As the Catholic Church's top officials in Rome struggle to cope with the ongoing sex abuse scandal in Europe, church leadership in the Czech Republic is proving equally inept at responding to growing public outrage.Dominik Duka, who will take over as the archbishop of Prague in April, asserted the Irish end of the scandal is being driven by militant atheism that aims to harm the financial solvency of the church.
"It is a clear campaign that aims at pushing the church from its position in upbringing and education that it has held from time immemorial and in which it has proved itself," he wrote in a pastoral letter March 22.
"Besides, only about 10 percent of the accusations made are proved," he continues.
Cardinal Miroslav Vlk, whom Duka will replace, struck an equally defensive posture in blog postings on his personal Web site.
"On behalf of the diocese, I must say that no concrete specific documented pedophile case had reached me in 20 years," he wrote.
While Vlk may be technically correct in this assertion, as the highest-ranking church official in the Czech Republic he does glaze over an abuse scandal in the country's other archdiocese, Olomouc, dating back 10 years.
In 2000, František Merta, a priest in the Olomouc Archdiocese, was criminally charged with molesting 20 boys, beginning in 1995.
A civil court convicted him and gave him a two-year suspended sentence.
He served no jail time.
At the time, one whistleblower accused Jan Graubner, the archbishop of Olomouc, of covering up the case and moving Merta to different posts as accusations surfaced.
Merta remains employed by the church, working in the archdiocese archives. Graubner remains archbishop.
"The church immediately called off Merta from his pastoral activities on the basis of the accusations, so that all contact with youth was prevented," says Monika Vývodová, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Olomouc. "Currently, he works as a civil employee. No other priest from Olomouc archdiocese was convicted."
Pope Benedict XVI issued an apology to the victims of sex abuse in Ireland March 20. It was the first public document ever issued by the church on sexual abuse, and it remained strictly directed at incidents in Ireland.
"I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity violated," he wrote. "We are all scandalized by the sins and failures of some of the church's members."
The pope avoided comment on the growing furor emanating from the Archdiocese of Munich, where he previously worked before moving on to Rome. A subordinate has taken responsibility for returning a known sex offender to pastoral work in 1980, while Benedict was archbishop.
In Germany, hundreds of abuse allegations have gone public since January, with accusations occurring in 22 of the country's 27 archdioceses.
In the past year, priests have also been accused of abuse in Austria, Brazil, Mexico, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
In 2001, Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued an official order that bishops keep secret any sex abuse allegation and report directly to him at the Vatican.
Church leaders still stop short of acknowledging that the abuse incidents are any more than individual cases, and do not consider the trend to be systemic despite a scandal in the United States that has cost the church more than $2 billion in compensation payments to victims to date.
The United States Conference of Bishops charged John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York system, with writing a report analyzing sex abuse allegations in the United States dating between 1950 and 2002.
Out of 10,667 allegations considered in the study, 3,300 went uninvestigated as the accused priests had died. An estimated 6,700 of the allegations (against 4,392 priests) were deemed credible. The report concluded that abuse was "widespread and affected more than 95 percent of the dioceses and approximately 60 percent of religious communities."
Closer to home, the Archdiocese of Olomouc has issued a public apology for the Merta case.
"The church had many times in the past expressed its apologies to the victims of crimes committed by someone from the church," Vývodová said. "The church considers these acts not only a grave sin, but also serious crime, which causes immense suffering to the victims and, what is more, it shakes the confidence of people in the church and priests."
Vlk said the situation may warrant further examination from church leadership.
"It will be necessary very soon to analyze the formation of the sexual morals for the priests," he wrote in his blog.
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