Pope admits response to abuse slow

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis acknowledged Thursday that the Catholic Church was “a bit late” in realizing the damage done by priests who rape and molest children, and said the decadeslong practice of moving pedophiles around rather than sanctioning them was to blame.

Francis met Thursday for the first time with his sexabuse advisory commission, a group of outside experts named in 2014 to advise him and the Catholic Church on best practices to keep pedophiles out of the priesthood and protect children.

Commission members briefed him on their work and made a series of proposals that, if accepted, would mark a turnabout in the way the church handles abuse cases.

One recommendation is for sex-abuse cases to be exempted from church’s norms requiring “pontifical secret.” Commissioners proposed that victims be guaranteed a “minimum right to information” as their claims are processed in the normally secrecy-filled church process. They also proposed that the 20-year statute of limitations on abuse accusations be lifted.

In addition, the commission said it was discussing the problem of when church law “impedes the reporting of suspected child abuse to civil authorities.”

The Vatican has long in-

sisted that the inviolability of the seal of confession prevents clergy who might learn about abuse through the sacramental practice as an impediment to reporting crimes to law enforcement officials. Recently, however, Australia’s royal commission has called for clergymen to face criminal charges if they learn of abuse in confession and fail to report it.

In prepared remarks, Francis thanked the members for their work and acknowledged they had had a difficult job going “against the current” in making the church and Vatican aware of the problem and respond to it.

In off-the-cuff remarks, he admitted that the church’s response to the scandal was slow. For decades, the Vatican turned a blind eye to the problem, and local bishops, rather than defrocking abusers, instead moved them from parish to parish, allowing them to abuse anew.

Under the papacy of St. John Paul II, the Vatican was reluctant to defrock young priests, even if they were abusers. “The consciousness of the church arrived a bit late, and when the consciousness arrives late, the means to resolve the problem arrive late,” Francis said.

Francis also addressed the way the Vatican was handling appeals of canonical sentences, saying he wanted to add more diocesan bishops to an appeals commission that is currently dominated by canon lawyers. He said lawyers “tend to want to lower sentences” and that he wanted the influence of diocesan bishops with experience of the problem in the field to balance it out.

Francis acknowledged that he had a learning curve about the clergy abuse issue, admitting that he once opted to impose a more lenient sentence on a priest who subsequently reoffended. He was referring to the case of the Italian priest, the Rev. Mauro Inzoli.

“I was new and I didn’t understand these things well, and before two choices I chose the more benevolent one,” he said. “It was the only time I did it, and never again.”