Pope: Religion more than ‘private matter’

Pope Benedict XVI blows out a candle on a cake to celebrate his 81th birthday during his visit Wednesday at the White House in Washington in this photo provided by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. At right are Archbishop Pietro Sambi, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, and President Bush.

? Feted at the White House on his 81st birthday, Pope Benedict XVI praised Americans for their deep religious beliefs Wednesday but later told the nation’s bishops that the scourge of clergy sex abuse had sometimes been “very badly handled.”

Benedict’s comments, his toughest critique yet of the U.S. church’s worst problem, marked the second day in a row that he addressed the abuse scandal. They came as he addressed the nation’s bishops at the imposing Immaculate Conception shrine.

He also reminded the prelates that religion cannot only be considered a “private matter” without any bearing on public behavior.

The pontiff questioned how Catholics could ignore church teaching on sex, exploit or ignore the poor, or adopt positions contradicting “the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death.”

“Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said. Benedict’s remarks came on a day when all of the five Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court approved the most widely used method of lethal injection, and congressional representatives who support abortion rights said they planned to take Holy Communion on Thursday at a papal Mass.

Benedict returned to the clergy sex abuse scandal that has cost the American church more than $2 billion, most paid out to victims in the last six years, calling it a cause of “deep shame.” He decried the “enormous pain” that communities have suffered from such “gravely immoral behavior” by priests.

Benedict addressed clerical molesters in the wider context of secularism and the over-sexualization of America. “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?” he asked.