It also insisted that church confidentiality doesn’t prevent bishops from reporting abuse to police.
The Vatican’s campaign to defend the pope’s reputation and resolve in combating clergy abuse of minors followed acknowledgment by the Munich archdiocese that it had transferred a suspected pedophile priest to community work while Benedict was archbishop there.
Benedict is also under fire for a 2001 church directive he wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.
Skeptical about the Vatican’s handling of abuse, a US-based advocacy group for abuse victims, Survivors Network of those Abused for Priests, urged faithful to bring candles and childhood photos to vigils outside churches, cathedrals and German consulates across the US this weekend to remind people to “call police, not bishops” in cases of suspected abuse.
But the Holy See’s so-called prosecutor for clergy sex abuse cases, providing some of the first statistics about his office’s handling of allegations, decried what he called “false and defamatory” contentions that Benedict had promoted a “policy of cover up.”
At the Vatican, rules on handling sexual abuse were “never understood as a ban on making a complaint to civil authorities,” Monsignor Charles Scicluna told Italian bishops conference daily Avvenire.
But Irish bishops have said the document was widely taken to mean they shouldn’t go to police. And victims’ lawyers in the US say the document shows the church tried to obstruct justice.
The Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi defended Benedict.
“It’s rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses,” Lombardi told Vatican Radio.
“The pope is a person whose stand on clarity, on transparency and whose decision to face these problems is above discussion,” Lombardi said.