Pope urges renewal at anti-abuse summit

7 Feb 2012, 7:08 am   -   Source: AAP
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The Pope has called for a major renewal of the Catholic Church as the Vatican began a summit on preventing child abuse.

Pope Benedict XVI has urged "profound renewal" of the Catholic Church to prevent child abuse, as the Vatican held its first-ever summit on the issue despite protests by victims.

"Healing for victims must be of paramount concern in the Christian community, and it must go hand in hand with a profound renewal of the church at every level," the Pope was quoted as saying in a Vatican statement.

In a message to participants at the conference, the Pope also called for "a vigorous culture of effective safeguarding and victim support" and said every effort should be made to help children's human and spiritual growth.

Bishops from 100 countries and the leaders of 33 religious orders took part in the four-day meeting, as well as the Vatican's top anti-abuse prosecutor Charles Scicluna and just one abuse victim, Ireland's Marie Collins.

The closed-door conference will also launch a child protection centre in Germany to fight sex abuse by the clergy worldwide and include a church service on Tuesday in which Catholic leaders will plead for forgiveness.

But victims' groups said they were not invited and slammed it as PR.

"You don't need a jolly in Rome to learn what the right thing to do is," said Sue Cox from Survivors Voice, a coalition of victim support groups covering Britain, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United States.

"This is just a PR stunt. It's just theatre really. It's no use," said Cox, herself a victim of abuse by a priest who says she still gets panic attacks from the smell of "whisky, incense and stale sweat".

Roberto Mirabile, head of the Italian victims support group La Caramella Buona, said: "You can have all the symposiums you want, but why don't you open a constructive debate. The church is too closed in on itself."

But Collins said the conference appeared to be "a step in the right direction" and said she had decided to take part despite initial hesitation because she believed the initiative could help prevent future abuse.

Collins, who was raped by a priest in a hospital in Dublin when she was a little girl, criticised the Vatican, however, for failing to take responsibility for a systematic cover-up of abusers stretching back decades.

The Vatican has requested that all the national bishops' conferences of the world must submit by May a set of comprehensive guidelines on how to combat paedophilia, stressing that abuse is not only a problem for Western churches.

Officials say some countries are having trouble formulating these rules because of "cultural differences" over what exactly constitutes child abuse as well as major differences between local laws in different countries.

Victim groups say the measures lack any real enforcement powers.

"The meeting is a historic watershed because for the first time the Vatican is going to analyse on an international level the responsibility of the Church for child abuse," papal biographer Marco Politi said.

He said there was a fundamental dilemma behind the conference, however.

"Is the church ready to push for an investigation in each diocese ... or is the Vatican and Italian tendency of talking about the future without the hidden victims and files of the past 50 years going to win out?"

The church has been rocked in recent years by thousands of paedophilia scandals, some of them dating back decades.

Conference participants warned many abuses have remained hidden in Africa, Asia and Latin America and called for redoubled efforts in those countries.

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