Asia Bibi Awaits Pardon After Death Sentence For Blasphemy Of Islam

CNN Christian Asia Bibi faces death (blasphemy, 5:51)
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Christian Woman Faces Death For Blasphemy


In early November, in the dusty city of Sheikhupura in Pakistan’s heartland, Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman and mother of five, was sentenced to death by hanging under the country’s blasphemy laws.

Her crime? She allegedly insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

Almost immediately, the death sentence unleashed international condemnation, and put pressure on Pakistan’s government to overturn the verdict and amend the country’s blasphemy laws – a holdover from a 19th century penal code designed to protect minority religious sects during British colonial times.

The law was radicalized during the 1980’s under the military dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq. He imposed life sentences, even death, for blasphemy to appease the mullahs and legitimize his grip on power.

Pope Benedict XVI appealed for Clemency but hard-line Islamic groups have threatened civil war if the government pardons Bibi or attempts to amend the law.

Bibi’s husband, 48-year-old Ashiq Masih, is desperate, convinced radical Islamic groups are aiming to kill the family. He has gone into hiding, along with his children, sheltered inside a Christian colony in an outlying district of Sheikhupura. Masih insists his wife was framed, a victim of old score-settling in their village of Ittan Walli, where his family was just one of two Christian families.

Bibi’s lawyer has filed an appeal with the High Court in Lahore and Pakistan’s President Asif Zardari may consider an unconditional Pardon if the appeals process takes too long.

So far, the Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti submitted a report on the case to Zardari. He concluded that the charges were baseless. In an interview with NBC News, he said that Bibi could be released on appeal in the high court. “We should wait for the court proceedings but if the court delays then the president may pardon her on the basis that she is innocent,” he said.

Bhatti is well aware of the possible consequences of an acquittal. Judges have been assassinated for freeing victims and several accused persons have been gunned down inside prisons or outside courtrooms as they walked free.

“We will protect Asia and her entire family,” the minister said. “No harm will come to them.”

Sidra, Bibi’s 18-year-old daughter, takes her younger sisters to the jail every Tuesday to visit their mother. “My mother tells us not to cry and to be strong,” she said. “But now, my mother is crying, so how can we be strong.”

With media reports of a possible pardon for Bibi, hard line Islamic groups have held demonstrations in cities across Pakistan. They’ve warned Zardari of a severe backlash if he commutes her death sentence.

At one rally, organized by “The Movement for the Protection of the Prophet’s Honor” denounced any attempt to change the law. “We are ready to sacrifice our life for the prophet,” they chanted.


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Asia Bibi, Pakistani Christian Jailed For Blasphemy Of Muslims

Official: Pakistani Christian Woman Falsely Accused Of Blasphemy


A preliminary investigation shows that a Pakistani Christian woman has been falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Mohammed, a government official said Monday.

"The president asked me to investigate her case and my preliminary findings show she is innocent and the charges against her are baseless," Pakistani Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti told CNN.

Asia Bibi, who has been jailed for nearly 15 months, was convicted in a Pakistani court earlier this month of breaking the country's controversial blasphemy law, a crime punishable with death or life imprisonment, according to Pakistan's penal code. She was sentenced to death.

Bibi filed a petition for mercy Saturday, and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari asked Bhatti to investigate the case, Bhatti said.

Bhatti emphasized Monday that he has reached only preliminary conclusions and will submit a final report Wednesday to Zardari's office.

Prosecutors say Bibi, a 45-year-old field worker, insulted the Prophet Mohammed after she got into a heated argument with Muslim co-workers who refused to drink from a bucket of water she had touched.

In a brief news conference at the prison where she's being held, Bibi said Saturday that the allegations against her are lies fabricated by a group of women who don't like her.

"We had some differences and this was their way of taking revenge," she said.

Bibi's death sentence sparked outrage among human rights groups, who condemned Pakistan's blasphemy law as a source of violence and persecution against religious minorities.


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Vatican Child Sex Abuse Scandal Biggest Crisis Since Reformation

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Archbishop Vincent Nichols Defends Pope Benedict XVI Amid Sex Abuse Scandal

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Archbishop Comes To Pope’s Defense



A leading archbishop and Vatican officials defended the pope on Friday, amid increasing allegations that top members of the church hierarchy protected pedophile priests at the expense of those they abused.

While acknowledging that past child abuse and its concealment by the church was "deeply shocking and totally unacceptable," the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols defended Pope Benedict XVI in an article in London's Times newspaper.

"He is not an idle observer. His actions speak as well as his words," wrote Nichols, who is head of the Catholic church in England and Wales.

When the pope was an archbishop he led important changes in church law, such as the extension of child abuse offenses to include the sexual abuse of all under 18; the case by case waiving of the statute of limitations; and the establishment of a fast-track dismissal for offenders, Nichols pointed out in his article.

The archbishop wrote that less than 0.4 percent of priests in England and Wales had been accused of abuse and since 2001 all allegations of sexual abuse had been reported to the police or social services.

"As far as I know, no other organization in this country does this," the Archbishop wrote. "It is not a cover-up; it is clear and total disclosure. The purpose of doing so is not to defend the Church."

"It is to make plain that in the Catholic Church in England and Wales there is no hiding place for those who seek to harm children," he added.

On Thursday, an editorial in a Vatican newspaper rejected claims that the pope failed to act against a Wisconsin priest accused of abusing up to 200 deaf boys two decades ago and denied there was a "cover-up."

"The prevalent tendency in the media is to ignore the facts and stretch interpretations with the aim of spreading the picture of the Catholic Church as the only one responsible for sexual abuse, something which does not correspond to reality," the editorial went on to say.

In 1996, leading U.S. clergy had complained about the priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, to a Vatican office led by the future pope, but received no response.

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Perilously close to Pope

A scandal of alleged cover-ups of sexual abuse of children by priests has been convulsing the Roman Catholic Church in Europe with even more intensity than a similar one which hit the United States eight years ago.

But this time it has come perilously close to the pope himself as victims groups have said they want to know how he handled cases before his election in 2005.

The pope had known of a cover-up "for many years," claimed one victim, speaking to BBC News. The pontiff should confess about what he knew, Arthur Budzinski, 61, said.

"It goes all the way up to him — he was in charge of these types of cases," he said, according to the BBC.

There have been also allegations of a cover-up of sexual abuse in Munich, in his native Germany, when he was the city's archbishop from 1977 to 1981. Victims groups have called for information on his decisions when he headed the Vatican doctrinal department from 1981 to 2005.

The Vatican was responding to the release of documents, first reported by The New York Times, that showed how the pope's former office told a Wisconsin bishop to shut down the church trial against Rev. Murphy, who was accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1975.

Murphy died in 1998, two years after Ratzinger first learned of the accusations, and more than 20 years after they came to the attention of the Milwaukee diocese.

The Munich archdiocese has said that Ratzinger was also involved in a 1980 decision to allow a priest who had been accused of abusing boys, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, to be transferred there for therapy.

However, Ratzinger's then-deputy, Gerhard Gruber, said earlier this month he took full responsibility for a subsequent decision to allow the priest to return to pastoral duties. Hullermann was convicted in 1986 of sexual abuse during a later posting.

The New York Times reported Friday that that the future pope was copied in on a memo saying that the priest would quickly be returned to pastoral work, and that church officials could not rule out that Ratzinger read it.


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Pope Benedict XVI Failed To Remove Sex Abusing Priest

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys


Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.

Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.

As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.

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The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.

To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.

Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.

“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”

Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”

In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After four days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.

However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at the doctrinal office.

With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and “true scandal in the future seems very possible.”

Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.

But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.

In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.)

Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.”

Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.

“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.”


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Pope XVI Apologizes To Sex Abuse Victims, Mistrust Lingers

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Catholic Sex Abuse Victims Still Angry Despite Pope's Apology



Pope Benedict XVI's unprecedented letter to Ireland apologizing for chronic child abuse within the Catholic Church failed Saturday to calm the anger of many victims, who accused the Vatican of ducking its own responsibility in promoting a worldwide culture of cover-up.

Benedict's message — the product of weeks of consultation with Irish bishops, who read it aloud at Masses across this predominantly Catholic nation — rebuked Ireland's church leaders for "grave errors of judgment" in failing to observe the church's secretive canon laws.

The pope, who himself stands accused of approving the transfer of an accused priest for treatment rather than informing German police during his 1977-82 term as Munich archbishop, suggested that child-abusing priests could have been expelled quickly had Irish bishops applied the church's own laws correctly. He pledged a church inspection of unspecified dioceses and orders in Ireland to ensure their child-protection policies were effective.

He also appealed to priests still harboring sins of child molestation to confess.

"Openly acknowledge your guilt, submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God's mercy," he wrote.

But Benedict offered no endorsement of three official Irish investigations that found the church leadership to blame for the scale and longevity of abuse heaped on Irish children throughout the 20th century.

The Vatican refused to cooperate with those 2001-09 probes into the Dublin Archdiocese, the rural Ferns diocese and Ireland's defunct network of workhouse-style dormitory schools for the Irish poor.

The investigations, directed by senior Irish judges and lawyers, ruled that Catholic leaders protected the church's reputation from scandal at the expense of children — and began passing their first abuse reports to police in 1996 only after victims began to sue the church.

Nor did Benedict's letter mention recent revelations of abuse cover-ups in a growing list of European nations, particularly his German homeland, where more than 300 claimants this year have alleged abuse in Catholic schools and a choir long run by the pope's brother.

German Archbishop Apologizes

In the latest development, the leader of the German Bishops Conference apologized Saturday for failing to protect children adequately from a pedophile priest in the early 1990s in his diocese of Freiburg. Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who was in charge of human resources and staffing at the time, said he should have done more to investigate the priest, who was forced into retirement in 1991 and committed suicide four years later when fresh complaints arose.

Rights campaigners in Ireland and abroad forecast that more victims in more nations will keep coming forward and opening new fronts of criticism, because the pope's promotion of secretive canon laws remains at the heart of an unsolved problem.

"We know this policy of secrecy was worldwide. The more that victims speak out, the more the scandals will spread," said Marie Collins, who was repeatedly raped by a Dublin priest while aged 13 and hospitalized in 1960. Her attacker wasn't removed from the priesthood and imprisoned until 1997.

While a cardinal at the Vatican, Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, wrote a 2001 letter instructing bishops worldwide to report all cases of abuse to his office and keep church investigations secret under threat of excommunication. The Vatican insists the secrecy rules serve only to protect the integrity of the church's investigations, and should not be taken to mean the church should not tell police of their members' crimes.

But victims' advocates in Ireland and the United States said the pope again failed to make it clear whether the church considers the secular law a higher priority than canon law when seeking to stop a pedophile priest.

"The letter's underlying goal seems to have been to appease the outrage while keeping the church in control of its incriminating information," said Terry McKiernan, president of a Web-based pressure group, BishopAccountability.org, that chronicles Catholic abuse scandals worldwide.

"He should have demanded that the bishops release all pertinent files and other information about all credibly accused priests. He should have demanded that every complicit official be named publicly and forced to resign," McKiernan said.

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Victims call for Resignations

Irish victims' leaders are seeking the resignations of any bishops who transferred pedophile priests to new parishes rather than report them to police — a demand that, if applied, would likely claim the majority of Ireland's 27 bishops, given their failure to tell police of any crimes until 1996. But the pope has yet to accept even the three-month-old resignations offered by three Irish bishops linked to Dublin Archdiocese cover-ups.

The Vatican's chief spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope's letter contained no punitive provisions because it was pastoral, not administrative or disciplinary in nature. He said any decisions concerning resignations would be taken by the competent Vatican offices.

Benedict faulted the Irish bishops for failing "sometimes grievously" to apply the church's own laws requiring child-abusing priests to be removed from the priesthood. But he didn't rebuke them for failing to report abuse to police, saying instead they must prevent future abuse and "continue to cooperate with civil authorities."

He also repeated an excuse for the bishops' inaction that has been rejected by the Irish investigations — that they didn't understand the scale or criminality of child abuse until recent years.

"I recognize how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice," Benedict wrote in remarks addressed to the Irish bishops.

Paper Trail

However, the Irish investigators forced the church to hand over its copious files on abuse cases dating back to the 1950s. They unearthed a paper trail confirming the Irish bishops' successful acquisition of group liability insurance in the 1980s, a decade before the deluge of lawsuits. And they found cases where Catholic officials in the 1960s reported school employees to police for abusing children, showing they understood even then it was a crime.

Andrew Madden, a former Dublin altar boy who in 1995 became Ireland's first pedophile-priest victim to go public with a lawsuit against the church, said the pope had missed the whole point of a meaningful apology.

"I don't need the pope to apologize for the child abusers. I, and untold thousands of victims like me, needed the pope to apologize for the church hierarchy's role in choosing to protect the abusers at the expense of children. That's the real scandal, and the pope has been involved in that. He's not an innocent bystander," Madden said.

'Only themselves to blame'

Massgoers arriving Saturday at central Dublin churches and in Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, were greeted with piles of the Pope's letter. Some lauded its readability and frank tone.

"I thought it was lovely. I thought it was very moving, and I hope it brings some help to all the victims," said one Armagh worshipper, Annette O'Hara. "They're the ones we should be praying for."

But outside a Dublin church, truck driver Tomas O'Reilly said he doubted the pope's sincerity and was unhappy with putting money in the collection plate. "I don't want to be paying the church's legal bills. They've only themselves to blame," he said.

At the Vatican, Lombardi was peppered with questions about why Benedict didn't directly address the German scandal or take the opportunity in the letter to make a more sweeping commentary on the global dimensions of the scandal.

Lombardi said the Irish scandal was unique in its scope, but said the pope's letter could be read to apply to other countries and cases.

"You can't talk about the entire world every time," he said. "It risks becoming banal."


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Pope Benedict XVI Demands Sex Abusers "Submit To Justice"

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Pope XVI Tells Sex Abusers "Submit to Justice"


Pope Benedict XVI told priests who have abused children to submit to the "demands of justice," according to a letter released Saturday.

The pontiff said a misplaced concern for the church's reputation and inadequate methods of choosing priests had contributed to decades of sexual abuse by members of the clergy. He ordered a Vatican investigation into elements of the Irish church to tackle the problem.

In an open letter written to Catholics in the Irish Republic, the pope said he was "deeply disturbed" by the flood of allegations in Ireland and told victims he was "truly sorry."

He acknowledged that victims had suffered "grievously" from "sinful and criminal" abuse at the hands of priests, brothers and nuns.

"It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the church," he said. "In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel."

The letter did not mention similar claims in the pope's native Germany.

The church has been accused of protecting priests in the past and the pope's comment about the "demands of justice" appeared to be a reference to court proceedings, NBC News reported.

Benedict laid out four reasons why abuse by priests had continued over the last four decades:

* a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church;
* inadequate procedures for choosing priests;
* insufficient training in seminaries;
* and a tendency to favor clergy.

There was no mention of any Vatican responsibility in the scandal and no specific punishments doled out for the bishops who have been blamed by victims and Irish government-ordered investigations for having covered up years of abuse.

The Vatican investigation will look into some diocese, seminaries and religious orders. Such a move is undertaken only when Rome considers a local church unable to deal with a problem on its own.

The Vatican ordered such an "apostolic visitation" into U.S. seminaries after the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in 2002.

The results of the Irish investigation could lead to further action.

Victims 'disappointed'

However, an Irish group representing survivors of abuse expressed dismay at the pope's remarks.

"My first response was deep disappointment in the letter. We feel the letter falls far short of addressing the concerns of the victims," Maeve Lewis, executive director of victims group One in Four, told Reuters.

"There is nothing in this letter to suggest that any new vision of leadership in the Catholic church exists," Lewis added.

She said the pontiff had focused too narrowly on lower-ranked Irish priests without recognizing the responsibility of the Vatican.

The letter also did not call for the resignation of the head of the church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, which victims groups have demanded, Lewis added.

In a speech after celebrating Mass on Saturday in Armagh, Northern Ireland, Cardinal Brady: "I welcome this letter. It is evident from the Pastoral Letter that Pope Benedict is deeply dismayed by what he refers to as 'sinful and criminal acts and the way the Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.'"

Three Irish bishops have offered to step down. Benedict hasn't accepted the resignations. The pope said that while bishops committed errors in the past, the church's leadership had already begun to remedy past mistakes.

Benedict used his harshest words for the abusers themselves, saying they had betrayed the trust of the faithful, brought shame on the church and now must answer before God and civil authorities.

"Conceal nothing," he exhorted them. "Openly acknowledge your guilt, submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God's mercy."

Benedict faulted their superiors, the Irish bishops, for having failed "sometimes grievously" to apply the church's own law which calls for harsh punishments for child abusers, including defrocking them.

He said Irish bishops had made "grave errors of judgement" in handling the allegations. But he didn't rebuke them specifically for having failed to report cases of abuse to police, saying only that serious mistakes were made and that now they must "continue to cooperate with civil authorities."

"I recognize how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice," Benedict wrote.

"Nevertheless, it must be admitted that grave errors of judgement were made and failures of leadership occurred. And this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness."

Secularization
The letter said the Irish church had had "to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society."

The pope added there was a "tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel."

Vatican reforms had been "sometimes misinterpreted" and "there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations."

Asked why there were no punitive provisions contained in the letter, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted that the letter was pastoral, not administrative or disciplinary in nature, and that any further measures concerning resignations would be taken by the competent Vatican offices.

Three Irish government-ordered investigations published from 2005 to 2009 have documented how thousands of Irish children suffered rape, molestation and other abuse by priests in their parishes and by nuns and brothers in boarding schools and orphanages. Irish bishops did not report a single case to police until 1996 after victims began to sue the church.

But Benedict said it wasn't enough to argue that abuse is widespread in society at large. He said the Irish church must now address the problem that has occurred in the Irish Catholic community "and to do so with courage and determination."

The seven-page letter was divided into sections directed at particular groups: the victims, their parents, their abusers, the bishops and the Irish faithful as a whole. Addressing himself first to the victims, Benedict said he understood that nothing he could say could undo their pain. He equated their wounds with those of Christ, and said he hoped that they find the courage to find faith.

"Christ's own wounds, transformed by his redemptive sufferings, are the very means by which the power of evil is broken and we are reborn to life and hope."

The letter concluded with a prayer for the faithful to meditate on as they work to try to rebuild the church.

"May our sorrow and our tears, our sincere effort to redress past wrongs, and our firm purpose of amendment, bear an abundant harvest of grace for the deepening of faith in our families, parishes, schools and communities, for the spiritual progress of Irish society, and the growth of charity, justice, joy and peace within the whole human family."

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Pope Benedict XVI Attacked During Christmas Eve Mass

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Pope Knocked Down At Christmas Eve Mass


Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas Eve Mass at St. Peter's Basilica got off to a tumultuous start Thursday after an apparently deranged woman jumped the barriers and knocked him down on his way to the altar.

The 82-year-old pope quickly got up and was unhurt, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini. But 87-year-old French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, a longtime Vatican diplomat who was also dragged down, fractured his hip in the fall and will be operated on, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said Friday.

The pope delivered his traditional Christmas Day blessing Friday, looking tired and unsteady but otherwise fine. The Vatican said his busy Christmas schedule would remain unchanged.

Footage aired on Italy's RAI state TV showed a woman dressed in a red hooded sweatshirt vaulting over the wooden barriers and rushing toward the pope before being swarmed by bodyguards.

Lombardi identified the woman as Susanna Maiolo, a Swiss-Italian national with psychiatric problems. Video shot by a witness showed Maiolo grabbing the pope's vestments as she was taken down, with Benedict seemingly falling on top of her.

Vatican officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Maiolo was involved in a similar incident last year in which she jumped the barricade as the pope passed. In that case, however, Maiolo never managed to reach the pope and was quietly tackled to the ground by security.

In both cases she wore a red sweat shirt.

The commotion occurred as the pope's procession was making its way toward the main altar and shocked gasps rang out through the crowd that packed the basilica. The procession came to a halt and security rushed to the trouble spot.

Benedettini said Maiolo was arrested by Vatican police. "During the procession an unstable person jumped a barrier and knocked down the Holy Father," Benedettini told The Associated Press by telephone. "(The pope) quickly got up and continued the procession."

Security guards tackle woman

MaryBeth Burns from Paris, Texas, was about four people away from Maiolo and was filming the pope's procession as the commotion started.

"I'm really mad because I had a perfect shot lined up," she said. "I'm still shaking."

Burns, who was visiting Italy with her family on a religious pilgrimage for Christmas, said the security guards immediately pulled the woman to the ground and the pope tumbled with them.

Benedict lost his miter and his staff in the fall. He remained on the ground for a few seconds before being helped back up by attendants. At that point a few shouts of "viva il papa!" (long live the pope!) rang out, followed by cheers from the faithful, witnesses said.

After getting up, Benedict, flanked by tense bodyguards, resumed his walk to the basilica's main altar to start the Mass. He did appear somewhat shaken and leaned heavily on aides and an armrest as he sat down in his chair.

Few people who were watching the Mass on giant screens set up in a rain-soaked St. Peter's Square even knew that the pope had fallen, with many saying that either they weren't looking or had arrived too late.

Benedict made no reference to the incident as the service started. As a choir sang, he sprinkled incense on the altar before opening the Mass with the traditional wish for peace in Latin.

Security Breaches

The latest incident was the first time a potential attacker came into direct contact with Benedict, and underscored concerns by security analysts who have frequently warned the pope is too exposed in his public appearances.

There have been other security breaches at the Vatican, in addition to this year's and last year's incidents.

In 2007, during an open-air audience in St. Peter's Square, a mentally unstable German man jumped a security barrier and grabbed the back of the pope's open car before being swarmed by security guards.

Then there was the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981. John Paul suffered a severe abdominal wound as he rode in an open jeep at the start of his weekly audience in the Vatican piazza.

The pope is protected by a combination of Swiss Guards, Vatican police and Italian police.

Delivers Homily

Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., the Vatican has tightened security at events where the pope is present. All visitors must pass by police to get into the square, with some going through metal detectors or being scanned by metal-detecting wands.

In a similar incident to Thursday's, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was attacked as he was greeting the crowd at a political rally earlier this month. A man with a history of psychological problems hurled a souvenir statuette at the politician, fracturing his nose and breaking two of his teeth.

Benedict celebrated this year's Christmas Eve Mass two hours earlier than the usual midnight starting time in a move by the Vatican to ease the pontiff's busy holiday schedule.

In his homily, delivered unflappably after the incident, Benedict urged the world to "wake up" from selfishness and petty affairs, and find time for God and spiritual matters.

"To wake up means to leave that private world of one's own and to enter the common reality," Benedict said. "Conflict and lack of reconciliation in the world stem from the fact that we are locked into our own interests and opinions, into our own little private world."

Benedict's next scheduled appearance is at noon on Christmas Day, when he is to deliver his traditional "Urbi et Orbi" Speech (Latin for "To the city and the world") from the basilica's balcony.




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Sources: MSNBC, Google Maps