Eurasia Review
By Nimal Fernando
Simon Peter’s latest successor is now in place. Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now known as Pope Francis I, who had been the archbishop of Buenos Aires, follows 265 other pontiffs as the representative of Jesus Christ on Earth.
He will no doubt have to summon all his management skills to deal effectively with more than a few challenges before the Roman Catholic Church.
As the past year and more has made abundantly clear, Catholics worldwide have voiced their unease, if not displeasure, in the church’s handling of the sex abuse by clergy. Catholics in the United States, for instance, tend to view the scandal over sex abuse by clergy as the most pressing issue for their church today, as an early-March poll by the Pew Research Centre showed.
Asked what they thought was the Roman Catholic Church’s most important problem, 34 percent of U.S. Catholics mentioned sex abuse, paedophilia or some other reference to the scandal. Nine percent of the respondents also viewed dishonesty, low credibility and low trust, taken together, as another problem that needs to be addressed.
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