Survivors of abuse by Catholic priests are mobbed by the media in the Vatican

By Sara Malm
Daily Mail
February 18, 2019

https://dailym.ai/2T1A3DU

Peter Isely, from Milqaukee, Wisconsin, led a group of victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy who have have descended on Rome to protest the Church's response to the crisis

Speaking out: Francesco Zanardi, from Italy, Denise Buchanan, from Jamaica, and Marek Lisinski, from Poland, all suffered sexual abuse by Catholic priests

Leona Huggins, a victim and a member of the worldwide association Ending Clergy Abuse Global, reacts to the press conference of the Vatican in front of St. Peter's Square

Speaking out: Ms Huggins and two other female victims of clergy sex abuse from Canada pose with their country's flag in St. Peter's Square

Victims and activists of the clergy sexual assault and members of the worldwide association ECA Global, wait for the press conference of the Vatican in front of St. Peter's Square

The survivors group have rejected reports that Pope Francis is 'facing resistance' from top Vatican officials ahead of the summit, saying it is nothing compared to their suffering

Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy have descended on Rome to protest the Church's response to the crisis ahead of Pope Francis' summit on the issue this week.

The organizers of Pope Francis' summit will meet this week with a dozen abuse victims  later this week, officials said Monday. 

Revelations in many countries about priests raping and committing other kinds of sexual abuse against children and a pattern of bishops hiding the crimes have shaken the faith of many Catholics.

Abuse survivors will not be addressing the summit of church leaders directly, but will meet with the four-member organizing committee to convey their complaints.

The larger summit of some 190 presidents of bishops' conferences from around the world, plus key Vatican officials, begins Thursday.

Peter Isely, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, addressed reports that Pope Francis is 'facing resistance' from top Vatican officials ahead of the meeting.

'Let me tell you what it was like to try and have to resist that priest when I was a boy who was sexually assaulting me,' Isely, a founding member of the advocacy group Ending Clergy Abuse, said. 

'So whatever difficulty for him or discomfort this is for anybody in the papal palace, it is nothing compared to what survivors have had to undergo.'

Another founding member of the group, Denise Buchanan, a native of Jamaica, said a priest raped and assaulted her when she was 17.

'That rape actually resulted in a pregnancy, and the priest arranged for an abortion,' Buchanan said.

Survivor advocates also have demanded that Francis say what he and other top Vatican officials knew about the prelate's sexual wrongdoing, which spanned decades.

'You abuse a child, you have to be removed from the priesthood,' Isely said. 'If you cover up for abusing a child, you have to be removed from the priesthood, and this is the only thing that is going to turn the corner on this global crisis.'

At a press conference Monday, organizers called the summit a 'turning point' in the church's approach to clergy sex abuse. 

The Catholic Church has long been criticized for its failure to hold bishops accountable when they covered up for priests who raped and molested children.

They said the summit would focus on three key aspects of dealing with the crisis: making bishops aware of their own responsibilities to protect their flocks, the consequences of shirking those responsibilities, and the need for transparency.

Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's leading sex crimes investigator and an organizer of the meeting, said transparency was key, since the church's knee-jerk response of denial and silence in the past had only exacerbated the problem.

'Whether it's criminal or malicious complicity and a code of silence, or whether it's denial or trauma in its very primitive state, we need to get away from that,' he told reporters. 'We have to face the facts.'

Chilean abuse victim Juan Carlos Cruz, who is coordinating the survivor meeting, told The Associated Press he hopes for a 'constructive and open dialogue' and for summit members to convey survivors' demand that bishops stop pleading ignorance about abuse.

'Raping a child or a vulnerable person and abusing them has been wrong since the 1st century, the Middle Ages, and now,' he said.

Francis called the summit in September after he himself discredited Cruz and other Chilean victims of a notorious predator priest. Francis was subsequently implicated in the cover-up of Theodore McCarrick, the onetime powerful American cardinal who just last week was defrocked for sexually abusing minors as well as adults.

Francis has urged participants to meet with abuse victims before they came to Rome, to both familiarize themselves with victims' pain and trauma and debunk the widely held idea that clergy sex abuse only happens in some parts of the world.

Survivors will be represented at the summit itself, but only in a few key moments of prayer.

Summit moderator the Rev. Federico Lombardi said he would gladly receive any written messages from other survivors, expressing an openness to hear from a broad cross-section of victims.

Cruz said the key message for the bishops to take away from the summit is that they must enforce true 'zero tolerance' or face the consequences.

'There are enforceable laws in the church to punish not only those who commit the abuse but those who cover it up,' he told the AP. 'No matter what rank they have in the church, they should pay.'

Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, another conference organizer, agreed.

'There is going to be every effort to close whatever loopholes there are, to make sure that people understand on an individual basis as bishops what their responsibilities are,' he said. 'Because they are going to be held accountable.'