Pope grants some pedophile priests clemency
Victims dismayed at the weakening of punishments
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope’s own advisers question.
One case has come back to haunt him: An Italian priest who received the pope’s clemency was later convicted by an Italian criminal court for his sex crimes against children as young as 12. The Rev. Mauro Inzoli is now facing a second church trial after new evidence emerged against him, The Associated Press has learned.
The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public ministry.
In some cases, the priests or their high-ranking friends appealed to Francis for clemency by citing the pope’s own words about mercy in their petitions, the church official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the proceedings are confidential.
“With all this emphasis on mercy … he is creating the environment for such initiatives,” the church official said, adding that clemency petitions were rarely granted by Pope Benedict XVI, who launched a crackdown during his 2005-2013 papacy and defrocked some 800 priests who raped and molested children. Staffers dismissed
Francis also ordered three longtime staffers at the congregation dismissed, two of whom worked for the discipline section that handles sex abuse cases, the lawyers and church official said.
One is the head of the section and will be replaced before leaving March 31. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said the others will be replaced and that staffing in the office, which has a yearslong backlog of cases, would be strengthened after Francis approved hiring more officials.
Burke said Francis’ emphasis on mercy applied to “even those who are guilty of heinous crimes.” He said priests who abuse are permanently removed from ministry, but are not necessarily dismissed from the clerical state, the church term for laicization or defrocking.
“The Holy Father under- stands that many victims and survivors can find any sign of mercy in this area difficult,” Burke said. “But he knows that the Gospel message of mercy is ultimately a source of powerful healing and of grace.” Little experience
Francis has repeatedly proclaimed “zero tolerance” for abusive priests and in December wrote to bishops committing to take “all necessary measures” to protect them.
But he also recently said he believed sex abusers suffer from a “disease” — a medical term used by defense lawyers to seek mitigating factors in canonical sentences.
Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor and founding member of Francis’ sex-abuse advisory commission, expressed dismay that the congregation’s recommended penalties were being weakened and said abusers are never so sick that they don’t know what they’re doing.
“All who abuse have made a conscious decision to do so,” Collins told AP. “Even those who are pedophiles, experts will tell you, are still responsible for their actions. They can resist their inclinations.”
Victim advocates have long questioned Francis’ commitment to continuing Benedict’s tough line, given he had no experience dealing with abusive priests or their victims in his native Argentina.
While Francis counts Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley as his top adviser on abuse, he has also surrounded himself with cardinal advisers who botched handling abuse cases in their archdioceses.
“They are not having zero tolerance,” said Rocio Figueroa, a former Vatican official and ex-member of the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a conservative Catholic lay society rocked by sex scandals. Resource gathering dust
The church official stressed that to his knowledge, none of Francis’ reduced sentences had put children at risk.
Amid questions about how the battle against abuse was faring, Francis recently named O’Malley, who heads his sex-abuse advisory commission, as a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But it’s not clear what influence he can wield from his home base in Boston.
Francis scrapped the commission’s proposed tribunal for bishops who botch abuse cases following legal objections from the congregation.
The commission’s other major initiative — a guideline template to help dioceses develop policies to fight abuse and safeguard children — is gathering dust. The Vatican never sent the template to bishops’ conferences, as the commission had sought, or even linked it to its main abuse-resource website.