Technology Slice Blog

Pope Benedict XVI Talks of Humiliation - Pope Benedict XVI conceded yesterday that 2010 had been a year sullied by the child sex abuse crisis which has plagued the Catholic Church for the last 12 months. Making his traditional Christmas address to the Roman Curia, the pope argued that 2010, the Year For Priests, had begun with “great joy” only for it to unfold “so differently from the way we expected”. “We were all the more dismayed, then,” he said, “when in this year of all years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its anti-thesis, and under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime.” Quoting the vision of the 12th-century saint Hildegard of Bingen, the pope said that “the face of the church is stained with dust”, adding: “We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal . . . We must as...