On Sunday the clerical abuse crisis came to the Oscars. The award for Best Picture went to Spotlight, the film about the Boston Globe’s investigation of clerical abuse cover-up. In his acceptance speech the producer of the film, Michael Sugar, called on Pope Francis to “protect the children and restore the faith”.
It is not necessarily a bad news story for the Church. The Boston Globe investigations took place in 2001-2. Since then the US Church has adopted stringent child protection guidelines that have been widely praised by campaigners and lawyers representing victims. Yet the film’s release has coincided with a stream of stories that still cast the Church as the villain when it comes to child abuse. And, while some of these stories are unfair, others have claimed a lack of sensitivity from the man who, two years ago, declared an era of “zero tolerance” towards abusers: Pope Francis.
In the early days of Francis’s pontificate it seemed as if the Vatican had at last put the abuse crisis to rest. In 2014 the new Pope set up the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, led by Cardinal Seán O’Malley of Boston, possibly the Church’s foremost authority on the subject. In a bold gesture of transparency, the panel included two abuse survivors, Peter Saunders and Marie Collins, who had been vocal critics of the Church’s handling of the crisis.
But since then some have claimed that Pope Francis has shown little appetite for confronting the issue. The much-trumpeted commission has run into curial resistance. And the Pope’s biggest supporters have expressed dismay at his handling of the subject. His most controversial move was the decision to appoint Bishop Juan Barros, who was embroiled in a cover-up scandal, to lead the Diocese of Osorno in Chile. The decision created great anger in the country. Protesters disrupted his installation.
Paul Vallely, author of Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism, suggests Francis stood by Bishop Barros because of his wariness about false accusations. “Those close to Francis have told me that, though he has a detestation of abuse, he is also wary of false accusations being made against priests,” he said in a speech in Warwick last month. The Pope met the bishop privately and was assured of his innocence – and that was that.
Given Francis’s vocal hatred of gossip it is easy to appreciate why he is so hesitant to act rashly, especially when so much is at stake for the person who stands accused.According to Vallely, among those urging the Pope to think again about Bishop Barros were several members of the child protection committee. Cardinal O’Malley apparently passed on their anxieties to the Pope, who continued to stand by the bishop.
In other ways, too, the commission has ended up being sidelined. According to Vallely, it was “starved of finance” and its press releases were “doctored and diluted”. John Allen, a commentator at Crux, pointed out that training for newly appointed bishops on how to handle abuse allegations has yet to take any guidance from the Pope’s panel. Allen wrote: “What’s the point of creating a commission to promote best practices, and putting one of the Church’s most credible leaders on the abuse issue, Boston Cardinal Seán O’Malley, in charge of it, and yet not having it address the new leaders who will have to implement those practices?”
Commission member Peter Saunders expressed increasingly vociferous criticism, until his departure from the panel last month. Pope Francis had not even attended any meetings, he complained. According to Vallely, the Vatican is embroiled in a wider civil war on the subject. He notes: “On one side are reformers who want public accountability for paedophile priests and the bishops who oversee them.
“On the other side are members of the Roman old guard whose instinct for cover-up continues. This second group is surreptitiously doing everything it can to undermine the Pope’s reform agenda. And opposition is at the highest levels.” But Francis has proved that he is not afraid of the Vatican machine and has famously taken on the Curia in the past. On this occasion, he needs to again side clearly with the reformers so that he can confidently say he is doing all he can to “protect the children and restore the faith”.
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