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Recent charges that the Pope failed to act against a US priest accused of abusing up to 200 deaf boys two decades ago have added to recent abuse scandals prompting commentators to ask whether the Pope should resign.

how the Catholic Church could end the scandal:

"The church needs to cast aside the lawyers, the PR specialists and its own worst instincts, which are human instincts. Benedict could go down as one of the greatest popes in history if he were willing to risk all in the name of institutional self-examination, painful but liberating public honesty, and true contrition. And then comes something even harder: Especially during Lent, the church teaches that forgiveness requires Catholics to have 'a firm purpose of amendment'. The church will have to show not only that it has learned from this scandal, but also that it's truly willing to transform itself."

the Pope to resign:

"What's fascinating in the steady onslaught of new incidences of previous cover-ups of child rape and molestation in the Catholic hierarchy is the notion that the hierarchs tended to see child rape as a sin rather than a crime. Hence the emphasis on forgiveness, therapy, repentance - rather than removal, prosecution and investigation. Obviously, there's one reason for this: they were defending the reputation of the church by hiding its darkest secrets, and they were using the authority of religion to do so. But I suspect it's also true that this is how they genuinely thought of child rape or abuse... We all know this game is now over. ..It's hard to imagine a deeper crisis for the Catholic hierarchy than this. If the church is to survive - and it will because it is the vessel of eternal truth - it will have to go through a wrenching transformation.
Beginning with the resignation of this Pope and an end to priestly celibacy."

the Catholic Church needs to follow the example set by the Pope in his recent letter to Irish Catholics, in which he apologised for abuse:

"It is the silence of the past, broken with praiseworthy moral force by Benedict XVI, that generates and feeds the hostile campaigns of today. The worst choice, for the Catholic world, would be to point to a plot by the 'international secular lobby' - to respond to attacks with the temptation of shutting oneself in a besieged fortress... It will be the Church's task and mission to no longer hide anything, to not be tempted by reticence, but to win one of its most difficult battles with truth and transparency, along the path traced by Benedict XVI."

it is still unclear how and why the allegations remained hidden for so long:

"In the same logic of truth that Benedict XVI places at the basis of morals, the Church should express its thanks to the media that have helped make revelations, rather than attacking them as aggressors against authority. But if it is possible to depict the lethal circuit between the crime of a minority of the clergy and the general vow of silence of the ecclesiastical structure as a failure of the system - dating to long before the phantom of sexual liberalisation of 1968 - it remains to be proven why not even the efforts of the most lucid of pastors succeeded in breaking this blockage."

things will change:

"The most painful experience for America's 66 million Catholics may be that the latest scandal is the oldest so far. The pattern of abuse, concealment, suppression, cover-up, pardon for the perpetrators and oblivion for the victims is the same. The higher the level at which the Church hierarchy deals with a new scandal, the more it prioritises defending the Church, rather than the children... Even the accusation that Pope Benedict XVI, in his previous incarnation as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger... did nothing, despite a plea from an American archbishop, but instead tempered justice with mercy for the self-confessed, critically ill sinner - this smacks uncomfortably of routine."

the Catholic church's previous attempts to tackle child abuse have come across as less than transparent:

"Wasn't it Pope Benedict XVI who, in 2001, as head of the Congregation of the Faith, issued the decree called 'De delictis gravioribus' - On especially serious misdeeds? It instructs bishops worldwide to report to Rome every case of child abuse. The sanction against perpetrators is the preserve of the Congregation of the Faith. It is also in the domain of the 'secretum pontificium' - the highest level of secrecy after confessional secrecy...
"In public perception the Vatican is surrounding itself with a wall of silence. The Latin vocabulary does the rest. You don't have to have read Dan Brown or the Monaldo & Sorti detective thrillers to feel a slight shiver upon hearing the words 'secretum pontificium'."

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