The Pope met with top German bishops March 12 and encouraged them to move ahead “with decision and courage” in investigating the widening scandal of sexual abuse of minors in Catholic schools, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the head of the German bishops’ conference, told reporters.

Later the same day, the Vatican responded to a report that a German priest accused of sexually abusing a child had been allowed to return to pastoral work in the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the early 1980s, at the time Pope Benedict XVI was archbishop there. The Vatican press office noted that the archdiocesan official who had returned the priest to ministry had taken “full responsibility” for his “serious error,” and said the future Pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was not involved in that decision.

In 1985, three years after Ratzinger had been called to serve as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official, the same German priest faced new accusations of sexual abuse, and was eventually suspended from the priesthood and convicted in a civil court.

The revelations about the German case made headlines around the world, and some commentators questioned how Ratzinger could not have been aware of details of the situation at the time.

On March 13, the Vatican countered by strongly defending the Pope against what it said was an aggressive campaign to drag him personally into the widening sex abuse scandal.

“It is evident that over recent days some people have sought, with considerable persistence, ... elements that could personally involve the Holy Father in questions of abuse. To any objective observer, it is clear that these efforts have failed,” Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said in a written commentary.

The same day, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran a front-page article under the headline: “The severity of Benedict XVI against the filth in the church.” It said Pope Benedict was being mischaracterized as an aloof administrator with little interest in the scandal, when in fact the German pontiff had led the way in addressing past cases and preventing new ones.

“It is thanks to the greater severity of the Pope that various bishops’ conferences are turning a light on cases of sexual abuse, and also co-operating with civil authorities so that justice is rendered to the victims,” it said.

In an unusual interview on March 13, a key Vatican official described in detail the steps taken by the Vatican to confront priestly sex abuse since 2001, the year the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under then-Cardinal Ratzinger, laid out strict new norms for processing such cases. The official, Msgr. Charles Scicluna, a doctrinal congregation official from Malta who deals directly with cases of priests accused of abuse of minors, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the allegation that Pope Benedict had covered up sex abuse crimes was “false and calumnious.” As head of the doctrinal congregation, he handled such cases with wisdom and courage, and as Pope he has dismissed many priests from the clerical state, Scicluna said.

Scicluna also emphasized that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy in the investigation of these cases by church authorities does not mean bishops or others are exempt from reporting these crimes to civil authorities.

Scicluna said that since the doctrinal congregation took over juridical control of the sex abuse accusations in 2001, it has processed about 3,000 cases, dealing with crimes committed over the last 50 years. He said about 60 per cent of theses cases involved sexual attraction towards male adolescents, 30 per cent involved heterosexual relations, and the remaining 10 per cent were cases of pedophilia, involving an adult sexual preference for pre-pubescent children.

Most cases of priestly sex abuse against minors have been handled without a church trial because of the advanced age of the accused, and the penalties in such cases have usually been the imposition of strict limitations on the priest’s ministry, he said.

About 20 per cent of the cases resulted in a church trial, with most of the accused found guilty (the conviction rate is about 85 per cent overall). Punishment can range from restrictions or removal from ministry to dismissal from the priesthood. In the most serious cases — about 10 per cent of the total — the Pope has dismissed the offender from the priesthood, and in another 10 per cent the priest has been laicized at his request, Scicluna said.

Like others at the Vatican, Scicluna noted that a very small minority of the world’s 400,000 priests were sexual perpetrators, which he said “does not correspond to the perception that is created when these sad cases occupy the front pages of the newspapers.”

Vatican officials rejected the idea that priestly celibacy is connected to sexually abusive behavior. The Pope himself said March 12 that “sacred celibacy” was a priest’s expression of the gift of himself to God and others.