SANTIAGO/BERLIN – It is homosexuality, not celibacy, that is linked to paedophilia, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said yesterday, seeking to defuse the sex scandal that has battered the Catholic Church.
On a visit to Chile, Cardinal Bertone, dubbed the deputy pope, also said Pope Benedict would soon take more surprising initiatives regarding the sex abuse scandal, but he did not elaborate.
“Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia,” he told a news conference in Santiago.
“This pathology is one that touches all categories of people and priests to a lesser degree in percentage terms,” he said. “The behaviour of the priests in this case, the negative behaviour, is very serious, is scandalous.”
Meanwhile, a new report commissioned by the Catholic Church in Germany has found that children were “sadistically tormented and also sexually abused” at a monastery in Pope Benedict’s native Bavaria.
A lawyer investigating accusations of abuse in a Benedictine monastery school in Ettal presented a final report to the archdiocese of Munich and Freising yesterday, including 173 pages of victims’ accounts of abuse.
“My investigations quite clearly show that for decades up until around 1990, children and adolescents were brutally abused in the Ettal monastery,” Thomas Pfister said in a statement.
“The number of victims’ accounts has increased significantly since the intermediary report of March 5th,” added Mr Pfister, who said last month that hundreds of pupils had been beaten and some sexually abused at the school.
An archdiocese spokesman said he could not comment on the specific number of victims before a news conference today.
A survey published yesterday found that a quarter of German Catholics were considering quitting the church in the wake of reports of hundreds of cases, some many decades old, of sexual abuse by clerics. – (Reuters)