the CORPUS Blog: Francis under pressure over his dismissal of alleged clerical abuse in Chile

There were many vivid glimpses of the radical Pope Francis in the week-long swing through Chile and Peru, three of which stay in my mind: the adoring faces of women prisoners in Santiago as he told them never to let their dignity be stolen from them; his call to young people to speak honestly to the Church and not let themselves be filtered by adults; and his powerful denunciation — issued in the company of Amazonian tribespeople in Peru’s Puerto Maldonado – of the “extractivism” of multinationals paying off politicians to let them tear up the rainforest.
There were also history-making moments: the heartfelt apology for clerical sex abuse in the unprecedented context of Santiago’s presidential palace, La Moneda; or when, in Lima, standing alongside the financial scandal-engulfed president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, he linked the destruction of the environment and the mistreatment of the poor to the “virus” of corruption.

And, of course, the by now predictably unscripted moments: marrying two crew members on his Latam flight to Peru (which Francis defended from conservative-canonical critiques), and getting down from his popemobile to lovingly embrace a tiny old woman in the streets of Trujillo, Peru, after seeing her moving cardboard sign: “My name is Trinidad. I am 99 years old. I cannot see. I want to touch your dear hand.” But one ex abrupto came to dominate coverage of his Chile visit. The accusations of a cover-up against a Chilean bishop made by the survivors of abuse were, he told a group of Chilean journalists, a “calumny”.
His remarks horrified victims’ groups and led to a rare papal apology for his choice of words on the flight home. As Cardinal Sean O’Malley, one of his closest advisers, said in a statement that Francis said he agreed with, the remarks had – “understandably” – caused “great pain”. But his insistence on the innocence of Bishop Juan Barros – who appeared at all the Papal masses – was crucial: Francis was determined not to sacrifice a man whom he sees as innocent in order to satisfy public opinion, whatever the cost to his popularity or despite media distraction from his messages. For Francis, the defence of the Gospel taked priority over any communications strategy.
The more profound aim of the visit was to deepen the Church’s commitment to pastoral conversion in order better to respond to the forces of global technocracy that Francis sees as dissolving the culture and humanity of the continent. It is a strategy defined by the Latin-American bishops at their historic Celam gathering in Aparecida, Brazil, which defined the “change of era” and designed a Church response to it that would be capable of meeting the challenge. The paradigm shift this requires of the Church is at the heart of Francis’s reforms as well as his evangelizing strategy, and through Evangelii Gaudium is the plan for the universal Church.
Latin America is key to the strategy – he has now made six trips to the continent, visiting nine nations – for two main reasons. First, as today’s dynamic “source” for the universal Church, the health of Latin American Catholicism matters. Second, unlike rich-world Catholicism, the continent can still draw on its reserves of evangelised popular culture, which Francis refers to in terms of a holy nation, el santo pueblo fiel de Dios, whose traditions were forged in the pre-clerical missionary days of the Spanish colony.
When, at the end of his visit to Peru, Francis gave thanks for being able “to share at first hand the faith of God’s holy, faithful people”, he meant it: popular religiosity is a reserve the Church draws on and needs to reconnect with. But this had been far easier to do in Peru than in Chile, which not only lacks Peru’s santo pueblo fiel but has the world’s highest number of shopping malls per inhabitant, bar only the US and Canada. Chileans these days are mostly middle class, individualistic and secular, and they have responded to the defensive, clericalist mishandling of the scandal of Fr Fernando Karadima with anger.
Chile was, therefore, a good place from which to warn – as he did at La Moneda – of “powerful economic interests” that seek to “prevail over natural ecosystems and, as a result, the common good of our peoples”. With the religious in Santiago’s cathedral, he spoke of the “postmodern” feeling of not belonging, and in a lecture at Chile’s pontifical university, called for a new “integrating literacy” faced with social and cultural liquidity.
In the Peruvian Amazon, he warned against being “ensnared by ideological forms of colonialism, disguised as progress, that slowly but surely dissipate cultural identities and establish a uniform, single, and weak way of thinking”. Later that day, he spoke of the threat of an “anonymous culture, without bonds, without faces, a motherless culture that only wants to consume” – one that mercilessly exploits the earth and the poor.
The call to the Church to meet this challenge, as Aparecida outlined, was a “continental mission” requiring “pastoral conversion”: going out to the margins to those left behind or cast aside by the new economic models. It means coming close to the poor (materially, spiritually) in their concrete needs, and through a proclamation centred on the experience of a loving God, backed by action of charity and justice, to enable an encounter with the divine and a ground-up rebuilding of the bonds of belonging. At the same time, it means rejecting the temptations of clinging to power, status and political alliances, or taking refuge in abstraction and rigidity – the neo-traditionalist response to relativism.
Two of the addresses on this visit were among the finest calls to pastoral conversion yet issued in this pontificate. The first, addressed to clergy and religious in Santiago’s cathedral, was a spiritual masterclass for a Church in desolation, triggered by factors that the rich-world Church is familiar with. The mishandling of the Karadima clerical abuse scandal, the failure to prevent the legalisation of abortion, a well as a fast-moving technological culture, have all left the Chile’s bishops looking and feeling out of touch, inward-looking and irrelevant. The crisis has been all the greater for a Chilean episcopate accustomed to power and influence in a deferential, socially conservative culture, typified by Karadima’s El Bosque parish.
Francis used the example of St Peter in desolation after the Crucifixion to show how Jesus’ love seeks to prevent him from turning inwards, obsessed with his failure and betrayal, paralysed by uncertainty. By embracing its wounds and failures, the Church, too, is set free from trusting in itself and making itself the centre, rather than Christ: “A Church with wounds can understand the wounds of today’s world and make them her own, suffering with them,” he said, charting what is, in effect, a route for Chilean Catholicism, from desolation to humble service. He captured the pastoral conversion in a brilliant phrase: “To know both Peter disheartened and Peter transfigured is an invitation to pass from being a Church of the unhappy and disheartened to a Church that serves all those people who are unhappy and disheartened in our midst.”
Afterwards, with the bishops, Francis was brief but blunt, inviting them to reject clericalism. (“Laypeople are not our peons or employees,” he told them. “They don’t have to repeat like parrots what we say.”) He noted: “A failure to realise that the mission belongs to the whole Church … limits the horizon, and even worse, stifles all the initiatives that the Spirit may be awakening in our midst.”
In Peru, where the Church is far stronger and bigger, the obstacle to its effectiveness is a longstanding internal divide in the episcopate – the legacy of a clampdown on liberation theology by a group of bishops led by Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima.
While urging the bishops to overcome “divisions that create cliques and hamper our vocation to be a sacrament of communion”, Francis in the Archbishop’s Palace again offered a clear map for evangelisation in the figure of Lima’s great saint-archbishop, Toribio of Mogrovejo. He described how St Toribius had spent almost all of his time on foot touring his vast diocese, close to his people, translating the Catechism into Quechua and Aymara, organizing the great Third Council of Lima, founding a seminary and creating unity.
But, in a Church often marked by arguments over the role of justice in evangelisation, Francis could not have been clearer. For St Toribius, “there could be no evangelisation without charity”, and charity required denunciation, not just of error but of corrupt power centres: hence his excommunication in 1585 of a Crown official who exploited the natives, drawing on himself the ire of the viceroy and a “web of interests”. In this way, St Toribius showed that “charity must always be accompanied by justice”, for “there can be no evangelisation that does not point out and denounce every sin against the lives of our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most vulnerable”. In Peru, Francis himself had done precisely that, denouncing human trafficking in Puerto Maldonado and femicide in Trujillo.
As ever, the Argentinian pope embodied the conversion to which he is calling the whole Latin American Church – and now, by extension, the whole Catholic world.
Austen Ivereigh is the author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

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