Developments in Belgium over the last seven days have gone from strange to stranger as police raided Church offices, drilled holes in the coffins of dead archbishops while ostensibly searching for files related to sexual abuse cases, and attracting the ire of Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican.

Pope Benedict closed the Year for Priests with a powerful apology for the Church for the clergy sexual abuse crisis. “We too insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved,” said Pope Benedict XVI at a closing Mass today for the Year for Priests held in St. Peter’s Square and attended by more than 15,000 priests from 90 countries.

A few weeks ago, Cardinal Tarcicio Bertone kicked up headlines by linking the Church's sexual abuse crisis and pedophilia to homosexuality. Yesterday, however, the Cardinal was clearly echoing the words of Pope Benedict XVI, when he spoke about the crisis within the context of the Year for Priests.

Two interesting articles appeared in recent weeks in Catholic publications on aspects of the current crisis. The first was by Justice Ann M. Burke, the Illinois Supreme Court judge who also served as interim chair of the National Review Board. In the well-known British magazine "The Tablet," Father Raniero Cantalamessa has his first public reflection on the reaction to his Good Friday homily in St. Peter's in which he compared some aspects of the attacks on the Church regarding sex abuse to tendencies in anti-Semitism.

“Why Being Pope Means Never having To Say You’re Sorry: The sex abuse scandal and the limits of atonement” is the provocative headline splashed across the cover of Time and over an image of the back of Pope Benedict’s mitered head. But the Time magazine June 7 cover story is a particularly frustrating example of a media enterprise playing to prejudices with half-truths even to the point of severely misrepresenting the real issues.

Controversial cases involving Italian clerics accused of sexual abuse have received relatively little attention until recently. The wave of such cases internationally, however, has included cases from Italy, and now the Italian bishops are speaking out.

As we have described in our book, Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis, one of the fallacies surrounding much of the news coverage and, frankly, underlying much of the frustration with regard to the Church and the sexual abuse crisis is a misunderstanding of the structure of the Church.

Many people assume that the Church is simply a religious version of a multinational corporation. The Pope is something between a CEO and a king, and he can snap his fingers and make the entire People of God jump to his command. This misunderstanding underlies a fair amount of anti-Catholicism...

On Wednesday, May 19, Matthew Bunson and I participated in a live on-line chat with the newspaper's readers about the article published earlier in the day on "Pope Benedict VI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal."

The Hartford Courant reports on the latest efforts to tie Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to a U.S. sex abuse case.

When it comes to stories related to the ongoing sexual abuse scandals, one of the strangest was filed a week ago on Politics Daily. Written by Annie Groer, it concerned a 67-year-old man who has been picketing the Vatican embassy to the United States for the past dozen years. John Wojnowski is usually seen with large banners that shout "Sociopaths Hide Pedophiles. Vatican Hides Pedophiles."