ROME
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on Feb. 09, 2012 NCR Today
ROME — A four-day Vatican summit on the sexual abuse crisis signals “a new baseline”, meaning a new “agreed standard of the Roman Catholic Church” in dealing with the issue, according to one of the participants.
Fr. Brendan Geary, a Scottish member of the Marist order who works in the United States, defined that baseline in the following terms:
•“We start by listening to victims, and we honor their experience.”
•“We’re trying to become leaders in the world in the protection of children, not following behind others.”
•“In the words of Pope John Paul II, there is no place in the Catholic church for those who would abuse children.”
Commitment to those three principles, Geary said, “came across clearly from every part of the world” during the Feb. 6-9 event.
Geary spoke in a session with reporters on the final day of the four-day symposium, titled “Towards Healing and Renewal.” It has been held at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University, in cooperation with several Vatican departments.
Claretian Fr. Paul Smyth stressed that this new baseline did not begin at this summit, but is instead “the fruit of several decades of work” – which doesn’t mean, he stressed, that the job is finished.
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