Pope urges faithful to do penance as calls for his removal gather force

The Pope has urged Christians to “do penance” in the face of “world attacks” on the Church over the clerical abuse scandals.

At a Mass in the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican for members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission the Pope, who turns 83 tomorrow and is to make a two-day visit to Malta at the weekend, said: “I have to say that we Christians, including in recent times, have often avoided the word penance, which seemed to us too harsh.”

He added: “Now, under attack from the world, which talks to us of our sins, we can see that being able to do penance is a grace and we see how necessary it is to do penance and thus recognise what is wrong in our lives”. He said that “pardon and purification” were the keys to “renewal”, which was “the work of divine mercy”.

The Pope, who on Monday marks the fifth anniversary of his election, has been asked to meet victims of clerical abuse during his visit to Malta. He has himself been accused of protecting paedophile priests when he was Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982 and, later, as head of doctrine at the Vatican. The Vatican denies this.

He spoke after a US priest urged the Pope to step down. Father James Scahill, in Massachusetts, called on the pontiff to resign for the good of the Catholic Church.

“If he can’t take the consequences of being truthful on this matter his integrity should lead him, for the good of the Church, to step down and to have the conclave of cardinals elect a Pope with the understanding that the elected Pope would be willing to take on this issue, not just in promise,” Father Scahill said.

Father Scahill dismissed repeated Vatican statements that blamed the media for highlighting the church’s child sex abuses and molestations. He said that the media had forced the Church to deal with the crisis more openly.

“I have met with countless victims of abuse” he said. “I have lives I can relate this to and anyone with an ounce of intelligence knows the media has not created this scandal. The institutional Church has brought this onto themselves.”

The Pope was also attacked by Hans Kung, the dissident Swiss theologian, who urged bishops to push for reforms in defiance of the Pope.

Father Kung, 82, who once taught theology alongside the pontiff in Germany but was later forbidden to teach after he questioned the doctrine of papal infallibility, said that the Church was now in its deepest crisis since the Protestant Reformation.

Writing in the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung he said that bishops should call for a new synod, or council, to discuss reforms. He accused the Pope of not living up “to the great challenges of our time”. His call for reform also appeared in The New York Times, the Italian daily La Repubblica and other newspapers in France, Spain and Switzerland.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7098470.ece