The Tablet
The Pope was chided by the head of his own sex abuse commission, Cardinal Seán O’Malley. He apologised but survivors of abuse reacted vehemently. “Pope Francis is no different from popes before him. When it comes to his brother priests, Francis protects them at the cost of heaping pain and shame upon victims,” said Mary Dispenza, a former nun who says her parish priest raped her when she was seven years old.
Francis’ instincts on sex abuse have never felt sure. A few months after his election in March 2013, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) issued a scathing report on the Church’s handling of paedophile priests. Pope Francis hit back swiftly, complaining in an interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, that when it came to putting in place guidelines to protect children, “The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility”. He added: “No one else has done more. Yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked.” More children were abused by family members than by priests, he said.
The new Pope’s response sounded ill-judged and out of touch. Instead of apologising for priests’ sins, he sounded defensive; a new man reading from the same old script. Perhaps he was badly briefed, or his phrasing was clumsy. But to some it confirmed, in the words of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), that he had “an archaic, defensive mindset that will not make kids safer”.
Tackling the abuse issue certainly has not seemed a very high priority for Francis. After his election, he moved swiftly to act on evangelisation, Vatican finances, curial reform, synodical government, the refugee crisis and the treatment of the poor in the globalised economy. But it took him over a year to set up his Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors – following months of pressure from Cardinal O’Malley, who became its chairman. The appointment of members was slow and its cash was restricted by the Vatican’s finance chief, Cardinal George Pell.
Its chairman told members at the first meeting in May 2014 that there was stiff resistance within the Curia to its creation. Vatican departments then jockeyed to control the new body, which was charged with recommending new systems across the Church, to prevent abuse and its cover-up.
A year later, in June 2015, the commission made a number of recommendations, which Pope Francis accepted in full. The world’s bishops were told that they had a duty to report child abuse to three key Vatican departments. A new body was to be set up inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to bring to trial bishops who failed to report abusers – and the Pope gave it authority to sack bishops.
But the initiative has produced no obvious results, while the only abuse survivors on the commission have left. One of them, Peter Saunders, was suspended and his term has now ended; the other, Marie Collins, resigned in March 2017, declaring her frustration at “the low priority being given to this issue of child protection despite the assurances so often given by the pope and others that it has the highest priority”. According to Saunders, Pope Francis, who had personally attended meetings on Vatican finances, “did not go to one single meeting of the commission until after the survivors – Marie Collins and me – had gone”.
The mandate of the commission expired last December. One month on, a new one, and new members, have not been announced, although the Pope has promised that they will be, soon. “My reading of Francis is that he is a genuinely compassionate and intelligent man who is deeply committed to this,” one commissioner, who may or may not be reappointed, told me. By contrast, Saunders, who does not expect to be invited to return, says: “The Pope seems always to be dragging his feet.”
It is more complicated than that. There are cultural problems. As early as May 2014 the Pope had endorsed the commission’s discussions of the need for “zero tolerance”, not just of abusers but also of those who cover up for them. But then, in January 2015, he appointed Mgr Barros as Bishop of Osorno, despite allegations from three survivors that the bishop had witnessed their abuse by his charismatic spiritual director, Fr Fernando Karadima, who has now been unmasked as a serial abuser. Barros denied the accusation and Francis, after reading all the papers in the case, decided to override the objectors.
Four members of the commission – two psychiatrists, Baroness Sheila Hollins and Dr Catherine Bonnet, and the two abuse survivors, Collins and Saunders, flew to Rome to express their concern. In Chile, outraged demonstrators invaded the bishop’s installation. Last month, the protests increased when Francis publicly embraced Bishop Barros and allowed him to concelebrate at the largest public Mass of the papal trip to Chile. “I don’t think Francis understands what zero tolerance means,” Saunders says. “You cannot make someone like Barros a bishop and say you are following a following a policy of zero tolerance.”
Hollins offers a more nuanced view. “There’s a cultural gap with a lot of different understandings of what zero tolerance means,” she says. “Pope Francis’ view is that nobody, however high, if they are guilty, will be exempt from the law.” But survivors from English-speaking countries tend to think that zero tolerance means that no one under suspicion should be promoted.
There are other divergences. Members from different cultures have different understandings of the complex therapeutic notion of moving from “victim” to “survivor”, with some dismissing it as political correctness.
There are also differences on issues of due process. “The key question for the commission is, ‘Have those who made the allegations against Bishop Barros had a fair hearing?’” says Hollins. “That’s what the Pope meant when he said: ‘Show me the proof’. Trial in the media is not proper process. There must be an adequate set of procedures. The question is, Have they been followed?, and, if not, can we find out what the problem is? Proper procedures are what the Church is trying to put in place.”
Outgoing members of the commission insist that calling on the Pope to dismiss individuals is an “off-with-their-heads” response, which won’t help in the long term. What is needed is the introduction across the entire Church of watertight, transparent and independently-monitored policies and processes – and a long-term education programme to change hearts as well as minds.
Saunders is impatient with that, which is why the rest of the commission lost patience with him. He points out that the principal Chilean victim, Juan Carlos Cruz, has sent full documentation about his allegations against Bishop Barros to Chile’s papal nuncio. He adds: “The Vatican has accepted the guilt of Karadima. Yet those who were witnesses to that were also witnesses to Barros’ cover-up. Why are they believed in the one case but not the other?”
There are deep psychological factors at work here. Some have assumed that individuals like Barros are beneficiaries of Francis’ insistence on “mercy”, which has been a central theme of his pontificate. But the Pope revealed last month that he has refused pardon to a score of priests found guilty of child abuse by church courts. Others have looked to the Pope’s earlier life and to exaggerated allegations that Jorge Mario Bergoglio betrayed two Jesuits during Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1980s.
Ariel Dorfman, the Latin American playwright and human rights activist, last month criticised “Francis’ offensive and counter-productive defence of Barros” and opined: “It seems probable, then, that the Pope saw in Barros a reflection of his own experience – someone who believes he has been falsely indicted, but is unable to clear his name, who feels he has been a target of malicious left-wing and anti-clerical activists determined to stain the reputation of an innocent man.”
What seems more likely is that for Pope Francis the Barros case carries unhappy echoes of his own record of handling clerical abuse allegations when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. In conversation with his rabbi friend, Abraham Skorka, in 2010, the then Cardinal Bergoglio suggested that sex abuse was not a problem in his time in Argentina. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests contradict this. SNAP claims that at least five victims of paedophile priests had approached him and were ignored, rebuffed or refused meetings, being sent away with rosaries blessed by Pope John Paul II.
The database of the campaign group BishopAccountability.org, over the two decades of Bergoglio’s time as a bishop, lists 43 alleged predator priests in Argentina. Fr Guillermo Marcó, who for eight years was the cardinal’s press spokesman, has insisted: “There were no sex abuse cases in Buenos Aires when Bergoglio was archbishop,” saying the two most infamous cases occurred outside his jurisdiction.
But two facts are indisputable. During Bergoglio’s time as president of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, the organisation missed the Vatican’s 2010 deadline to create safeguards against new abuse. And Argentina’s most notorious predator priest, Fr Julio César Grassi, who ran a national charity to shelter street children, claimed that throughout his long criminal trial, Archbishop Bergoglio “never let go of my hand”, adding: “He’s at my side, like always.”
The future Pope defended Grassi, complaining of a “a media campaign” against the celebrity priest. He commissioned and financed a lengthy private report, arguing that Grassi was innocent, which was submitted as part of his defence in a six-year appeal process. Eventually, in 2013, after his third appeal was rejected, Grassi was jailed for 15 years for aggravated sexual assault and corruption of minors. “Grassi continued to insist he was innocent,” Fr Marcó told me for my biography of Pope Francis, “and Bergoglio thought that one should believe in his innocence. Bergoglio was always very firm when there was any suspicion that a child had been abused: he supported the family and avoided cover-up. But he also believed that a presumption of innocence is essential.”
Pope Francis has not altered that view. More recently, one cardinal who is close to Francis, after discussing sex abuse with him, told me that in private conversation “the Pope clearly enunciated four principles – that victims should come first; that robust procedures must be put in place throughout the Church to protect children; that the Church should cooperate with the civil authorities to bring offenders to justice; and that there should be fairness for priests, to prevent false accusations.” The fear is that, with his accusations that the accusers of Bishop Barros are guilty of calumny, Pope Francis has revealed that, for him, the fourth of those principles trumps the first.
Psychiatrists and psychologists suggest that denial is a key factor at all levels in cases of abuse. It is often only when an abuser father dies that it emerges he was abusing his daughters, all of whom were keeping “Daddy’s Little Secret” – out of love, loyalty, shame, fear or a mixture of all that. “The disciples of Fr Karadima may have been trapped in a similar ‘family dynamic’; that is very common with abuse,” one expert says. “Perhaps the Pope is locked into that dynamic, too. His tears with survivors are genuine. But he has his own blind spots. All this is not an intellectual thing. The Pope does get it. The question is, ‘Does he get it quite enough?’”
The Pope’s apology, after he was publicly rebuked by Cardinal O’Malley, was confusing. He did not resile from the accusation of calumny, but only said sorry for upsetting the abused by using the word “proof” when he should have said “evidence”.
He clearly came to see this was nowhere near enough. On Tuesday the Pope dispatched one of the Vatican’s most experienced investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna – a former top prosecutor of sexual abuse crimes under Pope Benedict XVI – to examine the Barros case.
He has a lot of ground to recover. As Peter Saunders put it: “Francis is now implicated in covering up sex abuse. He seems to be no different from those other senior clerics who prefer to avoid, to cover up, and to hope it will go away. In some ways he is worse. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI didn’t actually attack survivors in the way Francis has done. I feel let down because he’s not the man I thought he was. The Church should be leading the way and not dragging its feet. Pope Francis has done himself terrible harm with this.” It is to be hoped that by sending a Archbishop Scicluna to Chile to investigate the Pope may have mitigated that damage. A lot will be riding on the outcome.
Paul Vallely is the author of Pope Francis: Untying the Knots – The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism (Bloomsbury).
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