Bilerico Project: Pope Benedict and I agree, finally

Filed by: Cathy Renna
April 17, 2008 8:02 AM
While at GLAAD, much of my time in the early 2000's was focused in the Catholic Church abuse scandal. We saw very early on that it was going to be a "let's blame the gay priest" strategy. At a press conference in Rome in 2001, then president of the US Bishops' conference, Wilton Gregory, said "we do not have a pedophilia problem, we have a homosexuality problem." Vatican City, we have a problem. My media "spider -sense" had gone off months before, so we were ready with experts, allied groups, messages and a strategy to deal with this. We were certainly not going down without a fight. And that fight paid off, as we saw from this recent visit by the Pope

First a little background. We bird-dogged the Bishops at their conferences in Dallas and Washington, DC, duly noting two things: one, their PR people were not so smart to ban reporters from the conferences since it left them in the lobby to spend the day with us and many of the abuse survivors who were also there; and the stunning similarity to the GLAAD awards, a lot of men in black and no line at the ladies room. Let's not discuss the parlor game we played daily, called "Is that Bishop gay?" It was an entertaining diversion that turned out to be pretty time consuming. Enough said about that.

So imagine my surprise when the extremely frightening new Pope Benedict (as a Catholic I think I can say this) has this to say about the abuse scandal during his first visit to America. : "I do not wish to talk at this moment about homosexuality, but about pedophilia, which is another thing." He also offered an unflinching acknowledgment that church officials mishandled the crisis and that victims deserve care and compassion. My guess is that the survivors want more than that, but that's another post.
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