UNITED STATES
The Voice of Russia
The issue of underage sex abuse in the Catholic Church is one that the new Pope, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is expected to address and deal with. How he plans to do this is something many want to know. Despite being hailed as a man who stands with the poor backing his own nation, Pope Francis, as he is now known, has had a controversial past with regards to pedophilia.
Critics are saying that even in the most famous cases that found Argentinean priests guilty and landed them in jail, Pope Francis did not do enough to ensure the protection and the elimination of this serious crimes, nor did he do enough to aid the victims after the fact, many say.
With us to discuss this is Anne Barrett Doyle of bishop-accountability.org
Thank you so much for joining me Anne. What does your organization do and how are you seeing it as it unfolds in Argentina? They’ve had some pretty serious articles about it in the Washington Post and in the New York Times that have addressed the fact that there are some things that have been left unset there?
My organization bishop-accountability.org tracks clergy sex abuse data and documents worldwide. We are the largest repository of documents that have been forced out of the Catholic Church for instance as a result of action by victims. And our concern here is simply, you know, we have not by any means thoroughly researched Pope Francis’s record in Argentina. But preliminary indications in just two priests’ cases that are recent suggest that he was very unsympathetic towards victims, and more seriously, did not take proper actions to protect children from credibly accused priests.
You said that your organization works worldwide. Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Latin America, what is that like? Is it kind of where we were in the 1950’es-1960’es?
We simply don’t have a good handle on the public record of the Catholic abuse crisis in Latin America yet. We are quickly fetching researchers to accumulate any information that is in the public domain, from court records to media accounts. But the crisis has not surfaced there to the same extent it has in the US or Europe, Australia or Canada. But we will see in the coming days what exactly exists in the public record about this crisis in Latin America and attempt to quantify how bad the problem is there.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.