Vatican seeks to play down comments on homosexuality
The Vatican today tried 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 the Rev. Federico Lombardi insisted today 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.
The Rev. Lombardi cited some of the statistics, from a March interview in a Catholic newspaper with Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's abuse prosecutor.
Scicluna said the allegations involving "paedophilia in the strict sense" accounted for 10% of the cases, 60% of cases involved adolescents in homosexual relations, while the other 30% of cases involved adolescents in heterosexual relations.
In all, Mgr Scicluna told the publication of the Italian bishops conference, 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, schools and other Catholic institutions around the world.
Nearly immediately 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.
The French government bristled at what it saw as an offense to human rights efforts.
"This is an unacceptable association that we condemn," the French Foreign Ministry said.
"France reiterates its resolute commitment to the fight against discrimination and prejudice linked to sexual orientation and gender identity,"
Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe also expressed his condemnation for what he called "unexpected" and "regrettable" comments. He said the cardinal's "shocking link" was all the more dangerous because these positions "deliberately stigmatise an identity and harm the respect for diversity and individual liberty".
The mayor, who came out as gay a decade ago, urged the church leadership, the scientific community and the international community to distance themselves from the comments.
The Rev. Scicluna is a top prosecutor for sexual abuse cases at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican office that cracks down on deviance, moral or theological.
Long headed by the now pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, both Ratzinger's and the congregation's work have come under attack by abuse victims for allegedly rebuffing or moving slowly on calls to remove molesting priests, essentially granting impunity to them and letting them keep ministering to minors.
