Pope: Church failed victims
In letter to Catholics, he asks forgiveness in priest abuse scandal.
Pope Francis VATICAN CITY — issued a letter to Catholics around the world Monday condemning the crime of priestly sexual abuse and its cover-up. He demanded accountability but offered no indication of how he plans to sanction complicit bishops or end the Vatican’s long-standing culture of secrecy.
Francis begged forgiveness for the pain suffered by victims and said lay Catholics must be involved in the effort to root out abuse and cover-up. He blasted the clerical culture that has been blamed for the crisis, with church leaders more concerned for their reputation than the safety of children.
“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives,” Francis wrote.
“We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”
The Vatican issued the three-
page letter ahead of Francis’ trip this weekend to Ireland, a once staunchly Roman Catholic country where the church’s credibility has been devastated by years of revelations that priests raped and molested
children with impunity and their superiors covered up for them.
As a result, the letter was clearly an effort by Francis to respond to outrage in the United States and pressure from Ireland to take a tough stand on the global abuse scandal. That pressure has mounted steadily
after Francis’ own reputation was tarnished during his disastrous trip to Chile in January, where he dismissed victims’ accusations of cover-up as “calumny.”
For Irish survivors, then, the letter was little more than strong words and recycled rhetoric that failed to
acknowledge the Vatican’s own role in turning a blind eye to predatory priests and fomenting the culture of secrecy and cover-up that allowed the crimes to go unpunished.
“That culture was overseen by #Vatican & codified
into its laws,” tweeted Colm O’Gorman, a prominent Irish survivor who is organizing a solidarity demonstration of survivors in Dublin during Francis’ visit. “He needs to name & own that.”
Priestly sex abuse was always expected to dominate the pope’s Irish trip, but the issue has taken on new gravity following reve- lations in the U.S. that one of Francis’ trusted cardinals, the retired archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, allegedly sexu- ally abused and harassed minors as well as adult sem- inarians.
In addition, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania last week reported that at least 1,000 children were victims of some 300 priests over the past 70 years, and that generations of bishops failed repeatedly to take measures to protect their flock or punish the rapists.
And it comes on the heels of Francis’ efforts to address a spiraling sex abuse scandal in Chile, which has grown so grave that Chilean law enforcement have staged several raids on church archives to try to get a handle on what the church has known about its pedophile priests.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro praised the pope’s letter and urged local church officials to “cease their denials and deflections” and accept the grand jury recommendations, which include open
ing a window for victims to sue the church for abuse that otherwise would fall outside the statute of limitations.
The Catholic Church has long resisted such windows, fearing for its bottom line. In the U.S., the sex abuse scan- dal and related litigation has cost the church some $3 bil
lion and led to the sell-off of church properties and bank-
ruptcy protection. It was the second Vatican response in recent days to the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which has sparked a crisis in confidence in the U.S. Catholic leadership and led to calls for ordinary faith- ful to withhold donations.