VATICAN CITY — The Vatican prosecutor of clerical sex abuse warned perpetrators on Saturday that they would suffer damnation in hell that would be worse than the death penalty.

The Rev. Charles Scicluna, a Maltese priest who is a top official at the Vatican’s morality office, led a special « make amends » prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Seminarians and other pontifical university students in Rome wanted to gather for prayers for the victims of clergy abuse and for the healing of the church’s wounds from the scandal over its concealment of abuse.

Quoting from a long passage from Gregory the Great, an early pope and monk who made rules for the clergy, Scicluna said in the case of a pedophile priest « it would be really better that his evil deeds cause him death in his lifetime » under secular laws than suffer « more terrible damnation » in hell.

Scicluna has been leading the Vatican’s drive to rid the church of pedophile priests. Many victims’ groups say the Vatican must admit responsibility for a decades-old culture of secrecy and systematic cover-ups.

The Vatican official likened children to a « holy icon, » and decried what the world becomes when children are « abused, destroyed. »

« Don’t make children the object of your impure covetousness, » Scicluna said to the priests.

Participants at the ceremony asked for prayers « for the victims of abuses perpetrated by men and women of the Church, so that they can heal their wounds and experience true peace, » the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Prayers were also offered for clerics and other religious who committed abuses so that « they can honestly face up to the consequences of their guilt and embrace the needs of justice, » ANSA said.

Scicluna drew on a passage in St. Mark’s Gospel saying those who harm children would be better off tying a millstone to their neck and throwing themselves into the sea.

Earlier in the week, the Catholic news agency Zenit reported that several seminary students, including ones from Britain and the United States, decided to have the prayer service in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s harsh letter to Irish bishops in March.

In that letter, Benedict chastised bishops in the predominantly Catholic nation for making grave errors of judgment about the abuse of thousands of Irish boys and girls. But he didn’t blame Vatican policies that kept the abuse secret for making the situation worse and he issued no punishment for the Irish bishops.

Any scandal in the Italian church is particularly delicate for the Vatican.

On Friday, the head of the Italian bishops conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco told his churchmen that it was « possible » that sex abuse by clergy might have also been covered up in Italy, and said bishops should follow the Vatican’s guidelines in dealing with abuse allegations.

Frances D’Emilio
The Huffington post

Un dossier à suivre :

Monday, 31 May 2010 : The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church’s relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church’s top theologians.

The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.

The « Courtyard of the Gentiles », as the foundation is known, is being set up by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the influential Vatican department that is charged with fostering better relations with non-Catholics. It was founded by Pope John Paul II in 1982 to spearhead his attempts to create a better dialogue with other cultures and faith, including those with no religion at all.

Until recently, Pope Benedict has shown less enthusiasm for the type of open-armed ecumenism favoured by his predecessor. In the past five years, the Vatican’s relationship with other faiths has been severely undermined following a series of gaffes by the current pontiff, including a speech on the Prophet Muhammad that upset Muslims and the reintegration of an excommunicated Holocaust-denying bishop that severely undermined Catholic-Jewish relations.

The church is also aware that its reputation has suffered enormously in the eyes of atheists following the explosion of clerical sex-abuse scandals that broke out in Western Europe earlier this year and spread across the globe.

Until the Pope’s recent turnaround on the sex-abuse scandal, where he admitted that the church’s sins were to blame for the abuse, Vatican hardliners continued to push the line that the allegations were largely « petty gossip » that had been stirred up by secular enemies of the church.

But in an interview with the National Catholic Register, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it clear he would not be willing to give a platform to certain prominent atheists.

The foundation, he said, would only be interested in « noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as Piergiorgio Odifreddi in Italy, Michel Onfray in France, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins« .

Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with « irony and sarcasm » and tend to « read religious texts like fundamentalists ».

In a speech to the Roman Curia back in December, the Pope first hinted at his plans to reach out to atheists.

« We, as believers, must have at heart even those people who consider themselves agnostics or atheists, » he said. « When we speak of a New Evangelization, these people are perhaps taken aback. They do not want to see themselves as an object of mission or to give up their freedom of thought and will. Yet the question of God remains present even for them, even if they cannot believe in the concrete nature of his concern for us. »

There are strong indications emanating out of Rome that the 83-year-old pontiff also intends to create a new ministry aimed at bringing lapsed Catholics in the West back towards the more traditional interpretation Benedict and fellow conservatives favour.

The Catholic News Agency says the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization will be « aimed at bringing the Gospel back to Western societies that have lost their Christian identity ».

Jerome Taylor, Religious Affairs Correspondent
The Independent