The Vatican Strikes Back

Just as the archdiocese of Boston was contemplating filing for bankruptcy last week to cope with the estimated 450 civil sex-abuse suits against it, two top Vatican officials were pointing fingers elsewhere. German Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, perhaps the most powerful policymaker in Rome besides the Pope, told a Catholic news wire that the U.S. sex-abuse scandal was an "intentional, manipulated ... desire to discredit the church" by the media. The conservative Ratzinger offered a virtual Vatican seal of approval for recent comments by two Latin American Cardinals each considered possible papal successors who also blamed the pedophilia crisis on the American press. Another sign of a hardening line in Rome came in a letter from Jorge Arturo Cardinal Medina Estevez published in a Vatican magazine last week. A growing number of officials in Rome have become convinced that the cause of the U.S. crisis is the prevalence of gay priests in American parishes. In his letter, Medina Estevez called the ordination of homosexual men "inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky." A Vatican official told TIME the letter "represents the mind of the church" and hints that a watershed document on rules for seminary admission, expected next year, will bar gays from entering the priesthood.