The AP newsagency says it has obtained a letter signed by the future Pope in 1985, when he was a senior Vatican official, in which he resisted appeals for the dismissal of an American priest who had sexually abused two boys at a school in California.
The Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, pleaded for more time, asking the diocese to consider the good of the universal church.
Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in the letter that arguments to remove the priest were of "grave significance", but also worried about what "granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner".
Irwin Zalkin, a lawyer representing victims of the priest in question, believes the church associated scandal with sin.
"Scandal was considered a sin and if evidence or information were to get out and become public about the depth and the breadth and the insidious nature of the problem of the priests and other religious committing these crimes, it would for sure provoke scandal," he said.
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