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The Vatican is breaking its silence on the previously-taboo subject of paedophilia. Pope Benedict has written a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland with guidelines on preventing and punishing sexual abuse of children by priests. Commentators look at what this will mean for the future of the Catholic church.

that the discussion of the case included the suggestion that celibacy can create a peadophile, something he says statistics show is a myth:

"If paedophilia and the abuse of adolescents were solely a response to sexual frustration, it wouldn't be perpetrated mostly [by] people who are free to find sexual gratification elsewhere. And even in Ireland, it mostly was. The best figures I can find for this come from a 2002 government-sponsored report which says that 5.8% of all boys sexually abused were abused by clergy or religious. The corresponding figure for girls was 1.4%. So the overwhelming majority of child abuse in Ireland was carried out by people who were not bound to celibacy."

religion has clouded the judgement of people who agreed to keep child abuse in the Catholic church secret:

"Imagine if this happened at The Independent. Imagine I discovered there was a paedophile ring running our creche, and the Editor issued a stern order that it should be investigated internally with 'the strictest secrecy'. Imagine he merely shuffled the paedophiles to work in another creche at another newspaper, and I agreed, and made the kids sign a pledge of secrecy. We would both - rightly - go to prison. Yet because the word 'religion' is whispered, the rules change. Suddenly, otherwise good people who wouldn't dream of covering up a paedophile ring in their workplace think it would be an insult to them to follow one wherever it leads in their Church. They would find this behaviour unthinkable without the irrational barrier of faith standing between them and reality."

there are sections of the media that will not be happy until they've implicated the pope in sex-abuse scandals:

"[A] narrative is being formed in the public imagination that is horrifying, packed with salacious detail and very neat, in that it describes a Catholic conspiracy to hush up child abuse stretching right to the very top. The problem is that it's partly fiction.
Many Catholics - and I am one of them - believe that the Pope has been stitched up over this Munich case."

On the current scandal is very significant:

"During four decades of reporting from the Vatican, I have never seen a graver crisis affecting the very credibility of the leadership of the world's longest surviving international organisation, the Roman Catholic Church."

in the Guardian that the accelerated demise of the Catholic church will not be celebrated by everyone:

"There will be plenty celebrating the Catholic church's plight, and it is hard not to agree in some part with [Diarmaid] MacCulloch [presenter of the History of Christianity], that hubris has played a huge part in this institution's history and its current crisis. But it is also important to acknowledge that this is more tragedy than anything else. For the victims, their families, their congregations - many of whom see no cause for celebration despite their need for truth - and for those causes on which the church has proved a trenchant champion, stirring lazy consciences on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess."

Mgr Charles Scicluna is Promoter of Justice at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and has the task of investigating the most serious crimes. the church:

"It is possible that in the past - perhaps out of a misunderstood sense of protecting the good name of the institution - some bishops were, in practice, too indulgent towards these very sad cases. I say this was in practice because, in principle, the condemnation of this kind of crime has always been firm and unequivocal."

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