CATHOLIC PONTIFF, Pope Benedict XVI, during the week, met with eight victims of priestly sex abuse in Malta and promised them the Church would do “all in its power” to bring offenders to book and protect children.

The pope was “deeply moved by their stories and expressed his shame and sorrow over what victims and their families have suffered”, a Vatican statement said after the private encounter on April 18.

“In the spirit of his recent letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he prayed that all the victims of abuse would experience healing and reconciliation, enabling them to move forward with renewed hope,” it said.

The meeting at the apostolic nunciature in Rabat came after a group of victims had asked to meet with the pope to tell him of their ordeal and ask for an apology. The encounter was not part of the pope’s official itinerary and was only announced publicly by the Vatican after it had happened.

Participants said the victims cried as they told their stories, and that the pope had tears in his eyes as he listened.

The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, told journalists that the private meeting in the chapel of the nunciature lasted about 20 minutes. He said the pope, Archbishop Paul Cremona of Malta, Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo and eight male victims of abuse began the encounter kneeling in silent prayer.

The pope then stood by the altar and met with each victim one-by-one to hear his story and to speak with each privately, Father Lombardi said. The victims were in their 30s and 40s, Father Lombardi said.

A group of 10 victims had announced on April 16 that they had been granted a meeting with the promoter of justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Msgr. Charles Scicluna. The meeting with the monsignor, who handles the cases local dioceses have brought against allegedly abusive priests, was to take place sometime in June at the Vatican.

Since 1999, three priests have faced criminal trials in civil courts after the victims decided to go to the police because they were unhappy with how the Response Team was handling the case.

The Archdiocese of Malta said that of the 45 cases investigated by the Church’s Response Team, 19 were found to be baseless, 13 were still ongoing and cases against 13 members of the clergy have been forwarded to the Vatican.

That three Catholic priests (or more) have toyed with their vow of not tasting “forbidden fruit” is no more news. But let’s look beyond the act and attack the root.

Without sentiments, what, individually, do we think is the cause of all these ‘abominations’? Yes, it is abomination, even if a Catholic reverend has conventional sex with a consenting adult of the opposite as other clerics would. Reason: at their ordination, one of the vows they take is that of celibacy – abstinence from sex.

Caveat: the following is my humble opinion, not from any authority.

Some time ago, Nollywood shot a controversial movie, The Pope Must Hear This, but many, especially Catholics, came down hard on the flick, claiming that it was out to ridicule the priesthood. But even as a Catholic, I saw it differently. To my understanding, the concept of the movie was to warn the Church about allowing every Tom, Dick and Harry into the vocation. The Church is catholic, which umbrella is too big to accommodate everybody – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Catholics must be careful. There are enemies within, I think; they have even infiltrated the priesthood. Or what do you make of a situation where the whole world had been pressuring the Church to bend a little – to ordain women priests, allow priests to marry, and others – and the Church, in its wisdom, has remained adamant. For not yielding to the pressure, I think the enemies decided to enter the fold to prove their point.

My argument still remains: how are you sure that allowing Catholic priests to get married will make some not to misbehave? Or don’t you hear about even acclaimed born-again pastors going promiscuous. I took part (as a chorister) in the late Francis Agu’s flick of the 1990s, In The Name of the Father, in which a new generation pastor impregnated a church member and forced her on a male member. By the way, the wife was busy dating male choristers. Agu was later to reveal to the cast that the story was real; that it happened in one church in Surulere, Lagos. That’s one in a million.

Okay, imagine what is happening in the Anglican Church today.

Because maybe the church, which broke away from the Catholic Church due to issues bordering on divorce and remarriage, bent a little by ordaining women bishops, the enemy entered. Now, the church – not the ones in Nigeria anyway – does not only permit ordination of gay priests, it also ordains gay couples.

On June 14, 2008, the Sunday Telegraph reported that two male priests exchanged vows and rings in a ceremony that was conducted using one of the church’s most traditional wedding rites – a decision seen as blasphemous by conservatives.

News of the ‘wedding’ emerged days before a crucial summit of the Anglican Church’s conservative bishops and archbishops, who are threatening to split the worldwide church over the issue of homosexual clergy.

Even, Prince Charles, the future head of the Church of England, had sparked controversy in 1996 by endorsing an openly homosexual Anglican cleric.

Harry Williams, the former dean of Cambridge University, who died earlier this year, was praised by the Prince in the foreword to a new book of poems being published. The Prince of Wales wrote that Williams “proved to be a star; a man of intense humanity and warmth whose humour and originality created an aura of approachability,” according to a UPI report.

Williams’ 1982 autobiography, Some Day I’ll Find You, describes the pastor’s experiences as a practising homosexual while at Cambridge.

“I slept with several men, in each case fairly regularly,” he wrote. “I have seldom felt more like thanking God then (sic) when having sex.”

Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention – wrote about Prince Charles: “In just over 50 years, Prince Charles has managed to make himself a mockery of marriage and morality and to pose, as one leading British newspaper observed, as ‘a well-intentioned eccentric seeking divine inspiration’.”

May be what is happening now is God’s way of fulfilling his word “that they may be one”. Now, we have “Ordinary Catholics” (Anglicans that converted to Catholic in protest of what is happening in their fold).

So, I still believe that if the Catholic Church remains firm in its stance on these issues, the enemies will give up and even adopt the cliché, “if you can’t beat them, you join them”.

Reverend fathers are men whose veins are filled with blood. I was told that, even as Catholic priests are not to marry, the Church makes sure that those to be ordained are virile – impotent men are not ordained, as they might have opted for the priesthood out of frustration. So, women should not give us the impression that they are really daughters of Eve (remember that it was Eve that lured Adam to taste the “forbidden fruit” in the Garden of Eden). If reverend fathers tell you what they see and hear daily, you pity them. One American reverend father in Lagos complained to his parishioners that a woman, who claimed to want to see him for counselling, ended up topless in his office, exposing her large boobs. Only the grace of God saved him from that situation. Or was it his erotic shock absorbers? Another thanked God for the Communion plate, which the knights of the altar use to cover the ladies’ cleavages whenever he’s distributing the Holy Eucharist.

Please, ladies, stop tempting these men of God; there are a lot of willing men out there who would even offer you fortunes for allowing them to… Though I’m not canvassing immorality, remember that “… anyone who misleads these ‘little’ ones, it is better for him not to have been born…” Leave the priest to go to the prostitute, if he so desires, so that the sin will be on his head alone.

And if I were the pope, I would recommend excommunication for any priest that misbehaves, because I still feel that some of them are not ‘called’ but only being used by the enemy to discredit the Church.