Pope blames 'terrifying' sex abuse on Catholic Church

Lisboa: Papa Bento XVI, originally uploaded by Dragom.

Nick Squires in Lisbon, Telegraph News on 11 May 2010

The Pope has laid the blame for the "truly terrifying" clerical sex abuse crisis squarely on the Catholic Church for the first time as he arrived in Portugal for a four-day visit.

In Lisbon, Pope Benedict XVI waved to enthusiastic crowds turned out to welcome the Pope as he proceeded through the city in his white, bullet-proof 'Popemobile'.

Benedict XVI said that "the greatest persecution of the church does not come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church."

His remarks were a repudiation of a string of senior figures of Vatican who in recent months have attributed the scandal to a shadowy conspiracy mounted by outsiders, ranging from a hostile media to liberals within the Church.

The Vatican has been strongly criticised for trying to apportion blame elsewhere and there was outrage when a close ally of the pope, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, last month dismissed the child abuse allegations as "petty gossip".

In some of his strongest comments yet on the crisis which has dismayed Catholics around the world, the 83-year-old pontiff said that while the Church had suffered from problems of its own making in the past, the scale of the present challenge today was "truly terrifying".

"The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also the necessity of justice," he said.

The Catholic Church has been convulsed by allegations that many bishops did too little, too late to stop the activities of paedophile priests, first in the United States and Australia and more recently in Ireland and continental Europe.

The turmoil has claimed the heads of several senior clerics, including three Irish bishops, a Belgian bishop who admitted that he had sexually abused a boy, and most recently, Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg in Germany, who has also been accused of sexually abusing children.

There have been no reported cases of sex abuse in Portugal, unlike in Malta, where last month the Pope met a group of men who said they were abused by priests in a Church-run orphanage on the island.

In Lisbon, enthusiastic crowds turned out to welcome the Pope as he proceeded through the city in his white, bullet-proof "Popemobile".

Schoolchildren waved flags bearing Benedict's smiling face and shouted "Viva o Papa" – Long Live the Pope.

A warship at the mouth of the Tagus River gave a booming 21-gun salute and presidential guards provided a mounted guard of honour.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk