ROME —

Retired Pope Benedict XVI asked forgiveness Tuesday for any “grievous faults" in his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, but denied any personal or specific wrongdoing after an independent report criticized his actions in four cases while he was archbishop of Munich, Germany.

Benedict's lack of a personal apology or admission of guilt immediately riled abuse survivors, who said his response reflected the Catholic hierarchy's “permanent” refusal to accept responsibility for the rape and sodomy of children by priests.

Benedict, 94, was responding to a Jan. 20 report from a German law firm that had been commissioned by the German Catholic Church to look into how cases of sexual abuse were handled in the Munich archdiocese between 1945 and 2019. Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, headed the archdiocese from 1977 to 1982.

The report faulted Benedict’s handling of four cases during his time as archbishop, accusing him of misconduct for having failed to restrict the ministry of the four priests even after they had been convicted criminally. The report also faulted his predecessors and successors, estimating there had been at least 497 abuse victims over the decades and at least 235 suspected perpetrators.

The Vatican on Tuesday released a letter that Benedict wrote to respond to the allegations, alongside a more technical reply from his lawyers who had provided an initial 82-page response to the law firm about his nearly five-year tenure in Munich.

The conclusion of Benedict’s lawyers was resolute: “As an archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger was not involved in any cover-up of acts of abuse,” they wrote. They criticized the report's authors for misinterpreting their submission, and asserted that the authors provided no evidence that Benedict was aware of the criminal history of any of the four priests in question.

Benedict’s response was more nuanced and spiritual, though he went on at length to thank his legal team before even addressing the allegations or the victims of abuse.

“I have had great responsibilities in the Catholic Church,” the retired pope said in his letter. “All the greater is my pain for the abuses and the errors that occurred in those different places during the time of my mandate.”

Benedict issued what he called a “confession,” though he didn't confess to any specific sin or fault. He recalled that daily Mass begins with believers confessing their sins and asking forgiveness for their faults and even their “grievous faults.” Benedict noted that in his meetings with abuse victims while he was pope, “I have seen at first hand the effects of a most grievous fault.

“And I have come to understand that we ourselves are drawn into this grievous fault whenever we neglect it or fail to confront it with the necessary decisiveness and responsibility, as too often happened and continues to happen,” he wrote. “As in those meetings, once again I can only express to all the victims of sexual abuse my profound shame, my deep sorrow and my heartfelt request for forgiveness.”

His response drew swift criticism from Eckiger Tisch, a group representing German clergy abuse survivors, who said it fit into the church's "permanent relativizing on matters of abuse -- wrongdoing and mistakes took place, but no one takes concrete responsibility,” the group said in a statement.

“Joseph Ratzinger can’t bring himself simply to state that he is sorry not to have done more to protect the children entrusted to his church,” the group said. “That would be an honest sentence."

The response will likely complicate efforts by German bishops re-establish credibility with the faithful, whose demands for accountability have only increased as the church has come to terms with decades of abuse and cover-up.

The head of the German bishops conference, Limburg Bishop Georg Baetzing, had previously said that Benedict needed to respond to the report by distancing himself from his lawyers and advisers. “He must talk, and he must override his advisers and essentially say the simple sentence: ’I incurred guilt, I made mistakes and I apologize to those affected,” Baetzing said. ”It won’t work any other way.”

In a tweet Tuesday, Baetzing noted that Benedict had said he would respond and has now honored that pledge.

”I am grateful to him for that and he deserves respect for it,” Baetzing wrote. The tweet didn't address the substance of Benedict’s response.

The law firm report identified four cases in which Ratzinger was accused of misconduct in failing to act against abusers.

Two cases involved priests who offended while Ratzinger was archbishop and were punished by the German legal system but were kept in pastoral work without any limits on their ministry. A third case involved a cleric who was convicted by a court outside Germany but was put into service in Munich. The fourth case involved a convicted pedophile priest who was allowed to transfer to Munich in 1980, and was later put into ministry. In 1986, that priest received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.

Benedict’s team had earlier clarified an initial “error” in their submission to the law firm that had insisted Ratzinger was not present at the 1980 meeting in which the priest’s transfer to Munich was discussed. Ratzinger was there, but his return to ministry was not discussed, they said.

Benedict said he was deeply hurt that the “oversight” about his presence at the 1980 meeting had been used to “cast doubt on my truthfulness, and even to label me a liar.” But he said he had been heartened by the letters and gestures of support he had received, including from his successor.

“I am particularly grateful for the confidence, support and prayer that Pope Francis personally expressed to me,” he said.

The Vatican had already strongly defended Benedict’s record in the aftermath of the law firm report, recalling that Benedict was the first pope to meet with victims of abuse, that he had issued strong norms to punish priests who raped children and had directed the church to pursue a path of humility in seeking forgiveness for the crimes of its clerics.

The Vatican’s defense, however, focused primarily on Benedict’s tenure as head of the Holy See’s doctrine office and his eight-year papacy.

Benedict reflected on his legacy at the end of his letter, noting that he is at the end of his life and will soon be judged by God.

“Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life,” he wrote. “Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great reason for fear and trembling, I am nonetheless of good cheer. For I trust firmly that the Lord is not only the just judge, but also the friend and brother who himself has already suffered for my shortcomings."

___

Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin.

VATICAN CITY — Retired Pope Benedict XVI admitted Monday he attended a meeting in 1980 regarding a case of sexual abuse of a child.

The meeting happened when Pope Benedict was the archbishop of Munich, Germany.

In a statement published in the German Catholic newspaper, Die Tagespost, the former pope’s personal secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein clarified that contrary to what was stated during a hearing, Benedict did attend the Ordinariate meeting.

This comes after a report faulted Benedict for not taking action against four abusive priests in Germany.

The newspaper reports that the former pope is “very sorry for his mistake.”

The priest involved in the investigation was allowed to resume pastoral work.

This is a decision that could have only been made with the consultation of the archbishop.

Gänswein said Benedict plans to explain how the error happened after he goes through the nearly 2,000-page report.

Benedict lives in the Vatican today.

He resigned from the papacy in 2013.

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis cracked down Friday on the spread of the old Latin Mass, reversing one of Pope Benedict XVI’s signature decisions in a major challenge to traditionalist Catholics who immediately decried it as an attack on them and the ancient liturgy.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass that Benedict relaxed in 2007, and went further to limit its use. The pontiff said he was taking action because Benedict’s reform had become a source of division in the church and been exploited by Catholics opposed to the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church and its liturgy.

Critics said they had never before witnessed a pope so thoroughly reversing his predecessor. That the reversal concerned something so fundamental as the liturgy, while Benedict is still alive and living in the Vatican as a retired pope, only amplified the extraordinary nature of Francis’ move, which will surely result in more right-wing hostility directed at him.

Francis, 84, issued a new law requiring individual bishops to approve celebrations of the old Mass, also called the Tridentine Mass, and requiring newly ordained priests to receive explicit permission to celebrate it from their bishops, in consultation with the Vatican.

Under the new law, bishops must also determine if the current groups of faithful attached to the old Mass accept Vatican II, which allowed for Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin. These groups cannot use regular churches; instead, bishops must find alternate locations for them without creating new parishes.

In addition, Francis said bishops are no longer allowed to authorize the formation of any new pro-Latin Mass groups in their dioceses.

Francis said he was taking action to promote unity and heal divisions within the church that had grown since Benedict’s 2007 document, Summorum Pontificum. He said he based his decision on a 2020 Vatican survey of all the world’s bishops, whose “responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”

The pope’s rollback immediately created an uproar among traditionalists already opposed to Francis’ more progressive bent and nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.

“This is an extremely disappointing document which entirely undoes the legal provisions,” of Benedict’s 2007 document, said Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales.

While Latin celebrations can continue, “the presumption is consistently against them: bishops are being invited to close them down,” Shaw said, adding that the requirement for Latin Masses to be held outside a parish was “unworkable.”

“This is an extraordinary rejection of the hard work for the church and the loyalty to the hierarchy which has characterized the movement for the Traditional Mass for many years, which I fear will foster a sense of alienation among those attached to the church’s ancient liturgy,” he said.

Benedict had issued his document in 2007 to reach out to a breakaway, schismatic group that celebrates the Latin Mass, the Society of St. Pius X, and which had split from Rome over the modernizing reforms of Vatican II.

But Francis said Benedict’s effort to foster unity had essentially backfired.

The opportunity offered by Benedict, the pope said in a letter to bishops accompanying the new law, was instead “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”

Francis said he was “saddened” that the use of the old Mass was accompanied by a rejection of Vatican II itself “with unfounded and unsustainable assertions that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’”

Christopher Bellitto, professor of church history at Kean University, said Francis was right to intervene, noting that Benedict’s original decision had had a slew of unintended consequences that not only created internal divisions but temporarily roiled relations with Jews.

“Francis hits it right on the head with his observation that Benedict’s 2007 loosening of regulations against the Latin rite allowed others to use it for division,” he said. “The blowback proves his point.”

The blowback was indeed fierce, though it’s also likely that many will simply ignore Francis’ decree and continue on as before with sympathetic bishops. Some of these traditionalists and Catholics already were among Francis’ fiercest critics, with some accusing him of heresy for having opened the door to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion.

Rorate Caeli, a popular traditionalist blog run out of the U.S., said Francis’ “attack” was the strongest rebuke of a pope against his predecessors in living memory.

“Francis HATES US. Francis HATES Tradition. Francis HATES all that is good and beautiful,” the group tweeted. But it concluded: “FRANCIS WILL DIE, THE LATIN MASS WILL LIVE FOREVER.”

Messa in Latino, an Italian traditionalist blog, was also blistering in its criticism.

“Mercy always and only for sinners (who are not asked to repent) but no mercy for those few traditional Catholics,” the blog said Friday.

For years, though, Francis has made known his distaste of the old liturgy, privately labeling its adherents self-referential naval-gazers who are out of touch with the needs of the church. He has cracked down on religious orders that celebrated the old Mass exclusively and frequently decried the “rigidity” of tradition-minded priests who prioritize rules over pastoral accompaniment.

Traditionalists have insisted that the old liturgy was never abrogated and that Benedict’s 2007 reform had allowed it to flourish.

They point to the growth of traditionalist parishes, often frequented by young, large families, as well as new religious orders that celebrate the old liturgy. The Latin Mass Society claims the number of traditional Masses celebrated each Sunday in England and Wales had more than doubled since 2007, from 20 to 46.

But for many, the writing was on the wall as soon as Francis stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica after his 2013 election without the ermine-trimmed red velvet cape that was preferred by Benedict and is a symbol of the pre-Vatican II church.

The restrictions went into immediate effect with its publication in Friday’s official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.