He excoriated Ireland’s Catholic bishops for their handling of clerical child sexual abuse allegations but refused to blame Vatican
It must be acknowledged that Pope Benedict XVI was the first holder of that office to take the clerical child sexual abuse scandal seriously. That said, few in Ireland could feel wholeheartedly grateful about that.
The findings of the Dublin report and that of the Ryan Commission, had been published six months earlier in May 2009. The reports investigated the abuse of children in orphanages, industrial schools, and reformatories run by 18 Catholic religious congregations. They prompted Pope Benedict to write a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland in March 2010.
The handling of clerical child sexual abuse allegations by the Irish church authorities had “obscured the light of the Gospel” in Ireland “to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing”. In other words, it had consequences that were worse than the Penal Laws.
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