VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI turned 83 on Friday (April 16) as the Roman Catholic Church is roiled by continuing clergy sex abuse scandals and charges that senior leaders covered up for the crimes.

A French Catholic publication published a 2001 letter in which a top Vatican official, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, praised a French bishop for not reporting to the police a priest who had sexually abused at least 11 children, and who was subsequently sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said the letter showed that the decision in 2001 to route abuse cases through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, at the time headed by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI), had been correct.

Lombardi did not deny that the letter, published by the French Catholic website “Golias,” was genuine. “How fortunate,” Lombardi said, “to have centralized under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affairs of sexual abuse of minors committed by priests.”

It is the first time that the Vatican has admitted that one of its top officials acted wrongly on the issue of sexual child-abuse, while claiming that corrective steps have been taken.

In the letter, dated September 8, 2001, Castrillon Hoyos congratulated Bishop Pierre Pican “for not denouncing a priest to the civil authorities.” At the time, Castrillon Hoyos was prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, the office that managed priests.

Castrillon Hoyos, a Columbian who retired in 2009, also came under fire recently for failing to stop the readmission of the ultra-conservative and Holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson.

Pope Benedict celebrated his birthday privately with his secretary,Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, and other Vatican officials. This weekend, he will visit Malta, where he is expected to meet privately with people who were sexually abused by priests.