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Pontiff says lax morals fueled child sex abuse

Pope Benedict XVI chided Americans for a moral breakdown he said had fueled the Church’s child sex abuse scandal, ahead of an open-air mass before tens of thousands in Washington yesterday.

Gates opened at Washington’s new sports stadium before dawn so that an expected 48,000 people could trickle through stringent security measures to attend the mass at 10am yesterday.

Benedict received a rapturous White House welcome on Wednesday and met privately with US President George W. Bush in the Oval Office, before addressing the pedophile priest scandal that has rocked the US Church in a speech to US Catholic bishops.

Thousands of people gathered at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception late on Wednesday whooped, cheered and whistled when the Popemobile pulled up outside.

The basilica’s bells pealed and inside the largest Catholic church in North America, people had no qualms about climbing onto pews to catch a glimpse as Benedict entered.

In a speech delivered after evening prayer, the pontiff berated the bishops for their poor handling of a scandal surrounding sexual abuse of children in the Church.

But he urged efforts “to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores” as well as a reassessment of “the values underpinning society.”

“What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” the pontiff said on the first full day of his US visit.

“Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships. They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today,” he said.

Describing clerics who sexually abuse children as “gravely immoral,” the octogenarian pope warned that the scourge of pedophilia “is found not only in your dioceses but in every sector of society.”

“It calls for a determined, collective response,” he said, but did not outline any firm action that the Vatican intended to take to purge the Church of pedophile priests.

The US Catholic Church plunged into its worst crisis in 200 years in 2002 when the archbishop of Boston confessed he had protected a priest who had sexually abused young members of his church — opening a floodgate of thousands of similar abuse cases around the country dating back decades.

Benedict angered victim support groups by praising the bishops’ efforts to heal the wounds from the scandal.

“Five years ago, US bishops begrudgingly adopted some minimal promises on paper. There’s no evidence to suggest they’ve had any real impact,” said Barbara Dorris, outreach director for the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests.
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