Ratzinger offered a similar defense. He said that for years after his arrival in Rome, he did not suspect that clerical sex abuse was a significant problem anywhere. When it erupted into a global scandal in 2002, Ratzinger insisted that it came as “an unprecedented shock.”
He claimed the events of 2002, when news organizations led by The Boston Globe exposed the cover-up of thousands of child-molestation cases around the world, stunned him because he had never suspected that “so much filth, darkening and soiling everything,” existed within the priesthood.
As a blizzard of once-secret Vatican records would later prove, however, his claim of “shock” never made any sense. Evidence from his own files showed that within weeks of arriving in Rome in January 1982, he received detailed briefings about priestly sex-abuse cases in several countries, many involving the molestation of children. From public news reports alone, he should have been aware of hundreds of cases in the early 1980s, especially in the United States.
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