VATICAN:In a highly unusual news conference, held to mark his first year in office as the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone this week said Pope Benedict XVI was pained by the "devastating scale" of clerical sex abuse in the archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The secretary of state, sometimes known as the Vatican's prime minister, also gave a strong indication of Pope Benedict's thinking on relations with China, with the worldwide Jewish community and on the future appointment of women to senior Vatican posts.
Cardinal Bertone was speaking in Pieve di Cadore in the Dolomites, close to where Pope Benedict is on holiday. After spending the morning with the pope, Cardinal Bertone said: "The pope on his holidays is like a volcano. He is very happy and relaxed, he is working, meditating and praying. He is also playing the piano a lot and working on the second volume of his book on Jesus."
Cardinal Bertone admitted, however, that the peace and quiet of the pope's alpine retreat was shattered last weekend by the news that the archdiocese of Los Angeles had agreed to make a $660 million settlement to 508 victims of clerical sex abuse.
"This is a problem that causes pain to the whole Church, and not just to the Church . . . It's obvious that this phenomenon flies in the face of our identity and our evangelical mission."
Turning to the pope's recent "Motu Proprio", lifting restrictions on the Tridentine or Latin mass, Cardinal Bertone addressed Jewish concern over the Good Friday liturgy in the 1962 Missal which contains a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, asking God to remove "the veil from their hearts" and help them overcome their "blindness".
"The Jews, as John Paul II put it, remain our elder brothers. In the first stanza of that Mass, we call on 'our father Abraham, father of the faith'. The word 'perfidious' (in relation to Jews) has already been removed and the problem of the 'conversion' can be resolved with a decision that is valid for everyone."
Cardinal Bertone suggested that the Good Friday liturgy should be standardised so that both the Latin and vernacular versions used the form approved by Paul VI, thus avoiding any potentially offensive reference to Jews.
The secretary of state also struck a positive note when welcoming the mid-July election in China of Fr Joseph Li Shan as the new bishop of the Bejing diocese: "The bishop chosen is a very good and suitable subject, and this certainly is a very positive sign."
Fr Shan must still be confirmed by the government-recognised Bishops' Conference of the Catholic Church of China, but Cardinal Bertone expressed the hope that this would happen and that the bishop would "enter into contact with representatives of the Holy See and ask for approval".
The election of Fr Shan comes just two weeks after the pope sent a letter to all Catholics in China urging the underground faithful to reconcile themselves to the official Chinese church, the China Patriotic Catholic Association. Many observers saw the pope's letter as an attempt to improve the fragile relations between the Holy See and China.
Cardinal Bertone told reporters the Pope is working on a plan to put more women into top Vatican jobs. The highest-ranking woman is the Salesian sister, Enrica Rossana, undersecretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life.