A significant part of Pope Benedict XVI’s emphasis on the renewal of the Church focuses on priests. In 2005, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote a famous passage for the Good Friday Way of the Cross that reflected on the “filth” in the Church, “even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him!”

While making the relatively short trip to Portugal, Pope Benedict again addressed forthrightly the overall topic of the sexual abuse scandal and the Church, calling it a “terrifying” crisis and admitting that the suffering the Church is undergoing now is the result of “sins that exist inside the Church,” rather than from external forces like the media or anti-Catholics.

In our book, Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal, we look at the long history of the crisis – first in this country and then overseas – and we look at what the Church has done to address this crisis. Pope Benedict, we concluded, has played a pivotal and underappreciated role in leading the Vatican and the Church Universal to address this issue head on.