Abuse summit
Meeting includes men, women from worldwide religious orders
With victims converging outside Vatican, pope opens sexual abuse meeting.
Cloistered inside the Vatican on Thursday, Roman Catholic Church leaders heard searing prerecorded video testimonials from abuse survivors, including one made pregnant three times by a priest who started abusing her at age 15, beat her and forced her to have abortions.
“Victims need to be believed,” another person pleaded by video, urging bishops and other church leaders to work with civil authorities to hold sexually deviant clerics accountable.
Outside the Vatican walls, clusters of people who have suffered abuse in the Catholic Church hovered near news conferences, gave hours’ worth of interviews, observed vigils and planned a Saturday march.
Many expressed exasperation and little optimism that an extraordinary four-day meeting of bishops and other church leaders convened by Pope Francis to grapple with clerical child sexual abuse would lead to even basic changes.
“Same old, same old,” said Tim Law, president of a survivor’s support group, Ending Clergy Abuse. “For six years of his papacy he has said, ‘zero tolerance, zero tolerance,’ ” he added. “He’s backed down.”
The scenes punctuated the enormous pressures on the pope to forcefully address priestly sexual abuse, a scourge that has for decades devastated some areas of his vast church while in others it has been utterly ignored and denied.
The meeting was potentially a consequential moment for this papacy and the most visible step taken by the Vatican to impress upon bishops and other church leaders — some of them still skeptical — the enormity of a crisis that has shaken the faithful.
Expectations for action were amplified by victims and victim advocates, who converged in Rome to apply pressure from outside the meeting which took place in a Holy See conference hall.
Priest sex abuse scandals have repeatedly emerged around the world even decades after the problem first came to light in the United States, where the systemic shuffling of predatory priests from parish to parish spread abuse like a virus.
A lack of forceful action by the Vatican has disheartened and disgusted many victims and their advocates, who are demanding a policy of zero tolerance and dismissal from the clerical state for abusive priests and the bishops who protect them.
The issue has drastically devalued the moral authority that is the currency of the clergy and Pope Francis, who is often a lonely voice in support of migrants and the poor. As the abuse crisis has festered, critics have asked why anyone should listen to a moral leader unable, or unwilling, to clean up his own house.
On Thursday, addressing the 190 Catholic Church leaders who had gathered from around the world, the pope sought to reassure his flock that “we hear the cry of the little ones asking for justice.”
Still, despite his acknowledgment that people “expect from us not simple and obvious condemnations, but concrete and effective measures,” he offered remedies that disappointed to many victims.
Instead, Francis — who has said he intended the meeting to be a “catechesis,” educating bishops and religious leaders so they could undergo a conversion of spirit on the severity of the crisis — provided those assembled with 21 “reflection points.”
“They are a road map for our discussion,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, said at a news conference.
They included weighing deciding that priests and bishops found guilty of abuse should be dismissed from public ministry, but fell short of what most advocates consider zero tolerance — the automatic dismissal from the clerical state.
“You have to take it on a caseby-case basis,” Scicluna said, promising no blanket remedies.
Advocates for other victims of abuse and secrecy in the church, including for children of priests and for nuns raped by clerics, also came to Rome to meet with top officials and take advantage of the intense media interest.
The meeting itself included the presidents of many of the world’s bishops’ conferences, men’s and women’s religious orders and powerful cardinals from Francis’ committee of top advisers.
The pope, who had initially inspired hopes for action after his election in 2013, placed himself in the ranks of abuse skeptics early last year, when he accused victims of slandering bishops during a trip to Chile.
The outcry from victims was fast and furious. Criticism reached a fever pitch last summer, when the Pennsylvania attorney general released a scathing grand jury report and prelates in Francis’ own hierarchy also accused him of covering up for abusers.
Since last year, Francis has undergone something of a conversion on the issue, admitting errors, asking forgiveness and toughening his stance toward those who covered up the crimes. He has pushed out bishops in Chile and last week defrocked American former Cardinal Theodore Mccarrick.
Francis called for the four-day meeting at the Vatican in September, with the apparent aim of relieving some pressure, but it also increased expectations.
Some bishops have long denied that clerical sex abuse was a problem, or suggested that it existed only in the Anglosaxon world, or was a result of homosexuality in the church, a contention discredited by most scientific studies.