Thursday, April 21, 2005
CARDINAL GEORGE RELATES THE EXPERIENCE OF MEETING POPE BENEDICT
He says the new Pope is focused on the scandal:
"I went up to him after he was elected, we kiss his hand, and I started speaking in my kind of halting German about promising obedience and love and asking for his prayers in return," George said Wednesday. "And he immediately responded in English -- much better English than I speak German -- that he remembered our conversation and that he would attend to that. So immediately he zeroed in on our last conversation, which was about the sexual abuse scandal."
Not long before the 115 cardinals entered the conclave to elect a new pope on Monday, George said he had had a conversation with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger about the sexual abuse scandal, the new laws that were instated several years ago governing the handling of such cases by the church in the United States, and, as he put it, "the need to maintain the canonical structures that we have used to address the scandal."
