on April 19.

Several Vatican officials have suggested there’s a campaign against the Catholic Church with the recent barrage of news about clerical sex abuse.

They’ve tried – not very successfully – to limit the damage. But in the last month or so there’s also been a tremendous amount of self-inflicted damage done by the Vatican itself.

The latest came this week with the Vatican’s highest-ranking official after the Pope himself, Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, saying there’s a link between homosexuality and sex abuse.

Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican’s top diplomat but one who never studied diplomacy, made his comments while on a trip to Chile.

Gay activists were outraged by Cardinal Bertone’s statement, and today the kind but beleaguered Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, had to issue an explanation of sorts.

“Church officials don’t believe it’s in their competence to make general statements of a specifically psychological or medical kind,” he said, “for which they naturally point to studies by specialists and research being done on the subject.”

That was a sort of diplomatic reprimand of Lombardi for his boss Bertone.

Lombardi did offer some of the Church’s own statistics on cases of sex abuse by priests. The statistics show that about 90 percent deal with adolescents, not very young children, and of those cases, roughly 60 percent are same-sex relations, and 30 percent are heterosexual.

Responding to a question about sex abuse on his way to the United States in 2008, Pope Benedict appeared to make the point not to link it with homosexuality.

“I will not speak at this moment about homosexuality,” he said. “This is another thing.”

Benedict went on to say that pedophiles had to be excluded from sacred ministry: “It is absolutely incompatible, and whoever is really guilty of being a pedophile cannot be a priest.”

The Vatican posted a guide to Church sex abuse norms on its website Monday, with the intention of making them easy to understand for people who are not specialists.

The guide is based on a 2001 Vatican overhaul of sex abuse policies, and the 1983 Code of Canon Law (Church Law).

It’s still not perfectly simple, but the guide does make some straightforward and important statements, including one that “Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed.”

In other words, crimes have to be reported.

Bishops have often been accused of covering up sex abuse crimes, or asking victims to remain silent to avoid scandal.

The guide also points out that the local church should “investigate every allegation of sexual abuse of a minor by a cleric.”

Bishops have the authority to suspend priests, and are encouraged to exercise that authority to whatever extent necessary “to assure that children do not come to harm.”

The short guide to how the process works still has a bit of Vaticanspeak in it (“pro bono Ecclesiae,” for example), but at least it’s in English.

Victims groups were not impressed. “Bishops answer to virtually no one and can easily ignore policies,” said Barbara Blaine, President of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “We must focus on behavior, not policies, and on deeds, not words.”

The editor of the Vatican newspaper told journalists at the Foreign Press Club in Rome Monday that he thinks charges of a conspiracy or a plot against the Vatican are ridiculous.

But Giovanni Maria Vian said he does believe there’s a “campaign” against the Catholic Church, with so many stories about sex abuse in the media.

“This news helps sell (papers); that’s the first key to the campaign,” Vian said. “Then there’s anti-Catholic hostility.”

Vian, a university professor who took over the Osservatore Romano under Pope Benedict – and actually managed to make it a readable newspaper – joked with a reporter from the New York Times when she identified herself and said, “Don’t shoot at me.”

Vian responded laughing, “You’re the ones shooting at us.”

He defended Benedict, and said the German cases accusing the pope of mishandling sex abuse by clergy were old stories that had been “dug up again.”

“The media campaign will continue; there will be more rehashing of old cases until the readers get bored,” he said. “But the Vatican will not forget the victims. Their lives have been ruined.”

Vian said he last saw the Pope on Friday, and that Benedict appeared serene and tranquil, as usual.

The Shroud of Turin went on display this weekend for the first time in 10 years. The linen cloth is normally kept wrapped up inside a silver box, and only taken out for public display on special occasions.

While many believe this is the linen cloth that covered Jesus Christ after his death – and you can see a faint outline of a man’s face and arms on it – testing done on the cloth two decades ago suggested it dated from between 1260 and 1390.

However, those results have been contested, and other experts say contamination of the shroud over the years could have skewed the dating process.

In any case, the Shroud of Turin is always a major mystery, and the Turin Cathedral still draws millions of visitors every year, even when the linen is wrapped up and hidden away.

About two million people are expected to visit over the next six weeks while the original can be seen in the cathedral.

Is it the real thing, or a brilliant forgery? The Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Severino Poletto, opts for real. “As a Christian I believe the Shroud is authentic,” Poletto said. “I can’t say officially, because it’s not my job, but either it’s a miracle, or it’s the real thing.”

A top Vatican cardinal denounced what he called “petty gossip” surrounding Pope Benedict and accusations that the pontiff mishandled church sex abuse cases.

“Holy Father, the people of God are on your side, and do not allow themselves to be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials which sometime shake the community of believers,” Cardinal Angelo Sodano said at the start of the Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

Sodano is a top-ranking cardinal and the former Secretary of State under both Benedict and John Paul II. His blunt comments reflect the opinion of many inside the Vatican regarding reports linking Benedict to sex abuse cases.

The Vatican newspaper, the L’Osservatore Romano, called accusations against Benedict a “vile operation of defamation.”

The New York Times has taken the lead in trying to link Benedict to two cases of sex abuse, one from when he was Archbishop in Munich and another when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But the Times has been flatly contradicted by some of those directly involved in the cases, and its reporting is undergoing increasing scrutiny.

Sex abuse cases have rocked the Catholic Church in Europe in recent months, especially in Ireland and Germany.

The time-honored slogan says “join the navy and see the world.”

If they were really honest they’d say “join the navy and see a different world,” at least as far as serving on an aircraft carrier is concerned.

Fox News recently joined sailors on board the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), the flagship of a strike group on a six-month deployment in the North Arabian Sea.

While the deck of an aircraft carrier is one of the most recognizable places in the world – it’s been the backdrop for dozens of war movies and even more documentaries – few know what happens beneath.

The four-and-half acres of black top is where the high-octane action happens.

On average a jet is launched every 60 seconds or retrieved every 45 seconds. It’s a dangerous ballet that involves absolute coordination and concentration, and for a news cameraman is one of the most visually rich environments anywhere.

But what you seldom see are the cramped places where the majority of the ship’s 4,500 sailors work and live while at sea.

In the bowels of this massive ship there are berths, gyms, and barber shops, there are laundries, cafeterias, maintenance hangars and briefing rooms. There are communications, radar and intelligence huts, not to mention medical stations and rest rooms. And that’s without going near the complex engineering parts of the vessel that provide the power and propulsion for the carrier. There’s even a TV studio and in-house radio station.

Connecting all these hard to find places are endless gleaming corridors and knee straining metal stairways. On the largest, most powerful warships in the world there are no elevators (with the exception of one for planes), no escalators, conveyors or even winches.

If you want to get camera and transmission equipment into the ship you have to recruit a handful of burly sailors and manually heft it up and down several flights.

In this practice, the ship’s old hands are easy to spot. Their heads do an instinctive half turn to avoid butting the low ceilings while descending and walk with high step to avoid tripping when navigating the thousands of bulkhead doors. A complex sequence of numbers painted at regular intervals on the walls is the only way to help you know your location. For those not trained in the code there’s really no way of knowing where you are.

And then there’s the noise. The constant roar from above as the busy F18 Hornets accelerate to take off AND to land. Too few revs on touchdown and they’ll not be able to power off at the other end if they miss the crucial arresting wires.

The ships’ top guns affectionately call this failure to land ‘bolting’ and if you have the misfortune to be the last one to do a ‘bolt’ they suspend a massive metal one right above your seat in the briefing room.

There’s no disguising the dubious honor in a room that sits directly under the flight deck impact zone so that your fillings vibrate every time another jet returns to the carrier.

Body movements learned the hard way, indecipherable directions and intolerable noise. Not things the average journalist can master in a mere three days.

As I said – a different world.

The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Ireland reached Pope John Paul II, if indirectly Wednesday when his former secretary resigned.

Pope Benedict accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee of Cloyne, Ireland, at the age of 73, two years before the normal retirement age for a bishop.

Magee had been accused of failing to respond adequately to charges of abuse in his diocese, something for which he assumed responsibility.

Benedict wrote a letter to the Irish faithful last week in which he deplored the bishops’ failure during decades of abuse, expressing his shame and remorse at what happened.

It was clear Magee would resign early after Pope Benedict named another bishop to serve along with him last year.

Magee was a private secretary to three popes: Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II.

Pope Benedict issued an apology to victims of sex abuse in Ireland on Saturday, and announced an investigation into parts of the Catholic Church in the country.

In a lengthy letter to the Irish faithful, he addressed the victims and their families: “You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured.”

Benedict acknowledged that victims might find it difficult even to enter a church after what they have suffered.

“It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church,” he wrote. “In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel.”

He had harsh words for priest abusers, asking them to acknowledge their guilt, and submit themselves to the demands of justice.

“You betrayed the trust that was placed in you by innocent young people and their parents, and you must answer for it before Almighty God…” he wrote. “You have forfeited the esteem of the people of Ireland and brought shame and dishonor upon your confreres.”

Benedict told the Irish bishops that some of them had failed, and at times grievously, to deal with abuse. He announced an investigation of certain dioceses, seminaries, and religious congregations in the country.

Benedict told the Irish faithful that their church, once rich in Catholic tradition, and producing missionaries who spread the faith around the world, must be purified by penance.

“I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them,” he wrote.

The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Europe has moved one step closer to Pope Benedict just as he prepares to send a letter on the abuse question to the Irish faithful.

Benedict was the Archbishop of Munich in the early 1980s, and a psychiatrist says he warned the archdiocese about a priest he was treating at the time.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, told the New York Times that he told archdiocesan officials in Munich that the priest, Fr. Peter Hullerman, “desperately has to be kept away from working with children.”

Huth said he did not have direct contact with Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, about the case, nor did he know if Raztinger knew about his warnings. Hullerman had been brought to the archdiocese of Munich in 1980 for therapy with Ratzinger’s approval.

Ratzinger, who was named Archbishop of Munich in 1977, moved to Rome in early 1982 as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The psychiatrist’s warnings clearly were not heeded, and one of Ratzinger’s assistants in Munich, Fr. Gerhard Gruber, has taken the blame for putting Hullerman back to work as a priest so quickly after he went into therapy.

In 1986, Hullerman was convicted of sexual abuse of boys, but was not ordered by the church to stay away from children until 12 years later. While the German bishops have accepted their blame for hundreds of cases of abuse now coming to light, something was also deeply askew in civil society. A German court failed to give Father Hullerman a stiff jail sentence after his conviction, letting him off with five-years probation and a fine.

The sex abuse scandal rocked Ireland before Germany, and today Benedict will sign a much-awaited letter to the Irish faithful on the subject. It will be released on Saturday, and it won’t just be the Irish who are reading it.

Pope Benedict told pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday that the Catholic Church in Ireland has been “severely shaken” by the sex abuse crisis there.

He said he’ll sign his letter to the Irish faithful on the subject on Friday, the feast of St. Joseph, and the guardian of the Holy Family. “My hope is that it will help in the process of repentance, healing and renewal,” he said.

But it won’t just be the Irish reading the letter closely. As the scandal has grown across Europe, and particularly in the pontiff’s native Germany, Catholics have been waiting for Benedict to speak out.

Earlier this year, he met in Rome with the Irish bishops, calling sex abuse a “heinous crime” and a “grave sin.”

Benedict told Irish Catholics he felt betrayal and shame about the Irish situation, and more of that kind of language is likely to be seen in his letter.

When the abuse scandal first broke in the United States, Vatican officials were largely defensive, seeing it as an attack on the Catholic Church.

But the future pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seems to have been deeply shaken by the number and severity of the cases in the U.S., and he has met with victims in both Australia and the United States.

As Pope, he also asked one elderly but high-profile suspect, Padre Marcial Maciel, to retire to a life of prayer and penance. Maciel, who died in 2008, was the Mexican founder of the Legion of Christ, a group favored by Pope John Paul II and other top Vatican officials.

Maciel has been accused of abuse by several former seminarians in the Legion, and is known to have fathered at least one child, although critics claim the real number is closer to six.

Pope Benedict ordered an investigation into the Legion of Christ after the revelations of Maciel’s behavior became public, and were finally acknowledged by the Legion itself.

After giving some serious lessons over the last few years on how not to handle a crisis, the Vatican has gone into full-scale damage control on the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Germany.

On Saturday, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi spoke of “a certain aggressive persistence” on the parts of some people in Germany to try to link Pope Benedict to the scandal – attempts Lombardi said are not working.

A German newspaper reported that a priest who had been suspected of abusing children had been transferred into the Archdiocese of Munich when Joseph Ratzinger – the future pope – was archbishop there. A lower level church official in Munich took full responsibility for the move.

Also on Saturday, the Vatican official in charge of investigating and prosecuting abuse cases, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, gave a rare interview, defending the work of Pope Benedict on the question of clerical abuse.

To accuse the Pope of any cover-up on clerical abuse cases is “false and calumnious,” Scicluna told the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire.

While the Pope has not spoken publicly about the turmoil in Germany, a bishop who briefed him about it on Friday said he found the Pope to be deeply disturbed about the reports from his homeland.

Stories of physical and sexual abuse at Catholic institutions in Germany are just the latest scandal to rock the Church in Europe.

Pope Benedict had already been briefed on the problem in Ireland, and is expected to address the issue in a letter to the Irish faithful before Easter.

When the story in Ireland became known to its full extent late last year, the Vatican said the Pope shared the “outrage, betrayal and shame” of Irish Catholics.

The head of the German bishops apologized to victims of sexual abuse on Friday after meeting with Pope Benedict. Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said the Pope was deeply disturbed by the latest reports of abuse in schools and other church institutions in his home country.

Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops Conference, said while the statistics show that pedophilia is not just a problem in the Catholic Church, it is particularly reprehensible when carried out by people with moral authority, such as priests.

“We are ready to face our responsibility and we don’t want to make excuses for anything that happened,” Zollitsch said at a Rome news conference, but added that there are numerous reports of sex abuse now coming to light in Germany, and they goes far beyond the Church.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi and other Vatican officials have echoed the same theme, saying it doesn’t diminish the responsibility of churchmen, but helps put the problem into context.

“There’s a growing awareness we’re dealing with a human problem – which you also find in the Church,” one Vatican official told Foxnews.com.

“The Church is an easy target but the fact is the problem hasn’t been faced,” the official said. “The real problem is in the homes, and that’s the big elephant in the room that no one wants to touch.”

About 170 students from Catholic schools in Germany have recently come forth with stories of sexual and physical abuse. It is just the latest in a series of scandals to rock the church in Europe.

The problem has been particularly serious in Ireland, and Benedict scheduled to write a letter to Irish faithful on the subject before Easter.

Shortly before the death of Pope John Paul II, the future pope, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, referred to what he called “filth” in the Catholic Church during a Good Friday meditation.

As pope, he met with victims of clerical sex abuse during his 2008 visit to the United States.

A Vatican spokesman that Tuesday that Church officials were responding quickly and decisively to the most recent charges of sex abuse in Catholic institutions in Europe.

“The correct starting point is the recognition of what happened, and concern for the victims,” said Father Federico Lombardi on Vatican Radio.

In recent weeks, charges of abuse have rocked the Catholic Church, especially in Germany, but also Austria and the Netherlands.

Pope Benedict is scheduled to write a letter to Catholics in Ireland before Easter addressing the sex scandal there. Benedict has already said he felt “betrayal and shame” after seeing reports of three decades of abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

Lombardi said the problem of sex abuse has to be seen in a wider context, that of society at large, although he acknowledged that it’s particularly repugnant when found in the Catholic Church because of the moral responsibility of clerics.

“But everyone who’s objective and informed knows that the question is much wider, and that concentrating the accusations against the Church means falsifying the perspective,” Lombardi said.