A difficult time ahead for the Church

IT must have been a very difficult step for Pope Francis to call a conference in the Vatican that exposed the Church to criticism of the severest sort. But he must have decided that after all the years of denial, that helped perpetuate the sexual abuse of children by some priests, it was time to take decisive action to stop it.

Thus the landmark Vatican conference was convened last Thursday. Some 200 senior Church officials, all but ten of them men, listened in stunned silence as a nun from Nigeria spoke on the abuse inflicted on so many children that were covered up. One woman testified how she was repeatedly raped by a priest when she was just 11 years old.

Our own Archbishop Luis Cardinal Tagle was there at the opening of the conference. He reportedly broke down in tears as he read his keynote speech on the “wounds that have been inflicted by us, the bishops, on the victims,” through all the many years of denial and cover-up.

A few days earlier, the Pope had remarked that those constantly attacking the Church are “fiends, cousins, and relatives of the devil. As President Duterte has had some very critical words about the Church in the past, Malacanang presidential spokesman Sal Panelo came out to comment that the Pope himself has been critical of some practices in the Church; he was just expressing concern with his “hyperbole,” Panelo said.

The Vatican conference that opened last Thursday was not against the Church; it was against abuses by some church officials which had been tolerated for so long in some countries. In 2018, Chile’s 34 bishops offered to resign over the scandal of clerical abuse of children. Billions of dollars have been paid by the Church to victims of abuse in the United States. Cases have been reported in Australia, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Geman Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who spoke on the third day of the Vatican conference, said Church files on priests accused of sexually abusing children had been destroyed. “Instead of the perpetrators, the victims were regulated and silence imposed on them.”

The silence imposed on the whole problem for so long may now be over with the Vatican conference which Pope Francis called last week bringing it out into the open. The sexual abuse of children may have taken place elsewhere, such as in online pornography and in sexual tourism, the Pope said, but it cannot be tolerated in the Church, “for it is utterly incompatible with her moral authority and ethical credibility.”

Some victims of child abuse who had come Rome upon learning of the Vatican conference were reported somewhat disappointed over the lack of more concrete action, but the fact alone that the conference was called should raise the hopes of all those who have long kept their silence.

The coming months and years may see more moves in the Church, perhaps serious discussions on the issue of clerical celibacy. Pope Francis himself is said to have once remarked that “celibacy is a matter of discipline, not of faith. It can change.”

Our own Church in the Philippines should be able to contribute to this cleansing action taken by Pope Francis. The Vatican conference was just a beginning. We can expect more efforts worldwide in the coming months and years.