Letter about sexual abuse questions denial by Pope
Failure to act on coverup raises doubts on pontiff’s stance of ‘zero-tolerance’
VATICAN CITY— Pope Francis received a victim’s letter in 2015 that graphically detailed how a priest sexually abused him and how other Chilean clergy ignored it, contradicting the Pope’s recent insistence that no victims had come forward to denounce the coverup, the letter’s author and members of the Pope’s own sexual abuse commission have told The Associated Press.
The fact Francis received the eightpage letter, obtained by the news agency, challenges his insistence that he has “zero tolerance” for sex abuse and coverups. It also calls into question his stated empathy with abuse survivors, compounding the most serious crisis of his five-year papacy.
The scandal exploded last month when Francis’s trip to South America was marred by protests over his vigorous defence of Bishop Juan Barros, who is accused by victims of witnessing and ignoring the abuse by Rev. Fernando Karadima. During the trip, Francis callously dismissed accusations against Barros as “slander,” seemingly unaware that victims had placed Barros at the scene of Karadima’s crimes.
On the plane home, confronted by an AP reporter, the Pope said: “You, in all goodwill, tell me that there are victims, but I haven’t seen any, because they haven’t come forward.”
But members of the Pope’s Commission for the Protection of Minors say that in April 2015, they sent a delegation to Rome specifically to hand-deliver the letter from Juan Carlos Cruz because they were alarmed by Francis’s recent appointment of Barros as a diocesan bishop.
The Barros affair caused shock waves in January 2015 when Francis appointed him bishop of Osorno over the objections of the leadership of Chile’s bishops conference and many local priests and laity.
They accepted as credible the testimony against Karadima, a prominent Chilean cleric sanctioned by the Vatican for abusing minors. Barros was a Karadima protégé and, according to Cruz and other victims, he witnessed the abuse and did nothing.
Cruz’s account of the abuse he suffered at Karadima’s hands had helped Vatican investigators decide to remove Karadima from ministry and sentence him in 2011to a lifetime of “penance and prayer.”
Now 87, he lives in a home for elderly priests in Santiago. He hasn’t commented on the scandal and the home has declined to accept calls or visits from the news media.
The victims also testified to Chilean prosecutors, who opened an investigation into Karadima after they went public with their accusations in 2010. Prosecutors had to drop charges because too much time had passed, but the judge running the case stressed that it wasn’t for lack of proof.
In his letter to the Pope, Cruz begs Francis to make good on his pledge of “zero tolerance.”
“Holy Father, it’s bad enough that we suffered such tremendous pain and anguish from the sexual and psychological abuse, but the terrible mistreatment we received from our pastors is almost worse,” Cruz wrote.
On April 12, 2015, the members of the sex abuse commission met with Francis’s top adviser, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, explained their objections to Barros’s appointment as bishop of Osorno, and gave him the letter to deliver to the Pope.
“He assured us he would give it to the Pope and speak of the concerns,” then-commission member Marie Collins told the AP. “And at a later date, he assured us that that had been done.”
Cruz, who now lives in Philadelphia, heard the same.
“Cardinal O’Malley called me after the Pope’s visit here in Philadelphia and he told me, among other things, that he had given the letter to the Pope — in his hands,” he said in an interview at his home Sunday.
Neither the Vatican nor O’Malley responded to multiple requests for comment.
After Francis’s remarks backing Barros caused an outcry in Chile, he did an about-face last week: the Vatican announced it was sending in its most respected sex-crimes investigator to take testimony from Cruz and others about Barros.