Several Vatican officials have suggested there\u2019s a campaign against the Catholic Church with the recent barrage of news about clerical sex abuse.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve tried \u2013 not very successfully \u2013 to limit the damage. But in the last month or so there\u2019s also been a tremendous amount of self-inflicted damage done by the Vatican itself.<\/p>\n
The latest came this week with the Vatican\u2019s highest-ranking official after the Pope himself, Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, saying there\u2019s a link between homosexuality and sex abuse.<\/p>\n
Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican\u2019s top diplomat but one who never studied diplomacy, made his comments while on a trip to Chile.<\/p>\n
Gay activists were outraged by Cardinal Bertone\u2019s statement, and today the kind but beleaguered Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, had to issue an explanation of sorts.<\/p>\n
\u201cChurch officials don\u2019t believe it\u2019s in their competence to make general statements of a specifically psychological or medical kind,\u201d he said, \u201cfor which they naturally point to studies by specialists and research being done on the subject.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was a sort of diplomatic reprimand of Lombardi for his boss Bertone.<\/p>\n
Lombardi did offer some of the Church\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will not speak at this moment about homosexuality,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is another thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Benedict went on to say that pedophiles had to be excluded from sacred ministry: \u201cIt is absolutely incompatible, and whoever is really guilty of being a pedophile cannot be a priest.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Several Vatican officials have suggested there\u2019s a campaign against the Catholic Church with the recent barrage of news about clerical sex abuse. They\u2019ve tried \u2013 not very successfully \u2013 to limit the damage. But in the last month or so there\u2019s also been a tremendous amount of self-inflicted damage done by the Vatican itself. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4491,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}