VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis ended a landmark Vatican meeting on clerical sexual abuse with an appeal “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors,” which he compared to human sacrifice, but his speech did not offer concrete policy remedies demanded by many of the faithful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/world/europe/pope-vatican-sexual-abuse.html
In the speech at the end of a Mass in the Apostolic Palace’s frescoed Sala Reggia hall, Francis argued that “even a single case of abuse” in the Roman Catholic Church — which he said was the work of the devil — must be met “with the utmost seriousness.” He said that eradicating the scourge required more than legal processes and “disciplinary measures.”
“To combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission,” the pope said, the church needed to protect children “from ravenous wolves.”
Faithful Catholics — especially those in the United States and other countries that have grappled with the problem for years — had demanded more than homilies: They wanted action that would hold their leaders accountable, once and for all.
They did not get it from the pope’s speech.
But church officials have hinted that concrete policy changes were on the horizon, especially on issues of transparency and bishop accountability that were discussed during the meeting.
Pope Francis had sought to get the church’s leaders on the same page for the first time, summoning them to the meeting in September, decades after the sexual abuse crisis first exploded in the United States. He sent a message to his bishops and the faithful that he, too, wanted concrete remedies to come out of the meeting.
After the pope’s speech on Sunday, the Vatican announced several forthcoming measures, including one that church officials described as toughening up child protection laws in the Vatican City-State itself.
Another was what the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, called a “very brief” handbook for bishops to “understand their duties and tasks” on cases of sexual abuse and the introduction of a new task force of experts and canon lawyers to assist bishops in countries with less experience and resources to handle the issue.
But when asked about the measures on Sunday, the Vatican acknowledged that all had already been in the pipeline well before the meeting began on Thursday, and Father Lombardi said that none included any input from the four-day meeting.
Instead, Vatican officials focused on the spiritual evolution of bishops and the importance of getting them all on the same page in tackling sexual abuse.
“At the end of the day, it is the change of heart that is important,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s leading sex-crimes investigator, said Sunday afternoon. The Rev. Hans Zollner, another leader in the church’s efforts to safeguard children, added that the church had made a “leap” forward in getting at the “systemic roots” of the scandal. But he said it would take more time and energy to “turn a big ship around.”
The Catholic Church has been devastated and the very legacy of Francis’ papacy has been threatened amid a cascade of civil investigations into clerical sexual abuse and accusations from within his own hierarchy that he had covered up the misconduct of a top prelate, Theodore McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington who has been defrocked.
High-profile cases involving the negligence by bishops, the abuse of nuns and other misconduct added to the pressure on Francis to do more than just speak about ending the crisis — albeit with harsh words.
On Sunday, he compared the abuse of minors to “sacrificing human beings, frequently children, in pagan rites.”
“Consecrated persons, chosen by God to guide souls to salvation, let themselves be dominated by their human frailty or sickness and thus become tools of Satan,” he added. “In abuse, we see the hand of the evil that does not spare even the innocence of children.”
Francis, however, had sought to tamp down expectations about the Vatican meeting, fostered by some of his own bishops, that the conference would deliver concrete remedies to end the scourge. He said the meeting had been intended to educate all the bishops on the gravity of the problem of sexual abuse; many were skeptical about such cases in their home countries.
Some advocates for abuse survivors considered the pope’s remarks a failure.
“Pope Francis’ talk today was a stunning letdown, a catastrophic misreading of the grief and outrage of the faithful,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, a leader of BishopAccountability.org. “As the world’s Catholics cry out for concrete change, the pope instead provides tepid promises, all of which we’ve heard before.”
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