THE Pope yesterday announced he is to create a new Vatican office to fight secularisation and "re-evangelise" the West. This was a tacit acknowledgment that his attempts to reinvigorate Christianity in Europe have not succeeded and need a new boost.
He said parts of the world were still missionary territory, where the Catholic Church was relatively unknown.
But in other parts of the world, such as Europe, Christianity had existed for centuries yet "the process of secularisation has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the church".
The new pontifical council, he said, would "promote a renewed evangelisation" in countries where the church has long existed "but which are living a progressive secularisation of society and a sort of 'eclipse of the sense of God'."
The Pope did not say who would head the new office, but Italian media have said he would tap Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who as head of the Pontifical Academy for Life is the Vatican's top bioethics official.
He created a minor uproar last year when he defended Brazilian doctors who aborted the twin fetuses of a nine-year-old child who was raped by her stepfather.
Also yesterday, the resignation of a church-appointed child abuse commission in Belgium left the Vatican reeling from widening pedophile scandals on both sides of the Atlantic.
A war of words broke out between the Vatican and Brussels after the Pope condemned as deplorable the seizure by police of the commission's files, and the detention of nine bishops for an entire day last week.
The Pope spoke out again yesterday, warning an Austrian cardinal against repeating accusations that an Italian cardinal covered up child abuse claims.
The crisis enveloping the church deepened yesterday when the US Supreme Court opened the way for the Vatican to be sued by the victims of pedophile priests.
The Vatican had wanted the court to throw out a lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the crimes of a priest who was moved from Ireland to Chicago, then to Portland, Oregon, to escape prosecution.
Yesterday, the court rejected the Vatican's argument that, as a sovereign state, it had immunity from prosecution in the US.
In Belgium last Thursday, police seized 475 case files from the offices of a commission of inquiry into child abuse as they stepped up their investigation after suspicions that senior church figures were being protected from the law.
Police also seized computer files from the home of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who led the church in Belgium for 20 years and faced allegations that he ignored claims of abuse.
Peter Adriaenssens, a respected child psychiatrist who was brought in to chair the commission this year, was furious that his team's documents were seized.
"We were used as bait," he said, suggesting that accusers had come forward confident in the anonymity afforded by his commission. "Why would they raid our offices? That can only be because they assume that we withhold information, or that we would manipulate things," he said.
In a sign of the tension felt in the Vatican, it issued a blunt statement yesterday in which it effectively said the Pope had censured Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, who last month publicly accused another cardinal of covering up abuse.
Cardinal Schonborn accused Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano of having blocked an investigation into abuse by former Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who stepped down as archbishop of Vienna in 1995.
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