‘Bomb the Vatican’ jibe from sex abuse survivor at summit
It was a week like no other as the media flocked to a summit on clerical abuse, writes Paddy Agnew
“We’ve got to bomb the Vatican, there is no other choice...”
CLERICAL sex abuse survivor and Englishman Peter Saunders was the speaker. He was, of course, joking — up to a point. He made his remark as he and other survivors gathered with the world’s media behind the colonnade in St Peter’s Square, waiting outside a meeting last Wednesday between clerical abuse survivors and Vatican officials.
Saunders used provocative language to make a point. You need to do something “to get the dirt and filth out of that place”, he later told the Sunday Independent.
It was that sort of week, an extraordinary week in the Holy See as the world’s media gathered to follow an unprecedented summit on clerical sex abuse.
Around every second street in the Holy See, you came across a vigil, a protest march or indeed an ad hoc news conference on the footpath.
It remains to be seen what impact this summit will have had on the life of the Catholic Church. For the time being, though, it has proved to be a gift to a myriad range of articulate lobby groups with a critical axe to grind — clerical child abuse victims, vulnerable adult victims, the right- wing homophobic lobby, disenfranchised Catholic women as well as the children of priests.
Incidentally, a New York Times report on the work of Irishman Vincent Doyle’s Coping International support group elicited a comment from senior Vatican spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti. He confirmed that the Holy See does indeed have its own secret guidelines for priests who father children but these are “for internal use”.
In short, there was a lot of energy and anticipation in the air. Yet, when Pope Francis delivers his final word on the summit at Mass this morning, most of the lobbyists expect little or nothing by way of radical, “concrete” change.
“The Pope is giving us survivors, victims and in a sense children the two fingers. This whole summit is clearly going to be little more than a whitewash, there isn’t any real action on the agenda,” says Peter Saunders, someone who sat alongside Irishwoman Marie Collins on the Vatican’s Council For The Protection Of Minors.
Are the victims’ groups right? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it is impossible for Francis or anyone else to produce a magic wand that will provide some hitherto, unthought of solution. No, in the sense that the real significance of last week’s summit is that it happened at all. Called in the immediate wake of last year’s devastating abuse scandals in Chile, Australia, Honduras, the USA and elsewhere, last week’s Vatican gathering was an unprecedented and candid admission that of clerical sex abuse is a global problem.
Remember, there was a time back in the 1990s and even the early 2000s when senior Vatican figures were fond of dismissing the clerical abuse issue as merely “an Anglo-Saxon problem”.
No one says that anymore around here.
Furthermore, sex abuse offences are now called “crimes” in VaticanSpeak.
The fact that the largest delegation of bishops at the summit came from Africa makes a point. For the record, there were 36 African bishops, 24 from North and South America, 18 from Asia and 32 from Europe. (There were also only 10 women delegates but that is to open a whole other, huge debate).
The fact, too, that three of the first anonymous survivors to address the Vatican summit came from Latin America, Africa and Asia only underlined the point. Then, too, there was the remarkable “group therapy” moment when the 190 or so cardinals and bishops gathered in the Synod Hall listened to testimony such as this...
“From the age of 15 I had sexual relations with a priest. This lasted for 13 years. I got pregnant three times and he made me have an abortion three times, quite simply because he did not want to use condoms or contraceptives. At first I trusted him so much that I did not know he could abuse me. I was afraid of him, and every time I refused to have sex with him, he would beat me”
Even if the so-called developed world, including Ireland of course, has been dealing with clerical sex abuse on a daily basis for the last 25 years, not all local churches in Africa, Asia and indeed Latin America (and also in Europe) are quite so prepared.
Anne Barrett Doyle, of Bishop Accountability, last week analysed the records of some of the Bishops’ Conference presidents here in Rome.
Her findings are interesting — Brazil’s Cardinal Sergio Da Rocha spoke publicly about sex abuse for the first time ever last week in Rome; Mexican Archbishop Rogelio Cabrera Lopez says that he has dealt with only one abusive priest in six years; Philippinnes Archbishop Romulo Valles leads a church in a country where not one priest has been criminally convicted of sex abuse crimes; the UN Committee for the Rights of the Child this month called on Italy to “make it mandatory for religious personnel to report any case of alleged sexual abuse” to Italian state authorities; French Archbishop Georges Pontier has had nothing to say about Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, currently on trial in Lyon for covering up the crimes of an abuser priest; last year, the Colombian Archbishop Oscar Urbina Ortega praised his recently deceased countryman Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, a Vatican official who coined the “Anglo-Saxon” remark and who praised bishops who covered up for their priests. The list goes on and on... It is little wonder then that the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, spoke last week of being on a “journey of exploration”. That journey continues this morning when the Pope draws his conclusions.
Francis surprised many when he produced 21 “reflection points” on the first morning of the summit. Sounds like he means business.
Yet, will that incorporate “mandatory reporting” and “bishop accountability tribunals”? We will see this morning.
‘I was afraid of him and every time I refused to have sex, he would beat me’