Francis calls clergy abuse summit

Critics dismiss meeting as Pope’s attempt at damage control

Pope Francis has summoned the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to a summit on preventing clergy sex abuse and protecting children, responding to the greatest crisis of his papacy with the realisation that Vatican inaction on the growing global scandal now threatens his legacy.

Francis’ key cardinal advisers yesterday announced plans for the summit early next year. The Pope meets today with US church leaders embroiled in their own credibility crisis from the latest accusations in the Catholic Church’s decades-long sex abuse scandal.

The meeting, scheduled for February 21 to 24, would assemble more than 100 churchmen to represent every bishops’ conference. Its convening signals awareness at the highest levels of the Catholic Church that clergy sex abuse is a global problem, not restricted to some parts of the world or a few Western countries.

Victims’ advocates immediately dismissed the event as belated damage control, an action publicised hastily as allegations regarding Francis’ record of handling abuse cases — and accumulated outrage among rankand-file Catholic faithful over covered-up crimes — jeopardise his papacy.

“There’s absolutely no reason to think any good will come of such a meeting,” given the church’s decades of failure to reform, said David Clohessy, former director of the victims’ advocacy group SNAP.