As does his priests
Pope Benedict said Saturday that clerical sex abuses were "gorgeous crime" that had damaged the standing of the Catholic Church and its clergy, in his first explicit remarks on the subject since becoming pontiff.
Speaking to a group of bishops from Ireland — an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country where all but one seminary has closed following repeated scandals — Benedict said it was urgent "to rebuild confidence and trust and to hide any future clerical abuse of children ."
"In the exercise of your pastoral ministry, you have had to respond in recent years to many heart-rending cases of sexual abuse of minors," the pontiff told the bishops. "These are all the more tragic when the abuser is a cleric and they get out in the open."
"The wounds caused by such acts of publication run deep because it is against cannon law to reveal child sex abuse by clerics," Benedict said.
