UNITED STATES
USA Today
David Gibson, Religion News Service
March 20, 2013
Before he became Pope Francis, Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio offered clues to his views on celibacy, on the sexual abuse crisis and on civil unions.
He advocated a zero-tolerance approach to clergy abusers in a 2012 conversation with a leading Latin American rabbi. Bergoglio, then archbishop of Buenos Aires, criticized bishops who attempted to protect the image of the church by covering up abuse and shuffling predatory priests among parishes. The archbishop called that “a stupid idea.”
“You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person,” Bergoglio told Rabbi Abraham Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary. The book-length dialogue with the rabbi will be published in English in May. The passage was translated by Aleteia, a website promoting Catholic evangelization.
He told Skorka that when a bishop once asked him what he should do with priests suspected of molesting children, “I told him to take away the priests’ licenses, not to allow them to exercise the priesthood any more and to begin a canonical trial in that diocese’s court.”
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