Bishops offer to resign in sex scandal

VATICAN CITY: In the biggest shake-up yet in the Catholic Church’s long-running sexabuse scandal, every active Chilean bishop offered to resign on Friday over what Pope Francis said was their “grave negligence” in investigating abuse and protecting children.

The bishops announced at the end of an emergency Vatican summit that all 31 active bishops in Rome had signed a document offering to resign.

Francis can accept the resignations, reject them or delay a decision, and the bishops remain in place until he acts. The symbolic significance of an entire national bishops’ conference resigning en masse because they covered up for paedophiles marked a historic moment in the decades-long saga.

“We want to ask forgiveness for the pain we caused victims, the pope, the people of God and our country for the grave errors and omissions that we committed,” they said.

They thanked victims for their “perseverance and courage”, for having continued to denounce the crimes and the cover up by the church despite “the incomprehension and attacks from the same church community”.

It marked the first known time that an entire national bishops conference had offered to step down over a scandal, and laid bare the devastation the crisis has caused the Catholic Church in Chile and beyond.

“They didn’t know how to protect the weakest, exposed them to abuse and then impeded justice,” said Jose Andres Murillo, one of those abused and one of the main whistle-blowers in the case. “For this, they deserve only to go.”

Calls for mass resignations had mounted after details emerged of the contents of a 2 300-page Vatican report into the Chilean scandal leaked early on Friday. Francis had cited the report in footnotes of a 10-page document that he handed over to each Chilean bishop at the start of the summit.

In the footnotes, Francis accused the bishops of destroying evidence of sex crimes, pressurising church investigators to minimise abuse accusations and showing “grave negligence” in protecting children from paedophile priests.

“No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others,” Francis wrote in the document, which was published by Chilean T13 television and confirmed as accurate by the Vatican.

In response, the Chilean bishops said the contents of the document were “absolutely deplorable” and showed an “unacceptable abuse of power and conscience,” as well as sexual abuse. “We want to re-establish justice and contribute to the reparation of the damage we caused,” they said.

Francis had summoned the 34 bishops to Rome after admitting he had made “grave errors in judgement” in the case of Bishop Juan Barros, who is accused by victims of Chilean priest, the Reverend Fernando Karadima, of witnessing and ignoring abuse.

But the scandal grew after Francis received the report written by two Vatican sex crimes experts sent to Chile to get a handle on the problem.

The whole report has not been made public, but even the highlights Francis included in his footnotes were astonishing. The gravity of the accusations appeared to lay the foundation for a full-scale Vatican investigation of Chilean dioceses, seminaries and religious orders. Such an investigation was ordered after a similar 2010 summit Pope Benedict XVI called for Irish bishops over their dismal record dealing with abuse.

Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops were among the 31. It was not clear if Cardinal Javier Errazuriz and two retired bishops in Rome were. Victims accused Errazuriz of covering up the crimes. – Ap/african News Agency/ana.