26. april 2014

Papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls stressed that Wojtyla was the one who kick started the battle against paedophilia in the Church:

Navarro’s account was brief and did not explain why the Holy See’s bodies took so long to look into the case, between 1998 when the first complaints against Maciel Degollado went public and 2004 when the investigation began.Most importantly, however, he did not explain why in those years and in the months before the green light was given for the investigation to begin, John Paul II’s collaborators allowed the Pope to continue pouring public praise on the figure and work of Maciel Degollado.

...

During the press conference, Navarro also talked about Wojtyla’s reaction to the first cases of clerical sex abuse against minors, which the Vatican started receiving in 2000. He recognised that Wojtylas did not realise just how serious the problem was, immediately, because “no one had grasped this at that time.”

“This cancer began in a specific geographical place, the United States, in the form of isolated cases. The isolated cases which surfaced at the time referred to incidents which had taken place a long time ago - about 30 years ago. This did not make the problem any less serious but that was how things were. As the number of cases began to slowly rise, the Pope started to get very concerned. His thinking was so pure that it was impossible for him to accept that all this was real; it was unbelievable, but he accepted it,” Navarro explained.

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