Catholic leaders on Thursday (Feb. 9) launched an online distance-learning center to help educate church leaders on the prevention of child sex abuse.

Unveiled on the final day of a “Towards Healing and Renewal” conference sponsored by the Vatican, the new online forum will provide training and certificate programs in four languages.

The center will cost 1.2 million euros ($1.92 million) for the first three years, partly funded by the U.S.-based Papal Foundation charity. The Rev. Hans Zollner, one of the conference organizers, stressed that all the foundation’s expenditures are expressly approved by Pope Benedict XVI.

The conference also highlighted the global scope of the child abuse crisis. Bishops from Asia, South America and Asia admitted that sexual abuse is not just a “Western problem,” even if the numbers of reported cases outside Europe and North America remain small.

The Rev. Edenio Valle of Brazil said bishops there had “no idea of what could or should be done.” Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, Philippines, said Asia’s “culture of shame” may be responsible for victims’ silence.

Even in the U.S., “many victims of sexual assault never report” the violence, warned Michael Bemi and Patricia Neal, who helped craft the “Protecting God’s Children” program that’s used in 115 U.S. dioceses.

Though a church-sponsored independent study identified at least 15,000 abuse victims from 1950-2009, others estimate the total number could be as high as 100,000 as some victims remain silent.

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The Vatican’s doctrinal chief on Monday (Feb. 6) told Catholic bishops from all over the world that they have a duty to “cooperate” with civil law on cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors.

Cardinal William J. Levada, a former archbishop of San Francisco who now heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with jurisdiction over abuse cases, stopped short, however, of requiring bishops to report abuse cases to prosecutors or police.

Speaking to a Vatican-sponsored conference on the church’s response to the scandal at Rome’s Gregorian University, Levada admitted that the church’s relations with civil authorities “may be different from one nation to another,” but stressed that this must not affect the basic principle of cooperation.

He also urged bishops to be “more proactive” in their response to the crisis, rather than wait for the scandal to erupt in the media.

Last May, the Vatican gave all bishops conferences around the world one year to draft voluntary “guidelines” on preventing abuse, caring for victims, disciplining abusive priests, and reporting suspected abuse to local police.

An estimated 4,000 cases of sexual abuse by clergy have been reported to Levada’s Vatican department during the last 10 years, he said.

Levada also highlighted the importance of listening to victims’ grievances, accompanying them “on the often long path of healing,” and encouraging them to follow the example of Pope Benedict XVI in meeting with victims.

In a message sent to the conference participants, Benedict wrote that victims healing must be of “paramount concern” for the church. The Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the conference as “window dressing” that will not result in real reform.

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Vatican officials are strongly refuting allegations made by the pope’s new ambassador to the United States that the Vatican City State is awash in corruption and waste.

A statement issued on Saturday (Feb. 4) by the current and past leaders of the Vatican’s Governorate, which oversees the management of Vatican City, has dismissed claims made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano as “erroneous,” “unfounded” and “based on groundless fears.”

Vigano, who had been secretary general of the Governorate from 2009 until his appointment as papal nuncio to Washington last October, expressed his worries directly to Pope Benedict XVI in two letters unearthed by an Italian TV program in January.

Vigano told the pope that Vatican City’s management was “disastrous,” and asked Benedict to not transfer him to Washington. The move, he said, would cause “disarray and discouragement” among those who worked against “numerous situations of corruption and waste.”

The Vatican’s top spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, had initially threatened to sue the TV program that revealed the letters and dismissed its coverage as “biased.” Lombardi also reaffirmed the pope’s “unquestionable respect and trust” towards Vigano.

Saturday’s statement strikes a different chord, however, saying that Vigano’s assertions portray the Vatican’s Governorate as an “untrustworthy entity, controlled by dark forces.”

The statement was signed by Vigano’s former superior, Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, and by Giovanni’s deputy, Bishop Giorgio Corbellini, and by the Governorate’s current president and secretary general.

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Ten years after the clergy sexual abuse scandal erupted in the United States, Catholic bishops from all over the world will meet next week at a Vatican summit aimed at preventing abuse and protecting children.

The conference, “Towards Healing and Renewal,” will be held on Feb. 6-9 and is organized by the Jesuit-run Gregorian University in Rome.

The Vatican’s top spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters on Friday (Feb. 3) that the summit enjoys the “full support and participation” of the Vatican’s highest offices, but Pope Benedict XVI is not expected to attend.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s chief abuse prosecutor, said the protection of children must become “a permanent principle and concern” in every decision of the church.

“There cannot be a distinction between the good of the church and the protection of youth,” he said Friday.

Last May, the Vatican gave all bishops conferences around the world one year to draft voluntary “guidelines” on preventing abuse, caring for victims, disciplining abusive priests, and reporting suspected abuse to local police.

Next week’s summit will bring together representatives from 110 bishops conferences, the heads of 30 religious orders and officials from most Vatican departments. Workshops will focus on a bishop’s responsibility to protect children and the psychological effects of abuse.

Bishop R. Daniel Conlon on Joliet, Ill., chairman of the Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is the official representative of the U.S. church.

The bishops and other delegates will hear the story of a sex abuse victim and participate in a “penitential vigil,” where representatives of seven groups who have been responsible of sex abuse or failed to prevent it will ask for forgiveness.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, will preside over the vigil while Cardinal William Levada, whose Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has jurisdiction over all abuse cases, will give the opening address.

Victims’ advocates have criticized the Vatican’s response to the scandal, accusing church officials of not disciplining bishops who failed to punish and report predator priests. Mary Collins, an Irish sex abuse victim, told journalists that she had been unsure whether to accept the Vatican’s invitation to address the conference, but had finally accepted in order to help protect as many children as possible.

“The church can become a leader in child protection,” she said, adding that she hoped Benedict would personally and publicly ask for forgiveness. “It would be the most wonderful thing for victims and for the church.”

Lombardi said Benedict would send the conference participants a message through his Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

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Pope Benedict XVI praised new communications technologies like Twitter on Tuesday (Jan. 24), saying that even “concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible,” can convey “profound thoughts.”

Benedict did not explicitly refer to Twitter in his yearly message for World Communications Day, but Monsignor Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told reporters that “it’s safe to say that a reference to ‘tweets’ is there.”

Benedict wrote that in today’s world, “various types of websites, applications and social networks” can help people “find time for reflection and authentic questioning.”

A number of high-ranking churchmen already use Twitter. Cardinals Sean O’Malley of Boston; Odilo Scherer of Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, have thousands of followers. According to Celli, most of the visitors to the Vatican’s online news portal, www.news.va, arrive from social networks.

In his message, the pope also focused on the value of silence in communication, saying that without it, meaningful messages “cannot exist.”

“When messages and information are plentiful,” he wrote, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary.”

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VATICAN CITY — After a 15-year process, the Holy See on Friday (Jan. 20) gave its final approval to the Neocatechumenal Way, a lay movement that has been criticized for its unorthodox liturgical practices but that has been successful in attracting followers.

The movement relies on tightly knit small groups, modeled on early Christian communities, that share a decade-long spiritual growth path under the guidance of a priest.

Pope Benedict XVI told around 7,000 members of the movement that Neocatechumenal communities could continue in their tradition of celebrating a special Saturday evening Mass, as long as the local bishop approved and the celebrations remained open to the public.

Nevertheless, he encouraged the movement’s members not to remain “separate” from their parish community.

The pope praised the Neocatechumenal Way as a “special gift” of the Holy Spirit for modern times, especially as secularism “has eclipsed the sense of God and obscured Christian values.” The movement, he said, can help Christians rediscover the “beauty” of their faith.

The Way’s founder, Kiko Arguello, said Friday’s approval was a “historic moment” after the “many troubles” the movement had faced in the process of receiving the Vatican’s approval.

The movement’s focus on preaching in secular contexts resonates with Benedict’s recent focus on “re-evangelizing” Western countries where the faith has grown weak.

At the end of the audience, Benedict sent out 17 new teams of Neocatechumenal missionaries, who will work mostly in Europe and in the U.S. Each team is made up of three or four families accompanied by a priest.

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“Radical secularism” is gaining ground in American society and poses a “grave threat” to the Catholic Church’s freedom of expression in the public square, Pope Benedict XVI told a group of U.S. bishops on Thursday (Jan. 19).

The delegation of bishops from the mid-Atlantic region, led by Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl, is in Rome for a series of regular “ad limina” visit that occur once every five years.

Benedict said bishops must help Catholic politicians understand that it is “their personal responsibility to offer public witness to their faith,” especially regarding the respect for human life.

Catholics must be on guard to confront a “reductive secularism,” Benedict said, which tries to “delegitimize the church’s participation in public debate.”

The pontiff warned that America’s “cherished” tradition of “religious freedom” is under threat as the nation’s moral consensus has been “eroded” by “powerful new cultural currents” that not only run counter to “Judeo-Christian tradition, but (are) increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.”

Benedict’s message echoed a recent campaign by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has warned of a “national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions” over same-sex marriage, contraception mandates and other issues.

Benedict warned that the separation of church and state must not be invoked to force the church to “be silent on certain issues,” or to sideline believers in “determining the values which will shape the future of the nation”.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the bishops’ conference, was not in Rome but thanked the pope in a statement for speaking “eloquently and powerfully on the threats to the church’s moral witness in public life.”

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PARIS — A decade ago, Rene Lebouvier requested that his local Catholic church erase his name from the baptismal register. The church noted his demands on the margins of its records and the chapter was closed.

But the clergy abuse scandals rocking Europe, coupled with Pope Benedict XVI’s conservative stances on contraception, hardened Lebouvier’s views. Last October, a court in Normandy ruled in favor of his lawsuit to have his name permanently deleted from church records — making the 71-year-old retiree the first Frenchman to be officially “de-baptized.”

“I took the judicial route to get myself de-baptized because of the church’s excesses,” said Lebouvier, speaking by telephone from his village of Fleury, near the D-Day beaches.

“It’s a sort of honesty toward the church because they have a guy on their register who doesn’t believe in God.”

Lebouvier’s case is among a growing wave of de-baptisms in Europe, one of the most visible manifestations of the continent’s secular drift. Websites offering informal de-baptism certificates have mushroomed. Other Christians are formally breaking from the church by opting out of state church taxes.

“The movement is happening across Europe,” said Anne Morelli, who heads a center studying religion and secularity at the Free University of Brussels. “It was very apparent during 2011 — in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria. It is obviously related to the scandals of pedophile priests, but it has been going on for some time.”

While there are no official statistics, experts and secular activists count the numbers of de-baptisms in the tens of thousands. It’s a phenomenon that has touched Protestant as well as Catholic communities.

In France, the de-baptism drive affects a relatively tiny proportion of Christians, experts say. Still, Lebouvier’s case may create a precedent.

The local bishop of Coutances, Stanislas Lalanne, has appealed the court ruling, a process that could take years.

“Baptism is a spiritual gift, it’s bigger than we are,” said Bernard Podvin, spokesman for the French Bishops Confederation, who would not comment on the specifics of the Normandy case. “It can’t be confined to a purely administrative framework.”

But if Lebouvier wins, de-baptism could become standard practice here, and trigger copycat lawsuits across Europe.

“The church is afraid the movement might amplify,” said Marc Blondel, president of the Paris-based National Federation of Freethinkers, who says he will launch another de-baptism drive if Lebouvier prevails.

Lebouvier’s split from the church took decades. Born in a deeply conservative and religious community, he went to Catholic school. But instead of becoming the priest his mother had wished, he became a baker, moving to Paris and joining a leftist trade union.

“I changed 180 degrees, “ he said. “It took time, but it happened.”

Change is afoot elsewhere. In neighboring Belgium, which has been hit hard by the church sex scandals, de-baptism requests in the French-speaking region alone soared to roughly 2,000 in 2010, compared to 66 two years earlier, according to the Brussels Federation of Friends of Secular Morality. The numbers of people reportedly leaving the Dutch church reportedly shot up 25 percent.

In Britain, a de-baptism certificate offered as a joke by the National Secular Society has since turned serious after tens of thousands of people downloaded it.

“Some people actually do feel actively hostile toward churches,” said society president Terry Sanderson. “And they want to express that by saying, ‘I’m not one of your members.’”

In Germany, a record 181,000 Catholics formally split from the Catholic Church in 2011 — the first time that Catholic defections outpaced Protestants leaving. Rather than requesting de-baptisms, Germans fill out government paperwork saying they no longer want to pay church taxes.

“I don’t think they want to get rid of their belief, their connection to Jesus and the baptism, but they don’t want to be connected with the church hierarchy,” said Christian Weisner, German spokesman for the international lay reform movement We are Church.

At stake for many cash-strapped European churches is not just faith, but euros.

“It’s not by chance that in Germany, Austria and Belgium that the movement is strongest,” says Belgian researcher Morelli, noting countries that levy church taxes, which France does not. “It’s also a struggle about subsidies the population must pay for a church that doesn’t represent them.”

The bigger worry, experts say, are plummeting rates of new baptisms. Half a century ago, for example, 90 percent of French children were baptized, said Sorbonne University religion professor Philippe Portier. Today, roughly one in three are.

“The church considers de-baptisms a very marginal phenomena and its strategy right now is to resist it,” Portier said. “It is much more active when it comes to reversing the drop in (new) baptisms — there it’s put in place a new evangelizing strategy.”

The parish at Paris’ historic Saint-Germain-des-Pres, for example, is offering a myriad of activities, from ski retreats to support networks for young professionals. At a recent evening youth Mass, the church was overflowing.

The parish priest, the Rev. Benoist de Sinety, is counting on faith, not numbers.

“What is striking today is that those who want to be Christian really want to be Christian,” he said. “I rejoice in the fact that people are free to choose.”

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Barbara Koob moved from Utica, N.Y., to nearby Syracuse in the summer of 1862, when she was 24, to enter the convent of the Sisters of St. Francis.

Twenty-one years later, the woman the world now knows as Saint Marianne Cope left Syracuse to work as a missionary among the lepers in Hawaii. Even during her lifetime, many considered her a saint for her bravery, compassion and leadership. She spent 35 years ministering to hundreds of people so feared that the Kingdom of Hawaii banished them to a remote, desolate peninsula of Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai.

“When the roll of the saints is called, Mother Marianne will be there,” Syracuse reporter Fred Dutcher wrote in The Post-Standard after Mother Marianne died Aug 9, 1918. “Fifty-six of the eighty years of her life she gave in the service of the Man of Galilee whose touch made a leper clean, and thirty-five of those she devoted in ministration to the doomed people of Molokai.”

Dutcher’s prediction came true last month, when the Sisters of St. Francis learned that Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed Cope a saint. She will be canonized next year. The designation came after an intense, 40-year-long process. The Franciscan sisters gathered thousands of pages of research about their heroine, toured the places she lived and worked and collected information about miracles, including two the Vatican ultimately ruled were healings of people whose recovery doctors could not explain.

The long journey to sainthood began with a modest life in Central New York. From 1862 to 1883, the future saint was a Franciscan leader and administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse.

Cope was born Jan. 23, 1838, in Germany. Before she was 2, her family moved to Utica and Americanized the last name from “Koob” to “Cope.” She moved to Syracuse after her father died of an illness in 1862. She took the name Marianne when she entered the convent

Cope was about 5 feet tall, with a towering personality. Accounts also hint at some unsaintly traits: a sharp tongue and perhaps a bit of impatience.

Cope lived at the hospital with the nurse-sisters she supervised while also supervising the St. Francis Convent and helping to lead the community of sisters. She made the 30-to-40-minute walk — wearing a full-length skirt and a headpiece — to fulfill work obligations.

Her order had been founded in 1860 by three sisters from Philadelphia responding to a request to work with immigrants in Utica and Syracuse, which were then part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany.

The Syracuse-based Franciscans are one of many men’s and women’s religious communities that take their inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century Italian friar who cast off his family’s wealth in favor of a life serving the poor and weak.

Cope kept journals while in Hawaii, and some survived, as have some letters. Few of her writings reveal personal thoughts; instead, the majority are businesslike records. Several biographical accounts describe her as constantly busy with the administrative work of the order and the hospital.

Cope is said to have “administered the hospital from top to bottom … reverence for the patients was her main concern and she could often be found sitting by a patient’s bedside after the lights went out.”

She believed that everyone deserved to be treated respectfully, including alcoholics and lepers.

“The charity of the good knows no creed and is confined to no one place,” Cope wrote in 1870.

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For Americans who take note of the pomp and circumstance — and politics — at the Vatican, the big news on Friday (Jan. 6) was that Pope Benedict XVI had included New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, and former Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, among the 22 churchmen that he will install as cardinals at a Mass at St. Peter’s next month.

The elevation of Dolan, 61, is not unexpected. His predecessor, retired Cardinal Edward Egan, will lose his vote in a papal conclave when he turns 80 in April. Popes have traditionally wanted to ensure New York is represented in the College of Cardinals for any future papal election.

But the larger story of Friday’s appointments — and an indication of how the next conclave may play out — is that the German pope continued his pattern of stacking the College of Cardinals with Europeans (mainly Italians) and with leaders of the Roman curia, the papal bureaucracy whose officials are often considered more conservative than prelates in dioceses around the world.

This trend goes against the push by Benedict’s predecessors, notably the late John Paul II, to “internationalize” the College of Cardinals and make it more representative of the global church. And it runs counter to the inexorable demographics of the church, which shows the number of Catholics growing in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, even as the faith barely treads water in North America and declines in Europe.

“This suggests an upside-down church,” Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic weekly in London, said of the pope’s appointments. “It doesn’t reflect where the church is going.”

The numbers tell the story. Since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in April 2005, his three batches of new cardinals have favored Europeans and those who work with him in Rome over bishops from other countries.

Eighteen of the 22 cardinals in this latest round of appointments are under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote in a conclave. (The red hats given to the four octogenarians are the church equivalent of lifetime achievement awards.) Of those 18 new electors, who will be formally installed on Feb. 18, seven are Italians, five others are from Europe, and a total of 10 are Vatican officials.

Just three of the new cardinals — from Brazil, Hong Kong and India — are from outside the West, and in the biggest surprise, none are from African, where the church is experiencing is greatest growth, followed by Asia. Half of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live in the Americas.

That means Italians will form the largest national block and account for one-quarter of the 126 cardinal-electors (several will age out this year), up from 16.5 percent in 2005. In addition, 35 percent of the cardinal-electors will come from the Roman curia — up from less than a quarter when Benedict was elected in 2005.

John Paul II, who was Polish and the first non-Italian pontiff in 450 years when he was elected in 1978, deliberately sought to internationalize the College of Cardinals and the Roman curia, though he also brought in a number of fellow Poles to help run his administration.

Why has Benedict largely reversed that trend?

Vatican-watcher John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter noted that before he was elected pope, Ratzinger spent nearly 25 years working in Rome and his appointments are “perhaps a product of his comfort level with Italian ecclesial culture.”

The other major factor is that Benedict is at heart an Old World, old-fashioned Bavarian Catholic, and both he and the cardinals who elected him believe that Europe remains the birthplace of Catholic culture. In that view, Benedict represents the best — and perhaps last — chance to restore that culture and use it to evangelize the rest of the world.

But in light of this latest round of cardinal appointments, and given growing concerns about Benedict’s health — he turns 85 in April — this set of electors may well be the men who eventually choose Benedict’s successor. Their numbers suggest they may be just as likely to look to Europe once again rather than to the future church in the global South.

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