A prominent German cardinal has decried the Vatican’s unwillingness to discuss the homosexual network in the Church in the context of clerical sex abuse, calling it a “silence which cries out to be broken.”

In an interview this week with the National Catholic Register, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, the former president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, said he was “very disappointed” but not surprised that the topic of homosexuality was not dealt with at the recent Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse.

“Discussing the problem of homosexuality would have become dangerous for them, because it’s evident there is a network of homosexuals within the Vatican,” the cardinal said. “That’s the problem, there’s no question.”

“They are part of the machine, so how can you exclude them? It’s a terrible problem,” he said.

It is up to “journalists” to break the conspiracy of silence, he said.

Just prior to the Vatican summit, Brandmüller wrote a joint letter with American Cardinal Raymond Burke to the heads of the national bishops’ conferences who would be meeting in the Vatican, urging them to address the real roots of the clerical sex abuse crisis.

The abuse of minors is “only part of a much greater crisis,” the cardinals wrote. “The plague of the homosexual agenda has been spread within the Church, promoted by organized networks and protected by a climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence.”

“Sexual abuse is blamed on clericalism. But the first and primary fault of the clergy does not rest in the abuse of power but in having gone away from the truth of the Gospel,” they said.

As a number of studies have shown, upwards of 75 percent of the victims of clergy sex abuse have been male.

Last August, Cardinal Burke, the former head of the Vatican’s highest court, called for “open recognition” of a homosexual culture within the Catholic church’s as the first step in addressing the crisis.

“I believe that there needs to be an open recognition that we have a very grave problem of a homosexual culture in the Church,” Burke said in an interview, “especially among the clergy and the hierarchy, that needs to be addressed honestly and efficaciously.”

Burke said it was already “clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.”

“There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this,” he said, referring to the generalized media cover-up of the homosexual nature of the abuse as well as such denial within the church itself.

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