FaithWorld

(Statues are seen covered in snow at St. Peter's Square in Vatican February 4, 2012. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi )

The Roman Catholic Church has sometimes been in denial over the sexual abuse of children by clergy but must now move forward to face up to the scandal, the Vatican’s top official for the issue said on Friday. In an interview with Reuters Television, Monsignor Charles Scicluna said he hoped a major symposium on pedophilia to be held next week in Rome would encourage Church leaders from around the world to listen more to the victims.

“Denial is a very primitive way of coping with very sad things,” said Scicluna, whose formal title is Justice Promoter. “I don’t think that denial will ever be a good response. I will not deny that we have been in denial. I think that people know that. But people need to know that we have to move forward from that very primitive coping mechanism. It doesn’t work,” he said.

The four-day symposium next week at the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University, called “Towards Healing and Renewal,” will bring together some 200 people including bishops, leaders of religious orders, victims of abuse and psychologists.

The participants will discuss how the worldwide Church can become more aware of the problem, make a commitment to listen to victims and prevent future cases of abuse. Scicluna said the symposium would stress that this “was not only a sin but a crime.”

(Road signs are seen in front of Saint Peter's Basilica from the Vatican Gardens at the Vatican May 31, 2010. REUTERS/Max Rossi )

A senior Vatican official who was transferred after he exposed a web of corruption begged to be allowed to continue his crusade and denounced a “vulgar and insolent” cleric behind a plot to destroy him, according to a leaked letter on Friday.

The letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who is now the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington, will increase consternation in the Vatican which has been put on the defensive by the growing scandal.

(??The Vatican flag outside the Holy See's nunciature, or embassy, in Washington, 26 January 2012. REUTERS/?Yuri Gripas)

The Vatican was shaken by a corruption scandal Thursday after an Italian television investigation said a former top official had been transferred against his will after complaining about irregularities in awarding contracts.

The show “The Untouchables” on the respected private television network La 7 Wednesday night showed what it said were several letters that Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was then deputy-governor of Vatican City, sent to superiors, including Pope Benedict, in 2011 about the corruption.

(A priest holds a tray of four-cornered cardinal's biretta hats during a ceremony installing new cardinals at the Vatican March 24, 2006. REUTERS/Tony Gentile)

Pope Benedict, increasing the chances the next pontiff will be a conservative European, has named 22 new cardinals, the red-hatted “princes of the Church” who are his closest aides and will one day choose his successor. Eighteen of the new cardinals will be eligible to enter a secret conclave to elect the next pope from among their own ranks, and of those, 12 are Europeans, bringing the number of “cardinal electors” from the continent to 67 out of 125.

The pope is a conservative on matters of faith and sexual morals such as birth control, homosexuality and the ban on women priests. Each time he names cardinals he puts his stamp on Roman Catholicism’s future by choosing men who share his views.

(The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, August 23, 2002. Reuters/Fred Prouser)

An assistant bishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles in the United States has resigned because he had a secret family, including two teenage children. The Vatican said that Pope Benedict had accepted the resignation of Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop of the diocese which has been plagued by sexual scandals.

A brief Vatican announcement on Wednesday did not give the reason for Zavala’s resignation, saying only that the pope had accepted it under the norm in canon (Church law) that says a bishop who is ill or otherwise unfit to carry out his duties should resign.

(Saint Peter's Basilica is seen in downtown Rome behind the Tiber river January 9, 2010. REUTERS/Max Rossi)

The new leader of disaffected U.S. Anglicans who have converted or want to convert to Catholicism has said his flock would strive to learn the culture of the Catholic Church without forgetting the “noble Anglican tradition.” Rev. Jeffrey N. Steenson, a married former Anglican bishop, assumed his post in Houston, Texas, Monday after Pope Benedict named him at the weekend to lead converts from the Episcopal Church, the main branch of Anglicanism in the United States.

“Pray that we may strive to learn the faith, laws and culture of the Catholic Church with humility and good cheer. But pray too that we do not forget who we are and where we have come from, for we have been formed in the beautiful and noble Anglican tradition,” he said in a statement on Monday.

(Pope John Paul II visits Rome's Jewish community in the Rome Synagogue in the first visit ever made by a Roman Catholic pontiff to a Jewish house of worship April 13, 1986. REUTERS/Luciano Mellace)

Jerzy Kluger, the Polish Jewish boyhood friend of the late Pope John Paul who had a major influence on the pontiff’s revolutionary relations with Jews, has died. Kluger, who was 92, died in a Rome hospital on New Year’s Eve of complications from bronchitis and was buried on Monday in Rome’s Jewish cemetery. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had been living in a home for the elderly east of the Italian capital.

Kluger and Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, were classmates in the southern Polish city of Wadowice and were friends from first grade through high school.

(Pope Benedict XVI (L) is surrounded by children as he arrives during his visit to foyer "Paix et Joie" at the St. Rita church in Cotonou during his pastoral visit in Benin November 19, 2011. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi)

Pope Benedict celebrated a big open-air Mass on Sunday, capping a trip to Africa where he appealed to leaders to serve their people honestly and to developed nations to shun a condescending, know-it-all attitude towards the continent.

The crowd of some 50,000 people in Cotonou’s Friendship Stadium in the largest city of Benin went wild as the pope entered. His reception in the West African country has been by far one of the most exuberant on all of his 22 foreign trips.

(Art restorers have discovered the figure of a devil hidden in the clouds of one of the most famous frescos by Giotto in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, showing a profile of a figure with a hooked nose, a sly smile, and dark horns hidden among the clouds in the panel of the scene depicting the death of St Francis. Picture released on November 5, 2011. REUTERS/Basilica of St Francis in Assisi/Handout)

Art restorers have discovered the figure of a devil hidden in the clouds of one of the most famous frescos by Giotto in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, church officials said on Saturday.

The devil was hidden in the details of clouds at the top of fresco number 20 in the cycle of the scenes in the life and death of St Francis painted by Giotto in the 13th century.

(Dark rainclouds gather over the Vatican's Saint Peter's Basilica, in Rome December 12, 2008. REUTERS/Chris Helgren)

Catholic Ireland’s stunning decision to close its embassy to the Vatican is a huge blow to the Holy See’s prestige and may be followed by other countries which feel the missions are too expensive, diplomatic sources said on Friday.

The closure brought relations between Ireland and the Vatican, once ironclad allies, to an all-time low following the row earlier this year over the Irish Church’s handling of sex abuse cases and accusations that the Vatican had encouraged secrecy.