Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston wants to see a report from the Vatican detailing who knew what and when about Theodore McCarrick, once among the most influential men of the Church in the United States – and, as of last Saturday, an ex-priest found guilty of sexual sins with both minors and adults.
After meeting with victims of sexual abuse on Friday, the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See affirmed its support of Pope Francis’ efforts to rid the Catholic Church of abuse.
As a Vatican summit on the protection of children from clerical sexual abuse rolls on, in Pope Francis’s native Argentina two cases of priestly sexual misconduct close to him continue to develop.
Over the years, the Vatican has demonstrated a fairly remarkable capacity from a PR point of view to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory – striving to offer the world good news about the pope and the Church, only to find a way to step on that story and turn it into something else.
As part of Pope Francis’s high-stakes summit on clerical sexual abuse this week at the Vatican, during Thursday’s opening session he released a list of 21 “points for reflection”- including a couple that didn’t necessarily sit well with abuse survivors, who say they fall short of the Catholic Church’s pledge of zero tolerance.
Cardinal Blase Cupich defended on Thursday, Feb. 21, the “dramatic drop” in clergy sex abuse cases in the United States since the U.S. bishops enacted a zero tolerance policy against abusers in 2002.
Church leaders were warned not to blame the outside world for the Church’s abuse crisis and that “the enemy is within.”
Concrete, effective actions and courage, not merely “simple condemnations,” is what Pope Francis said he’s expecting from a Feb. 21-24 Vatican summit on clerical abuse that opened Thursday morning.
Arguably few countries in the world have faced the scope of the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis as has Australia. The president of the country’s bishops’ conference believes that the only way to understand the drama is to speak with survivors, whom he compared to Jesus crucified.
If a high-stakes summit this week on the clerical sexual abuse crisis is to succeed, a leading Australian prelate says, it will require a “Copernican revolution” in Catholic culture with survivors, not clergy, directing the Church’s response.
