The report landed on French Catholics like a bomb. French bishops had never considered sexual abuse a serious problem. “We have been in denial for 20 years,” Father Goujon said. “The bishops said that [that kind of abuse] could never happen here.”

“For some priests, it would be better if they were married—not just for sexual reasons, but because it would be better for their life and they wouldn’t be lonely,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx said in a newspaper interview.

Taxation “must favor the redistribution of wealth, looking out for the dignity of the poorest who risk always ending up crushed by the powerful,” the pope said in a meeting with members of Italy’s tax collection agency.

This week on “Inside the Vatican,” host Colleen Dulle and veteran Vatican reporter Gerard O’Connell explain what we know so far about the four cases Pope Emeritus Benedict was implicated in.

“I am not clinging to my office,” Cardinal Marx said on Thursday. “The offer to resign last year was meant very seriously. Pope Francis decided otherwise and asked me to continue my ministry responsibly.”

A Vatican editorial defended retired Pope Benedict XVI’s record in fighting clerical sexual abuse after the release of a report that accused him of mishandling four cases during his time as archbishop of Munich.