… two high-ranking Catholic officials seem to value free speech – at least when they themselves have something they want to say.

And as it turns out, these two just might be worth listening to.

Does that constitute a miracle? Or merely one more demonstration of the fact that if you look at very large numbers of people over a long period of time you’re virtually certain to find a few examples of almost anything not prohibited by the laws of physics?

You be the judge!

Archbishop Of Vienna Accuses One Of Pope’s Closest Aides Of Abuse Cover-Up (Richard Owen/The Times; May 10)

VATICAN CITY: Open warfare broke out in the Vatican over the clerical sex abuse scandal at the weekend as Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, accused one of Pope Benedict XVI’s closest aides of covering up past scandals.

Cardinal Schönborn, 65, seen as a possible future Pope, accused Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 82, the former Vatican Secretary of State (Prime Minister), of having blocked investigations into sex abuse crimes committed by his predecessor in Vienna, the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer.

Cardinal Schönborn, a former theology pupil of Pope Benedict and a close ally, also charged Cardinal Sodano with causing “massive harm” to victims by dismissing claims of clerical abuse as “petty gossip” on Easter Sunday.

Cardinal Sodano is now Dean of the College of Cardinals and as such due to convene and chair the conclave to elect the next Pope. The row thus pitches the man in charge of the next papal election against one of the leading contenders.

Andrea Tornielli, the papal biographer, said that Cardinal Schönborn’s remarks, made to a small group of journalists and reported by the Catholic news agency Kathpress, were “without precedent” and a sign of “nervous tensions” in the Church hierarchy….

Cardinal Schönborn had previously accused senior Vatican officials of obstructing the investigation of Cardinal Groer, but had stopped short of naming names. The scandal broke in 1995 when a former seminary student said that Groer had abused him repeatedly in the early 1970s. Other accusations followed. Groer stepped down because of “old age” and died in 2003 without admitting any wrongdoing.

Cardinal Sodano has also been accused by US Catholic journals of persuading John Paul II not to take action against Father Marcial Maciel, the once revered Mexican founder of the conservative order the Legionaries of Christ.

Father Maciel, who died two years ago, was found to have abused seminarians and fathered several children by mistresses. Pope Benedict has ordered direct Vatican control of the disgraced order….

Austria, like other countries in Europe, has been hit by a wave of clerical abuse allegations. On Saturday Pope Benedict accepted the resignation of Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg in Bavaria. Bishop Mixa, 69, is the first bishop to step down in the pontiff’s native Germany over the abuse scandal.

Bishop Mixa offered to step down last month after being accused of striking children. However, German prosecutors and Church officials said that they were now also investigating accusations of sexual abuse when he was bishop of Eichstaett in Bavaria. Bishop Mixa’s lawyer denied the accusations.

A survey last month found that a quarter of Germany’s Catholics were considering leaving the church over the abuse allegations….

Australia Archbishop Says Church Culture Tied To Abuse (Rod McGuirk/The Associated Press; May 24)

CANBERRA: The Roman Catholic Church’s culture of discretion and focus on “sin and forgiveness rather than crime and punishment” were among ingrained factors that ultimately led to the child sex abuse scandal and cover-up surrounding the church today, a pre-eminent Australian bishop said Monday.

Archbishop Mark Coleridge, whose archdiocese is based in the national capital of Canberra, took the unusual step of writing an open letter attempting to explain the culture that led the church to turn a blind eye to priests accused of molesting children.

Factors include a determination to protect the church’s reputation, a culture of discretion, “institutionalized immaturity” of priests fostered by seminary training, and an outlook of “sin and forgiveness rather than crime and punishment,” Coleridge wrote.

Clerical celibacy was not itself a factor but it “has its perils,” he wrote. “The discipline of celibacy may also have been attractive to men in whom there were paedophile tendencies which may not have been explicitly recognised by the men themselves when they entered the seminary.”

Coleridge said as a young priest in the 1970s, he regarded pedophilia cases as “tragic and isolated.” Coleridge’s view shifted when he was called to serve at the Vatican as chaplain to Pope John Paul II during a five-year period that ended in 2002. While there, Coleridge came to regard child abuse in the church as “cultural.”

“There is no one factor that makes abuse of the young by Catholic clergy in some sense cultural,” Coleridge wrote. “It seems to me a rather complex combination of factors which I do not claim to understand fully.”

Coleridge, a priest for 36 years, said no one could now deny the scale of the pedophilia problem in the church.

“All can see that this is a time of crisis for the Catholic Church… there will be no quick fix to this problem, the roots of which go deep and wide.”…

Canberra-based church historian Paul Collins said Coleridge’s letter was unprecedented in Australia in that it openly admits the scale of the child abuse problem.

“Certainly Coleridge is the first bishop to have tackled it head on in this way in Australia,” said Collins, an author and former priest….