RELIGION:"I Never Covered Things Up"A Letter From POPE Benedict XVI To An Atheist Mathematician.

Benedict XVI has emerged from his self-imposed silence of seven months to deny
covering up the sexually abusive priests
scandal and defend Christianity to non-believers.

The emeritus pope released a letter to one
of Italy's best-known atheists, which was
his first work published since he retired -and his first-ever denial of personal
responsibility for the sex scandal.

But what made the letter published
yesterday in Italy's La Repubblica more
remarkable was that it appeared just two
weeks after Pope Francis penned a similar
note to the newspaper's atheist editor.

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It gives evidence that the two POPE in white,
who live across the Vatican gardens from
one another, are of the same mind about
the need for such dialogue and may even
be collaborating on it.

The Vatican said the letters’ appearance
was just a coincidence. Benedict wrote his
to mathematician and atheist Piergiorgio
Odifreddi, who in 2011 penned a book
titled ‘Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You.’

The book was Mr Odifreddi's reaction to
Benedict's classic ‘Introduction to
Christianity’. In his book, Mr Odifreddi
posed a series of arguments about
Catholicism, including the sex abuse
scandal.

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For nearly a quarter of a century, the
former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed
the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible
for handling abuse cases.

He was prefect when the scandal first
exploded in the US in 2002 and was pope
when it erupted on a global scale in 2010
with revelations of thousands of victims in
Europe and beyond.

It emerged bishops had covered up for
paedophile priests and Vatican officials
turned a blind eye to the crimes - in some
cases actively interfering with bishops
trying to report paedophiles to police.

In his letter, Benedict denies responsibility.
‘I never tried to cover these things up,’ he
wrote.

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‘That the power of evil penetrated so far
into the interior world of the faith is a
suffering that we must bear, but at the
same time, we must do everything to
prevent it from repeating,’ he wrote,
according to Repubblica.

‘Neither is it comforting to know that,
according to research, the percentage of
priests who commit these crimes isn't any
higher than the percentage of other similar professions.

‘Regardless, one shouldn't present this
deviation as if it were something specific to
Catholicism.’

As prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001
compelled bishops around the world to
send all credible cases of abuse to his
office for review.

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He took the move because it had become
clear to him that bishops were merely
shuffling abusive priests around, rather
than subjecting them to church trials.

He actually tried in 1988 to get around the
cumbersome church trials, asking the
Vatican's legal office for quicker ways to
permanently remove priests who raped and
molested children.

But he was rebuffed, with the legal office
saying that doing so would compromise the
priests' ability to defend themselves.

Cardinal Ratzinger was hamstrung by Pope
John Paul II's unspoken policy against
letting young men leave the priesthood and
his overriding concern with preserving the
rights of accused clerics, often at the expense of victims.

This was a concern formed in part by his
experiences in communist-controlled
Poland, where priests were often accused
of trumped-up charges.

Eventually, a year after the abuse scandal
exploded in the US, Cardinal Ratzinger
pushed through administrative changes in
2003 and 2004 that enabled his office to
permanently remove abusers without going
through a church trial.

But that decision came decades after his
office began receiving a steady stream of
documentation about the scale of abuse in
the US - far too late, according to victims.

‘In the church's entire history, no one knew
more but did less to protect kids than
Benedict,’ said Barbara Dorris, outreach
director of the US-based victims' advocacy
group SNAP, the Survivors Network of
those Abused by Priests.

‘As head of CDF, thousands of cases of
predator priests crossed his desk. Did he
choose to warn families or call police about
even one of those dangerous clerics? No.
That, by definition, is a cover-up.’

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After the 2010 explosion of abuse cases,
the Vatican issued informal guidelines
ordering bishops to report suspected
abusers to police in countries where it is
required.

But the Vatican has yet to remove or
sanction any bishop who covered up for an
abuser.

Benedict became the first pope in 600 years
to resign when he retired on February 28,
setting the stage for the election of Pope
Francis two weeks later.

Benedict said at the time that he would
spend his final years ‘hidden from the
world,’ living in a converted monastery
tucked behind St. Peter's Basilica, reading
and praying.

His decision to cloister himself was in part
due to his own shy, bookish nature, but
also to make clear that he was no longer
pope and that his successor was in charge.

Benedict has been seen only a handful of
times since his retirement and only once
with Pope Francis, at an official Vatican
ceremony in July.

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A prolific writer, he has published nothing
since retiring except for the encyclical ‘The
Light of Faith,’ which was signed by Pope
Francis but was actually written almost
entirely by Benedict.

Pope Francis responded in the same pages
to a series of questions posed to him by
Repubblica's atheist editor in editorials this
summer.

Pope Francis's letter was clearly not
penned by his own hand:It involved
language that is much closer to Benedict's
style, including arcane references to early
church fathers like Tertullian whom only
Benedict and a few others at the Vatican
have ever cited.

But Vatican spokesman, the Reverend
Federico Lombardi, denied the two had
collaborated on it. ‘They are autonomous
and distinct initiatives,’ he said.

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In Benedict's letter, he takes Mr Odifreddi
to task for what he said was the
‘aggressiveness’ of his book, and responds
to many of the arguments with piqued
criticism himself.

‘What you say about the figure of Jesus isn't
worthy of your scientific standing,’ wrote
Benedict, who authored a highly praised,
three-volume work on the Jesus Christ
during his pontificate.

He similarly criticizes Mr Odifreddi's
‘religion of mathematics’ as ‘empty’ since it
doesn't even consider three fundamental
themes for humanity: freedom, love and
evil.

On evolution, he wrote: ‘If you want to
substitute God with Nature, the question
remains: What does this Nature consist of?
Nowhere do you define it and it appears
rather like an irrational divinity that doesn't
explain anything.’

Mr Odifreddi, for his part, wrote in an
accompanying piece yesterday that he was
stunned to have received the letter, though
he said he wrote the book precisely in
hopes Benedict might read it.

He said he sought, and obtained,
Benedict's permission to publish the letter.

He planned to re-issue his book with
Benedict's letter included, calling the
exchange ‘an unprecedented dialogue
between a theologian pope and an atheist
mathematician, divided in most everything
but drawn together by at least one
objective: the search for Truth.’

Culled From:UKDailyMail. 

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