Pope Francisco & # 039; Handling cases of sexual abuse fractures a Catholic fortress
Pope Francisco & # 039; Handling cases of sexual abuse fractures a Catholic fortress
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis took over the Catholic Church promising a new style of leadership that would make the Church more open, sincere and dedicated to the vulnerable. His response to the prolonged clerical abuse scandal is undermining those objectives.
Nowhere has the Pope stumbled more than in Chile, which once had one of the highest percentages of Catholics in Latin America. The complaints involve 167 Catholic officials and 178 victims so far. Prosecutors recently raided church buildings, confiscated documents and arrested a prominent priest, placing the abuse scandal in the center of the Pope's home region.
"The future of the church is at stake here," said Juan Pablo Hermosilla, a lawyer from Santiago who represents victims of sexual abuse. "What is happening in Chile is very important for the region, and what happens in Latin America is going to be very important for the church."
Loss of faith
The proportion of Catholics in Chile and in Latin America in general has decreased drastically since 1995.
Under Pope Francis, Chile for the first time is no longer a largely Catholic nation. The decrease in support occurs when the Catholic Church competes with the evangelical churches of Latin America, the bastion of the church.
The crisis of sexual abuse, which abated for a time after Pope Francis became Pope in 2013, was rekindled with a series of new revelations. More than 300 priests in Pennsylvania were accused of sexually abusing more than 1,000 children for decades, in a August report of the grand jury that triggered investigations in other states, as well as by the Department of Justice.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former Vatican envoy to the United States, He accused the Pope in August of ignoring the disciplinary measures imposed on former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for sexual misconduct and making him an important counselor in appointments of bishops in the United States. UU The Vatican this month promised an investigation.
Pope Francis convened a world meeting of bishops, scheduled for four days in February, to discuss clerical sexual abuse.
Greg Burke, the Vatican spokesman, said that Pope Francis has made "combating sexual abuse by the clergy as a priority of his pontificate", denouncing the abuse, advising the victims and promoting efforts to inform the priests abusive to the police and remove them from the ministry.
The defenders of Pope Francis say that criticism of him is unfair because most of the cases that now come to light happened a long time ago. Some say that the abuse scandal has been exploited by people who oppose the Pope's calls for expansive immigration policies, his warnings about economic inequality and global warming, as well as his indulgence regarding divorce.
The Pope has long been cast as a tribune of the people against the oppressive, clerical and secular elites. However, his generally sharp instincts as a communicator have left him at crucial moments of abuse.
In An open letter this summer to the faithful Catholics of the world., the pope suggested that everyone in the church share the responsibility.
Last Friday, Pope Francis He accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Washington, D.C., after criticism of the handling of cases of sexual abuse by the cardinal during his tenure as bishop of Pittsburgh. The Pope also praised the cardinal's leadership.
"He has been ambivalent, confused in sexual abuse, he has never been at the top of his list of priorities," said Paul Vallely, a British journalist and author of "Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism," a biography.
Since 2001, the ecclesiastical law has required bishops to inform the Vatican about any report of sexual abuse of a minor "that has at least an appearance of truth." As archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 to 2013, the future Pope sent only two cases to the Vatican, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Growing doubts
The scandal of sexual abuse of the clergy in Chile has prompted widespread disapproval of the work done by the Catholic Church.
Among US Catholics US, 31% said that Pope Francis was doing a good or excellent job to handle the abuse scandal compared to 62% who said he was doing a fair or bad job, according to a recent survey by Pew Research. That compared to the 55% who saw it positively on the subject in 2015.
"I think very few people have faith that the Catholic Church is solving this problem," said Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, a US organization that tracks abuse cases internationally.
The scandal spreads
Chile became a hot topic in January, when the Pope's trip there drew attention to the victims who accused Bishop Juan Barros of covering up an abusive priest in the 1980s. During his visit, the Pope said the accusations against the bishop, who is under criminal investigation in another case, were defamatory.
Bishop Barros' lawyer, German Ovalle, says the bishop is "absolutely innocent" of the accusations.
Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, a leading papal adviser with a strong record in the fight against sexual abuse in the United States. UU., Publicly reprimanded the Pope for causing pain to the mistreatment of victims by dismissing their claims. The Pope apologized, but repeated the defamation charge on his flight back to Rome.
The Pope also said that the Chilean prosecutors had never approached him with their complaints of abuse. Two weeks later, it was revealed that Cardinal O'Malley had given the Pope a detailed letter from a victim more than two years earlier.
In March 2015, protesters surrounded Reverend Juan Barros, in the center on the left, in a cathedral for the Bishop's Ascent ceremony in Osorno, Chile.
Photo:
Mario Mendoza Cabrera / Associated Press
Pope Francis in April acknowledged "grave errors" in a letter to the bishops of Chile, following a Vatican investigation of Bishop Barros. Instead of submitting the bishop to trial under church law, he accepted his resignation.
In all, the Pope has accepted the resignations of seven bishops in Chile and has expelled several prominent priests..
The criminal investigation in Chile has shaken up the national chapter of the Marists, a Catholic religious order that runs 12 schools there. Victims accuse church officials in some of the schools of hunting children for decades.
"There was a system of impunity that allowed this to happen," said Emiliano Arias, a prosecutor who led a raid on church offices in four cities in September. "I'm sure there are more cases."
Gonzalo Dezerega, a 53-year-old businessman in Santiago, said he has debilitating memories of being sexually abused when he was a 10-year-old boy in a school run by Marists. After each incident, Dezerega said, her abuser knelt and prayed, calling the child a sinner, but assuring him that God forgave him. The sins, they told the boy, must be kept secret.
"I remember that I cried and asked the Lord: 'Why me, why did this happen to me, God?'" Said Mr. Dezerega, who recently told his family.
Gonzalo Dezerega visits the sacristy of a school run by the Marists in Santiago, Chile, a room where he said he was sexually abused as a child.
Photo:
Tamara Merino for The Wall Street Journal
Eneas Espinoza said he was abused in the 1970s at the Alonso de Ercilla Institute, a Marist school in downtown Santiago. Prosecutor Raúl Guzmán has identified 26 suspects and 40 victims in cases dating from 1968 to 2016.
Mr. Espinoza, 45, remembered his school as hell. A Marist brother from Spain would take him out of class and sexually abuse him, said Mr. Espinoza. Later, the brother would order the 6-year-old boy to brush his teeth.
As an adult, Mr. Espinoza said, he associated brushing with abuse and avoided it, losing most of his teeth.
In September, a canonical investigation conducted by the Vatican concluded that the accusations of abuse in Marist schools were credible. The congregation said that two of its members have confessed. A prominent cleric, who has denied accusations of abuse, was one of those expelled by Pope Francis.
A representative of the Marist branch of the Marist order of Chile said that schools now have policies to prevent abuse and that they are "absolutely safe" for children.
Surveys show that scandals have a role in Chileans away from the Catholic Church. In August, 46% of respondents identified themselves as Catholics, according to the Cadem survey, compared with 63% in 2017; About three-quarters of Chile's population in the 1990s were identified as Catholic. The survey also found that 96% of Chileans believe that the church concealed or protected clergy accused of sexual abuse.
Eduardo Rozas, 54, said she was a young victim of abuse in one of the Marist schools in Chile.
Photo:
Tamara Merino for The Wall Street Journal
Isaac Givovich, 38, said he was sexually abused when he was 6 years old by a Marist brother in Santiago.
Photo:
Tamara Merino for The Wall Street Journal
"The church knows better than anyone that it has been wrong," President Sebastián Piñera said at a mass last month to commemorate Chile's independence day.
At first
In 2013, when Pope Benedict XVI became the first pontiff to resign in almost six centuries, the world's cardinals met in Rome to choose a successor to drive the changes after several scandals of corruption and mismanagement. Addressing the growing crisis of clerical sex abuse was also considered urgent, particularly in the English-speaking world.
From the moment the new pope came to the San Pedro lodge on the night of March 13, the focus was on Pope Francis as the first pope in Latin America, a leader with a very informal style that softened the teachings on the sexuality. and medical ethics identified with its predecessor to focus on poverty, migration and the environment.
The new pope spoke little of the crisis of sexual abuse during his first year. He expressed his impatience with critics on the subject and told an interviewer in early 2014: "The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution that has acted with transparency and responsibility. Nobody else has done more. And yet, the church is the only one attacked. "
Some people say that the Pope has had a blind spot on clerical sexual abuse since he was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in his country of Argentina.
"In my diocese it never happened to me," Cardinal Bergoglio said in an interview published in 2010, referring to cases of clerical pedophilia. In another book, he suggested that his archdiocese successfully filter out candidates for priesthood who could abuse children.
The Argentine priest Julio César Grassi, on the left, poses with the children of the national charitable foundation Happy Kids in March 2000.
Photo:
PHOTOGNOSOURCE / TNS / ZUMA PRESS
When the victims of abuse became public in Argentina, he refused to meet them. In 2006, as head of the conference of Argentine bishops, he denounced what he called a media campaign against the Rev. Julio Grassi, founder of a well-known orphanage who was accused of abusing children under his care. Father Grassi was finally sentenced to 15 years in prison, a verdict confirmed last year by the supreme court of Argentina.
In March 2014, the Pope established an advisory panel on child protection, at the behest of Cardinal O'Malley of Boston. The panel included two prominent victims of abuse who became defenders, which raised the hope of greater influence of the laity. The panel proposed a special tribunal to try bishops accused of covering up or neglecting abuse by priests.
The Pope accepted the recommendation and the Vatican announced the decision in 2015.
The court was not established. Instead, the pope amended the church's law the following year to specify that the negligence of bishops in cases of abuse was grounds for dismissal.
The change of opinion of the pope was a disappointment to Marie Collins, a known victim of sexual abuse by officials who served on the advisory panel. She resigned last year, complaining about the Vatican's inaction, and was joined by Peter Saunders, another member of the panel who had been the victim of abuse.
The Pope told reporters that he had spoken with Mrs. Collins and heard their concerns. Ms. Collins said they did not have such a conversation.
"He has done nothing to restore confidence to the people that the church has control over this issue," Collins said. "He has made these statements about zero tolerance and then zero tolerance has not operated."
Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean victim of sexual abuse, remains hopeful. In the meetings of this spring in the residence of the Pope, Mr. Cruz said that the pontiff was sincere in wanting to face the crisis.
Dezerega, the Chilean businessman who suffered abuse as a child, said he looked forward to the changes of Pope Francis. "We want a new and clean church," he said, "without criminals."
Sunday Mass at the Catholic Parish Our Lady of the Rosary in Santiago de Chile.
Photo:
Tamara Merino for The Wall Street Journal
Write to Francis x rocca in francis.rocca@wsj.com and Ryan Dube in ryan.dube@dowjones.com
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