Pope’s comments about victims of abuse in Chile raising doubts

ROME — For years, victims of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and their advocates have asked when Pope Francis would adjust his blind spot on an issue that has caused enormous damage to Catholics, the reputation of the church and the pontiffs who preceded him.

But the pope’s remarks overnight Sunday as he returned from a trip to Chile and Peru — apologizing for demanding proof of abuse from victims in Chile even as he doubted them — prompted concerns he does not understand.

“There was great hope that this pope understood — he ‘got it’ — but if that were true we would not have his words today,” said Marie Collins, a survivor of abuse who last year resigned in frustration from the pope’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. “Anyone who was still clinging to the hope there would be real change in the church to the issue of abuse and this change would be led by Pope Francis will have lost that hope today.”

On his flight back to Rome, Francis issued a rare apology for what he called an unintended “slap in the face” to victims. He was referring to the crisis he had created in Chile when he said that he had seen no “proof ” that a bishop covered up abuse.

“Here I have to apologize because the word ‘proof ’ hurt them,” he said on the plane. “It hurt a lot of abused people. I know how much they suffer. And to hear that the pope told them to their face that they need to bring a letter with proof ?”

But then he made an unclear distinction between proof and evidence, and offered a spirited defense of Bishop Juan Barros Madrid, the Chilean accused by some abuse victims of protecting the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a notorious Chilean pedophile priest.

Some of those victims have said Barros witnessed the abuse and did nothing, an accusation he denies.

“Someone who accuses insistently without evidence, this is calumny,” the pope said on the plane. “If I say, ‘You stole something, you stole something,’ I’m slandering you because I don’t have evidence.”

The pope revealed that he had twice rejected the resignation of Barros in recent years, explaining that while an investigation continued into the bishop, whom he appointed to the small diocese of Osorno in 2015, “I cannot condemn him because I do not have the evidence.”