Campaigners for the victims of sexual abuse in Ireland claimed the Pope’s letter failed to address the “core issue” of why the perpetrators were protected.

Sexual abuse charity One in Four said the Catholic Church was “still in denial”, while a survivor of abuse said the apology did not address the cover-up.

One in Four director Maeve Lewis said: “Victims were hoping for an acknowledgement of the scurrilous ways in which they have been treated as they attempted to bring their experiences of abuse to the attention of the church authorities.

“Pope Benedict has passed up a glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the clerical sexual abuse scandal: the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church at the highest levels to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children.

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Today is a very historic day for the Catholics of Ireland.

Pope Benedict has written a pastoral letter to express his closeness to us at this challenging time. He says ”˜with words that come from my heart… I wish to speak to each of you individually and to all of you as brothers and sisters in the Lord’. He speaks of the wounds inflicted on Christ’s body by child sexual abuse and of the sometimes painful remedies needed to bind and heal them. He talks of the need for unity, charity and mutual support in the long-term process of restoration and renewal.

I welcome this letter. I am deeply grateful to the Holy Father for his profound kindness and concern.

It is evident from the Pastoral Letter that Pope Benedict is deeply dismayed by what he refers to as ”˜sinful and criminal acts and the way the Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.”˜

He says the Church in Ireland must acknowledge before the Lord and others the serious sins committed against defenceless children.

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Pope Benedict XVI has apologised to victims of child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland.

In a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, he acknowledged the sense of betrayal in the Church felt by victims and their families.

The Pope said there had been “serious mistakes” among bishops in responding to allegations of paedophilia.

The pastoral letter is the first statement of its kind by the Vatican on the sexual abuse of children.

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Pope Benedict XVI rebuked Irish bishops Saturday for “grave errors of judgment” in handling clerical sex abuse and ordered a Vatican investigation into the Irish church to wipe out the scourge.

In a letter to the Irish faithful read across Europe amid a growing, multination abuse scandal, the pope did not mention any Vatican responsibility. And he doled out no specific punishments to bishops blamed by victims and Irish government-ordered investigations for having covered up years of abuse.

The letter directly addressed only Ireland but the Vatican said it could be read as applying to other countries. Hundreds of new allegations of abuse which have recently come to light across Europe, including in the pope’s native Germany.

“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” Benedict said, addressing himself to the generations of Irish Catholics who suffered “sinful and criminal” abuse at the hands of priests, brothers and nuns.

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For my part, considering the gravity of these offences, and the often inadequate response to them on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities in your country, I have decided to write this Pastoral Letter to express my closeness to you and to propose a path of healing, renewal and reparation.

It is true, as many in your country have pointed out, that the problem of child abuse is peculiar neither to Ireland nor to the Church. Nevertheless, the task you now face is to address the problem of abuse that has occurred within the Irish Catholic community, and to do so with courage and determination. No one imagines that this painful situation will be resolved swiftly. Real progress has been made, yet much more remains to be done. Perseverance and prayer are needed, with great trust in the healing power of God’s grace.

At the same time, I must also express my conviction that, in order to recover from this grievous wound, the Church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenceless children. Such an acknowledgement, accompanied by sincere sorrow for the damage caused to these victims and their families, must lead to a concerted effort to ensure the protection of children from similar crimes in the future.

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Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.

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Last Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”

On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.

Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.

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As accusations of clerical sexual abuse continue to emerge, most recently in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, a conversation I had recently with a Vatican official offered a timely reminder not to forget what is often overlooked: the well-being of priests in all of this.

He pointed out that while each case must, of course, be treated with the utmost seriousness and justice be done, often innocent priests are the ones who have to bear most of the fallout. The perpetrators also receive precious little help or compassion from the Church.

“There has been such an overreaction that most priests are now warned not to even touch a child,” he said. “And I’ve not seen the slightest compassion shown by anybody to a priest caught up in this stuff.”

Stressing that while the crime is deplorable, he said a very small minority of priests are guilty of the crime. Furthermore, he reminded that the perpetrator is “a priest and a Christian and deserves some kind of help and respect ”“ they’ve almost been treated like dogs and it’s horrible.”

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As accusations of clerical sexual abuse continue to emerge, most recently in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, a conversation I had recently with a Vatican official offered a timely reminder not to forget what is often overlooked: the well-being of priests in all of this.

He pointed out that while each case must, of course, be treated with the utmost seriousness and justice be done, often innocent priests are the ones who have to bear most of the fallout. The perpetrators also receive precious little help or compassion from the Church.

“There has been such an overreaction that most priests are now warned not to even touch a child,” he said. “And I’ve not seen the slightest compassion shown by anybody to a priest caught up in this stuff.”

Stressing that while the crime is deplorable, he said a very small minority of priests are guilty of the crime. Furthermore, he reminded that the perpetrator is “a priest and a Christian and deserves some kind of help and respect ”“ they’ve almost been treated like dogs and it’s horrible.”

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The experience reinforced for me the reality of terror in the sky. Sitting in an aircraft, 37,000ft over the Atlantic, there is nowhere to go, no escape and, confronted by passengers behaving suspiciously, a total sense of helplessness.

The nonchalant manner with which the male passenger was allowed to walk through the plane and enter the toilet during the landing approach, and to remain out of sight and control for around five minutes, was simply incredible and extraordinarily alarming.

Afterwards, I complained to the United Airlines desk. I was informed that an armed air marshal was probably on board the flight, as is most likely the case on high-risk routes between the United States and the UK.

However, I wondered what difference the marshal’s presence would have made had the passenger beside me turned out to be a suicide-bomber. Would he – could he – have shot the suspect through the toilet door and saved our lives?

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For Vatican and Irish participants, the two-day meeting on the handling of priestly sex abuse cases was a major accomplishment, combining a frank admission of mismanagement with truly collaborative discussions on how to avoid such mistakes in the future.

But for much of the wider public, especially in Ireland, the meeting Feb. 15-16 fell short of expectations and was remarkable for what it didn’t do: no bishops were fired, no abuse victims were heard and Pope Benedict XVI made no plans to visit Ireland and build bridges to alienated Catholics.

“Papal whitewash” and “The pope has ‘washed hands’ of our abuse” were two not untypical headlines in Irish newspapers the next day.

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Gerry Adams’s appearance on Channel 4, in a programme following the footsteps of Jesus in the Holy Land, won’t be screened for a week but it’s already caused a stir. Victor Barker, who lost his son in the Omagh bombing, is aggrieved, on the grounds that it makes the Sinn Fein leader seem like a “genuine, peaceful person”. That’s understandable. Yet there will be lots more people with no connection to the Troubles who simply don’t like the idea of someone with IRA connections talking about Christ at all.

You have to wonder whether they’ve ever come across that remark by the Man Himself, to the effect that he came for sinners, not the righteous.

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Pope Benedict XVI has summoned more than two dozen Irish bishops to the Vatican for meetings to discuss Ireland’s massive clerical sex abuse scandal. The meetings, Monday and Tuesday, could lead to a major shake-up in the Irish Church hierarchy.

Two months ago, an investigation known as the Murphy Commission Report into the Dublin diocese revealed that the Irish Church had been covering up crimes by dozens of pedophile priests against hundreds of young people for decades.

The report came just seven months after another investigation revealed chronic beatings, rapes, near-starvation and humiliation of 30,000 children in state-run schools and orphanages all run by the Catholic Church.

Bishop Joseph Duffy, a spokesman for the Irish Bishops Conference, acknowledges that the meetings with the pope will have to lead to major changes in the Irish Church.

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Last year it was banks; this year it is countries. The economic crisis, which seemed to have eased off in the latter part of 2009, is once again in full swing as the threat of sovereign default looms.

Europe’s leaders are struggling to avert the biggest financial disaster in the euro’s 11-year history…. This week all eyes have been on Greece. If it defaults, it will be the first EU member to do so. As The Economist went to press EU leaders were meeting to discuss what to do, and there was talk of a German-led rescue scheme. If it happens, other European candidates may be queueing up. Bond markets are worried about the capacity of Spain (see article), Ireland and Portugal to repay their debts, forcing these countries to increase taxes and cut spending, even as they remain mired in recession.

Europe’s troubles have given investors good reason to worry; but they are not the only cause for concern.

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Pope Benedict is to visit the UK in September in the first papal visit to England, Wales and Scotland in more than a quarter of a century ”” although Northern Ireland will not be on the itinerary.

However, Irish church sources still hope Pope Benedict will visit both Northern Ireland and attend the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 2012, some 33 years after Pope John Paul’s historic visit to the Republic.

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1. Sex scandals rock the Catholic church. This was the most difficult year for the Irish Catholic Church for as long as anyone can remember. In May, the Ryan Report made headline news across the world when it revealed that rape and sexual molestation were “endemic” in schools and orphanages run by the Irish church over seven decades. Two months earlier, Bishop John Magee was forced to “stand aside” from the management of his Cloyne diocese, in county Cork, after an investigation, published the previous December, found that his diocese had put children at risk by failing to follow child protection guidelines.

Things got considerably worse for the church with the publication, in November, of the Murphy Report into the sexual abuse scandal in the archdiocese of Dublin. Judge Yvonne Murphy chronicled an organised cover-up of child abuse allegations in the diocese spanning a period of nearly four decades. In the wake of the report’s publication, there were unprecedented calls for the Pope’s diplomatic representative, the Papal Nuncio, to be expelled from Ireland, after it emerged that he failed to correspond directly with the Commission of Investigation. Four bishops named in the report resigned, many said belatedly. A fifth bishop, Martin Drennan of Galway, has so far resisted the growing clamour for him to also step down….

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Pope Benedict XVI shares “the outrage, betrayal and shame” felt by Irish Catholics over cases of clerical sexual abuse and the way abuse claims were handled by church leaders, and he plans to write a special pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, the Vatican said.

The letter “will clearly indicate the initiatives that are to be taken in response to the situation,” said a statement issued by the Vatican Dec. 11. The statement was released after the pope and top Vatican officials spent 90 minutes meeting with Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh, Northern Ireland, president of the Irish bishops’ conference, and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin.

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The Vatican will issue a “strong reponse” to the findings of the Murphy report after the pope meets Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Cardinal Seán Brady on Friday, the papal nuncio has said.

The report revealed a catalogue of cover-ups and inaction by senior Church figures in face of serious allegations of abuse. It also revealed Vatican officials refused to deal directly with the commission’s investigators, suggesting they should use official diplomatic channels instead.

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If possible the evidence is even more damning. The accounts of rape, assault and beatings are familiar but almost worse ”” because cooler, more institutional, more deliberate ”” is the detail of the cover-up.

To quote the report, the archdiocese remained wedded to “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the Church and the preservation of its assets”. Right up to 2004, priestly sex offenders were quietly moved to new parishes, even promoted. Victims were told to keep silent. Archbishops held back files; the Papal Nuncio and the Vatican showed no inclination to throw open the records: a “studied silence” met requests for additional information. The pattern follows earlier investigations in the US and Australia; as one victim there said, cover-up “was a policy, a system, it was throughout the Church . . . it’s not just rogue elements”. In Ireland the gardai are now huffing about possible legal action, but their own inattention and deference to the clergy is also bitterly criticised in the report.

This is not old stuff from the era of Angela’s Ashes.

For seven years till 1995, Cardinal Desmond Connell, then Archbishop of Dublin, kept incriminating documents locked in a secret vault, detailing abuses by seventeen priests….

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Jon Snow talks to Colm O’Gorman, the Executive Director of Amnesty International in Ireland, who was a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by a Catholic priest as a teenager.

The video link is provided–some 10 1/2 minutes. Watch it all.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland connived with the authorities in a cover-up spanning decades to shield paedophile priests from prosecution, an official report concluded yesterday. Hundreds of crimes against children were not reported as the four archbishops of the Archdiocese of Dublin remained wedded to the “maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church and the preservation of its assets”.

Instead, the church hierarchy shuffled the sex offenders from parish to parish, allowing them to continue to prey on victims. In some cases paedophile priests were even promoted. The 750-page report by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse on the Dublin archdiocese ”” the second significant inquiry this year to expose appalling levels of sexual abuse of minors in Ireland under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church ”” said that it had uncovered a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy throughout the period that it investigated between 1975 and 2004.

It said that the State had helped to create the culture of cover-up and that senior police officers regarded priests as “outside their remit”.

“The State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes,” it concluded.

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The report states that the Commission has no doubt that clerical child abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other church authorities.

It states that the structures and rules of the church facilitated that cover-up. It also says that State authorities facilitated the cover up by allowing the church to be beyond the reach of the law.

It claims that the welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor considered in the early days by State and church authorities.

The preservation of the good name, status and assets of church institutions was the first priority, according to the report, which states that priests were seen as the most important members of the institution.

The Commission says that it has identified 320 people who complained of child sexual abuse during the period 1975-2004.

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The Commission of Investigation into Dublin’s Catholic Archdiocese has concluded that there is “no doubt” that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the archdiocese and other Church authorities.

The commission’s report covers the period between January 1st 1975 and April 30th 2004. It said there cover-ups took place over much of this period.

In its report, published this afternoon, it has also found that “the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.”

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The tragedy is that the church which is called to be the model of reconciliation is often its contradiction because of a preoccupation with internal matters.

We see this in the debate within churches about the role of women in ministry. While there has been a general acceptance within Anglicanism of women’s ordination, there are those who feel in conscience that they cannot accept this break with tradition and especially if it means the ordination of women bishops.

In response to the situation, Pope Benedict XVI recently approved a canonical structure which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Roman Catholic Church while preserving elements of their Anglican heritage.

But the suggestion that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was only informed of this proposal at the last minute has caused disquiet in Anglican circles and beyond. Archbishop George Carey, his predecessor, was “appalled” that Archbishop Williams was informed only shortly before it was announced: “I think in this day and age, it was inexcusable to do this without consultation.” The Catholic theologian Father Hans Küng described the offer as a “tragedy, a non-ecumenical piracy of priests.” These are difficult times for ecumenism.

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Married Anglican clergy would pose two problems.

At the moment when a Catholic priest retires, the church only has responsibility towards him.

But what if the priest was married, has a wife and family?

Where would they go if they had to vacate their parochial home? What would they live on? What would happen to clerical widows or, even more distressingly, orphaned children?

Secondly, how could the Catholic Church maintain its stance on clerical celibacy?

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Bishop Fleming continued “Each of us has a duty to care for one another and, in particular, to care for the weak and the vulnerable in our society. The parish community can play an important role both in the promotion of mental health and in the provision of the support which says to its members that approaching a professional in the area of mental health is a sign of strength rather than an indication of weakness. Through the creation of a supportive and compassionate community, each of us can reach out to those who, for whatever reason, find life a great burden.

“The Day for Life 2009 also wishes to support those who have lost a friend or a family member through the taking of their own life. In helping them to understand the forces which may draw someone to do this, we wish to show them something of the love and compassion of Christ.”

“Life matters. It is commonly accepted that those who die by suicide don’t want to die; they simply wish to end their pain. Suicide prevention is, therefore, a duty of everyone in our society. In this area we need to be particularly concerned for other people and sensitive to their difficulties.” You are Precious in my Sight addresses pastoral issues around suicide such as why some people consider suicide and the issue of assisted suicide. Bishop Fleming said “Our Pastoral Letter is for everybody. It contains a special Day for Life prayer and it reminds us that “the message of the Gospel is that, whatever has happened to us, and whatever we have done, we can never be separated from the love of God in Jesus Christ. Pain, even tragedy, are never God’s last word.'”

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