By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Speaking to the press enroute to Portugal yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI said the Church has always suffered from problems of its own making, but “today we see it in a truly terrifying way” in priest sex abuse scandals.
“The greatest persecution of the church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church,” the pope said while aboard the papal plane that flew him to Lisbon yesterday. “The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice.”
According to the Associated Press (AP), after landing in Lisbon, the subject turned abruptly to Portugal’s dire economic situation, which was referred to in remarks by Portuguese president Anibal Cavaco Silva at the airport.
“In these times, men require someone bearing a message of hope to meet their thirst for justice and solidarity,” he told the pontiff.
The Pope responded by saying the crisis “demonstrated the need for greater moral responsibility in running the global financial system,” the AP reports, and noted that he outlined his vision for more ethics in finance in his 2009 encyclical “Charity in Truth.”
The Pope also used the occasion to sharply criticized Portugal’s abortion law and urged public officials to give “essential consideration” to issues that affect human life.
“The point at issue is not an ethical confrontation between a secular and religious system, so much as a question about the meaning that we give to our freedom,” he said.
Portugal’s Socialist government passed a law allowing abortion in 2007 and another in 2008 that allows couples to divorce even if one party is opposed. In January of this year, Parliament passed a law allowing same-sex couples to marry, a bill that President Silvo has not yet signed into law.
An estimated 90 percent of the country’s 10.6 million people are Catholic, but only two million say they are still practicing the faith. But in spite of these dismal numbers, at least 500,000 people are expected to attend the pope’s Mass in Fatima on May 13.
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