It's been all over the news since he said it. Here and here for starters. Pope Benedict XVI has said that it is sin "within the Church" that has led to the sex abuse crisis the Catholic Church now faces.
Sounds pretty terrible and scary. But it is good news.
It looks like Vatican Radio broke the story and everyone else ran with it. Said the pope:
... attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church ...
His words are getting billed in the press as the "strongest comments" on the sex abuse scandal, that he is dismissing the idea that the whole sex abuse crisis has been ginned up by a press that hates the authority of the Vatican, the celibate priesthood, and him.
But his comments aren't surprising. He is essentially saying what those who follow the pope, and what many faithful Catholics, have known since the sex abuse scandals first started to break in America.
The crisis in the Church is a crisis of fidelity to Christ. It is rooted in the steady departure of the Church from fidelity both in preaching and in practice to the New Covenant in Christ. Components of this departure include a watering down of solid theological and moral teaching, and thereby a de-valuing of the admission of personal imperfection and penance before Christ. But at the root of it is a departure from prayer. At some point, Benedict seems to believe, the Church lost her prayerful soul. All the other ills flowed from that. Benedict continued:
... the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues.
Bad or inaccurate media coverage, or slanderous accusers, or anything else external, could not create the crisis the Church now faces. Could they in some way contribute to it? Probably. But what could have prevented the crisis from becoming the cancer that it is on the body of the Church is and has always been prayer.
Again, this is good news. Why? Because the illness can be cured with prayer. Our prayer.
It has long been understood that the Church is not limited to the clerical hierarchies and religious celibates. The Catholic Church is all the baptized Catholic faithful. We can hardly affect what detractors and critics on the outside say about the Church and about her faithful. We are quite in a position to strengthen the soul of the Church itself, which is the Body of Christ.
If a man's body is bleeding because of what someone else is doing to him, then he faces the tall order of defending himself and changing the behavior of another. But if a man's wounds are self-inflicted, what he must do is simply change his own behavior. Unlike if his wounds are inflicted by an outside agressor, if he and he alone is responsible for his wounds, then the choice of what to do now is entirely his.
What happens to the Church now has nothing to do with the kind of press she gets. As the Holy Father has said, it requires conversion. In other words, it is our free choice.
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