By IANS/AKI,
Vatican City : The Vatican said Tuesday that the Catholic Church must do everything possible to investigate claims of sex abuse in Ireland, Germany, Austria and Holland.
However, while acknowledging the broadening issue of abuse, the head of the Vatican press office, Father Federico Lombardi, said “concentrating accusations against the church alone gives a false perspective”.
The Vatican issued a statement after Georg Ratzinger, brother of Pope Benedict XVI, denied any knowledge of sexual abuse in the Regensburg boys’ choir which he directed in Germany for 30 years.
Lombardi said that church bodies including the German bishops’ conference, the German Jesuit province and the bishops’ conference of the Netherlands had faced the issue “with timely and decisive action”.
“They have demonstrated their desire for transparency and, in a certain sense, accelerated the emergence of the problem by inviting victims to speak out, even when the cases involved date from many years ago,” Lombardi said.
He said that the Pope had demonstrated his concern by calling a meeting of Irish bishops at the Vatican and was now preparing a letter on the subject for the Catholic Church in Ireland.
“Certainly, the errors committed in ecclesiastical institutions and by church figures are particularly reprehensible because of the church’s educational and moral responsibility,” he said.
“But all objective and well-informed people know that the question is much broader, and concentrating accusations against the church alone gives a false perspective.”
Lombardi said that recent data supplied by Austrian authorities showed that, over the same period of time which he did not specify, the number of proven cases in church institutions was 17, while there were 510 other cases outside the church.
“Although the seriousness of the difficulties the church is going through cannot be denied, we must not fail to do everything possible in order to ensure that, in the end they bring positive results, of better protection for infancy and youth in the church and in society, and the purification of the church herself,” Lombardi said.
Ratzinger, who was director of the German choir from 1964 to 1994, said he had heard stories from members of the choir, but had not taken any action to intervene because he was not alarmed by what they had said.
Last week, the Regensburg diocese said a former singer in the church choir that was run by Ratzinger, had alleged there was abuse there in the early 1960s.