Pope begins pilgrimage in nation hit by sex scandal

April 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

VALLETTA, Malta

Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday began a pilgrimage in Malta, a Catholic nation buffeted by the worldwide clerical sex-abuse scandal and where victims are hoping to meet with him as a way to deal with their pain.

The overnight trip is his first foreign travel since the full force of the scandals have rocked the church and threatened to engulf his papacy.

Benedict, for his earlier roles as an archbishop in Germany and later in his long tenure at the helm of the Vatican morals office, has been accused by victims’ groups of being part of a systematic practice of cover-up by church hierarchy for pedophile priests. The groups are demanding he take responsibility for the Vatican as an institution.

With the pope listening at the airport welcoming ceremony, the president of this tiny Mediterranean island nation tackled the issue head on.

“It would be wrong, in my view, to try to use the reprehensible indiscretions of the few to cast a shadow on the church as a whole,” President George Abela told the pontiff.

On the island, 10 men who testified that they were sexually molested by priests at an orphanage here during the 1980s and 1990s have asked to meet with Benedict so what they call a “hurtful chapter” in their lives can be closed.

The Maltese men who have spoken up say they were abused by four priests at a Catholic home for boys, alleging that if they resisted sexual advances, they would be asked to leave the home, which was their only shelter.

The overnight trip was long planned as a pilgrimage among the faithful to commemorate the 1,950th anniversary of St. Paul’s shipwreck.