Vatican City - The Pope has offered to meet more victims of clerical child sex abuse as the Roman Catholic Church continues its attempts to regain public trust.
Father Frederico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, told Vatican Radio today that the Pope was available for new meetings with victims of paedophile priests and that to win back trust the Church had to co-operate with police and the judiciary on child abuse cases.
In his letter to Irish Catholics last month, when he personally apologised to victims in Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI revealed that he had met sex abuse victims before and said he was ready to do so again. Irish Catholics are among those who want more meetings.
Father Lombardi's comments indicate that the Church is beginning to grasp the seriousness of the international outrage surrounding the scandal.
He said: “Apart from the attention we must pay to the victims, we must pursue co-operation with the relevant civilian judicial and penal authorities, in line with the legal and other situations in each country.
“This is the only way to restore a climate of justice and full confidence in the institution of the Church.”
The Church has been shaken by a series of scandals involving paedophile priests in a number of countries, amid criticism that it protected guilty clergy and put the reputation of the Church before the sufferings of the victims.
In recent months, the scandal has rocked the Catholic churches of Ireland, Austria, the United States and the Pope’s native Germany.
Further scandals have emerged in the past 24 hours.
Prosecutors in Brazil yesterday charged a Roman Catholic priest with possession and exchange over the internet of pornographic images of mainly male adolescents.
Prosecutors in the northeastern state of Alagoas identified the priest as Benedikt Lennartz, 41, the parish priest in Craibas.
“An investigation of the priest’s residence revealed the existence of a computer hard drive with 1,300 photographs of explicit sex scenes or pornography involving adolescents, most of them males,” an official statement said.
Three other Catholic clergymen in Alagoas have been formally accused of paedophilia, one of them after being filmed in sexual acts with minors.
SBT television aired hidden camera video footage in which Father Luis Marques Barbosa, 82, was seen having sexual relations with a male youth.
In Canada, a former Catholic bishop facing child pornography charges was accused yesterday in a civil law suit of sexually abusing an orphanage resident in the early 1980s.
Raymond Lahey, 69, resigned in September 2009 as bishop of the diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, after a search at Ottawa airport of his laptop computer uncovered graphic photographs of males who authorities suspected could be as young as 8.
He was later charged with possessing and importing child pornography following. A trial is expected next year.
In Malta, it was claimed that several priests have been involved in child abuse cases over the past 11 years, days before the Pope is to visit the island.
Since the Church established a commission to investigate the matter in 1999, several cases involving 45 priests had been dealt with, Kevin Papagiorcotulo, a Church spokesman, said.
Mr Papagiorcotulo could not say how many priests had been found guilty or suspended.
Paul Cremona, the Archbishop of Malta, and Mario Grech, the Bishop of Gozo, issued a statement yesterday expressing the Church’s “grave sorrow and repentance towards all those who have been abused, towards all our Christian brothers who have been hurt, and towards Maltese society in general".
The Pope will visit the predominantly Catholic island on April 17 and 18 in his first foreign trip since the paedophile priest scandal exploded.