Scicluna: 'If you want to silence someone, you don't make him a bishop'

Mgr Charles Scicluna has told the Associated Press that his promotion to serve as Auxiliary Bishop in Malta wasn't the latest casualty in the Vatican's turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues. "When Pope Benedict XVI announced last month he was transferring his respected sex crimes prosecutor to Malta to become a bishop, Vatican watchers immediately questioned whether the Holy See's tough line on clerical abuse was going soft - and if another outspoken cleric was being punished for doing his job too well," the news agency said. But in an interview on the eve of his departure from Rome, Mgr Scicluna insisted he wasn't the latest casualty in the Vatican's turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues. Rather, he said, his promotion to auxiliary bishop was simply that - "a very good" promotion - and more critically, that his hardline stance against sex abuse would remain because it is Pope Benedict's stance as well. "This is policy. It's not Scicluna. It's the Pope. And this will remain." Besides, he said laughing over tea at a cafe' on Rome's posh Piazza Farnese, "If you want to silence someone, you don't make him a bishop."  AP noted that in his decade on...