Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, assured that it was never his intention to hide the sexual abuse of minors committed by Catholic priests.
According to CNN, in the first public statements since he quit his position as head of the Catholic Church in February 2013, Ratzinger answered the questions of Piergiorgio Odifreddi, an Italian atheist mathematician who he wrote to Benedict XVI in 2011.
According to the same source, Benedict XVI wrote a long letter published on Tuesday, Sept. 24, in the Italian newspaper "La Republica." "Regarding your mention of the moral abuse of minors by priests, I can only, as you know, acknowledge it with deep dismay. But I never tried to hide these things," Ratzinger wrote. This was one of the few public statements from the Pope Emeritus since he left the papacy.
It's worth remembering that before he was chosen as Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger presided the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican organ responsible for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests. There, he was criticized for the alleged cover-up of these regrettable cases.
Back then, many critics like the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) belittled Ratzinger's actions, in both his acting as a Cardinal and as a Pope.
"After a clerical career of over six decades, there is not a single abusive bishop, priest, nun or seminarian exposed by Benedict," said Barbara Dorris, a member of SNAP, an organization based in the United States, quoted by CNN.
The same organization belittled the actions undertaken by the Pope Emeritus in 2010 when he issued policies to facilitate the exit of abusive priests and apologized for the "shame" the abuse of minors brought to the church. SNAP considered the policies to be insignificant and arrived too late.
"That the power of evil would penetrate so far into the inside world of faith is, for us, a suffering that, on one hand, we cannot bear and, on the other hand, forces us to do everything possible so that these things won't happen again," wrote Benedict XVI in his letter.