ROME – The Vatican is trying to defuse growing anger over remarks by the pope’s top aide that the paedophile priest scandal was caused by homosexuality and not the church’s celibacy rule.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Holy See’s secretary of state, outraged gay advocacy groups, politicians and even the French government with his remarks yesterday in Chile.
“Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and paedophilia,” the Italian cardinal said, “but many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem”.
Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi insisted yesterday that Cardinal Bertone was not talking about paedophilia in society at large, nor making any medical or psychological assertions.
Rather, he was “evidently” referring to statistics, recently supplied by the Holy See’s own prosecutor handling sex abuse allegations against clergy.
Fr Lombardi cited some of the statistics, from a March interview in a Catholic newspaper with Msgr Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s abuse prosecutor.
Msgr Scicluna said the allegations involving “paedophilia in the strict sense” accounted for 10 per cent of the cases, 60 per cent involved adolescents in homosexual relations, while the other 30 per cent of cases involved adolescents in heterosexual relations.
Msgr Scicluna told the publication of the Italian bishops conference that 300 of some 3,000 cases that his office handled from 2001 to this year involved “acts of true and actual paedophilia”.
The Vatican has been increasingly on the defensive from unrelenting contentions that both church hierarchy, by trying to cover up rape and molestation, and church policy, by making celibacy a requirement for the priesthood, are major factors behind decades of often systematic sex abuse in parishes, orphanages and other Catholic institutions around the world.
After Cardinal Bertone’s comments at a news conference in Santiago, Chile’s gay rights advocates denounced what they called a “perverse strategy” by the Vatican to “shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility” with a “spurious and disgusting” connection.
Msgr Scicluna is a top prosecutor for sexual abuse cases at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. – (AP)