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				Vatican Split Over Apology For Its Past

By Bruce Johnston in Rome, The London telegraph, Feb. 4, 2000

THE Roman Catholic Church was said yesterday to be deeply divided over a report which seeks forgiveness for past "sins" including the Crusades, witch-hunts of heretics and the Inquisition.

Opponents of the report doubted the value of apologising for past wrongs, arguing that anachronism was the "worst sin for an historian". After three years in the making, the mea culpa document, completed by an international theological commission headed by the doctrinal expert Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is to be read by the Pope on March 12.

It follows an apostolic letter in 1994 in which the Pope said that for the new Millennium the Church should own up to the past "sins of its children . . . when they have strayed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel". While the document will not carry the Pope's authority and will have only consultative value to enable "theological reflection", it is said to have split the Vatican.

The most significant opposition to the document, wanted by the Pope to "purify the memory of the Church" to celebrate the Holy Year 2000, has come from a respected group of historians. The document, entitled The Church and the Faults of the Past, is thought to have taken into account some of the objections.