Pope in Center of Crisis At the Vatican
As more abuse cases surface, Benedict faces a church scandal.
March 18, 2010— -- Pope Benedict XVI is facing a crisis. The sexual abuse scandal that first rocked the U.S. Catholic Church in 2002 is now spreading to Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Germany and elsewhere. Alleged victims are coming forward almost daily, claiming abuse. Since January, 300 Germans have told authorities they were abused in Catholic choirs and schools.
"Until this moment, all the abuse scandals were happening far away," Marco Politi, a Vatican analyst, told ABC News. "Now it came to Europe, also in the diocese of Pope Benedict."
The pope himself stands accused of complicity. As an archbishop in Germany in the 1980s, then Cardinal Ratzinger referred an accused pedophile priest to a therapist, not the police.
That priest was then put back onto pastoral duties and went on to abuse again, authorities say. One of Ratzinger's deputies in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising claims that Ratzinger approved the therapy, but knew nothing of the pedophile priest being assigned once again to an active role in the church.
"That's an attempt at damage control," The Rev. Thomas Doyle told ABC News. Doyle is a Dominican priest who once worked at the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C., before becoming an advocate for the rights of victims of sexual abuse. "Head of the Archdiocese of Munich was Archbishop Ratzinger," said Doyle. "No priest gets assigned anywhere unless it's signed off by the archbishop."
The Vatican strongly denies Doyle's assessment. There are whispers in Rome of a conspiracy to discredit the pontiff. Last weekend, another accusation surfaced that could embroil Benedict even further into this scandal.
A man who sang as a boy with a renowned Catholic choir in the early 1990s claims he was sexually abused by older choristers. Benedict's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, was director of the choir at the time.
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