Bishops’ cover-up worse than the abuse, says Pope

The Pope has criticised bishops in the US for covering up sex abuse and indulging in ‘‘gossip and slander’’ to avoid responsibility for scandals that have damaged the Roman Catholic church.

He gave his warning in an unusual and lengthy letter to America’s bishops as they met for a prayer retreat to consider a series of abuse incidents. A conference on the crisis will be held at the Vatican next month.

The scandal in the US first emerged in Boston in 2002 but reports have continued to appear as a grand jury unearthed hundreds of cases of paedophile priests. Attention has focused on the bishops who transferred guilty priests and ignored victims. ‘‘The church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes, but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them,’’ the Pope wrote in a letter released by the Vatican yesterday.

Winning back that credibility would require a new approach to spirituality, he wrote, ‘‘since it cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts, as if we were in charge of a department of human resources’’.

As bishops in the US have cracked down on sexual abuse by priests, conservative Catholics have fought back against accusations from Rome, claiming that the Vatican and the Pope share responsibility for perpetuating abuse. Pressure on the Pope grew last year after Cardinal Carlo Maria Vigano, a former papal nuncio to the US,accused him of ignoring abuse allegedly committed by Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington.

The Pope removed Archbishop McCarrick from the college of cardinals in July after he was accused of molesting a minor in the 1970s. Former seminarians have since said that the archbishop tried to share a bed with them.

Allegations that the Pope ignored abuse in the church have been seized on by conservative Catholics in the US already resentful of his mercy-before-dogma approach. His relatively relaxed approach to homosexuality has been a particular issue for conservatives, who believe that gay priests are responsible for abusing young worshippers.

In this letter, the Pope appeared to take aim at his critics in the US. ‘‘Let us try to break the vicious circle of recrimination, undercutting and discrediting, by avoiding gossip and slander in the pursuit of a path of prayerful and contrite acceptance of our limitations and sins, and the promotion of dialogue, discussion and discernment,’’ he wrote. It was painful, he added, to watch ‘‘an episcopate lacking in unity and concentrated more on pointing fingers than on seeking paths of reconciliation’’. – The Times