UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
As April began, I wrote that I agree with Spanish Benedictine theologian Teresa Forcades that, while we welcome positive signs of change in the way Pope Francis is modeling papal ministry now, we must also wait and see how he will deal with the “basic questions.” At the top of the list of those questions is the ongoing crisis in the Catholic church caused by abuse of minors by Catholic religious authority figures.
On that front, the article that Stacy Meichtry and José de Córdoba published in Wall Street Journal* on Sunday is not promising news. As Dennis Coday notes in a summary of this article in National Catholic Reporter yesterday, under the leadership of Cardinal Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) the Argentine conference of Catholic bishops missed a deadline for formulating and implementing guidelines to deal with abuse in the Catholic church in Argentina. The Argentine bishops’ conference does not have a written plan for dealing with abuse.
As Barbara Blaine notes for SNAP, this revelation reinforces the growing sense, among many Catholics watching to see how the new pope will deal with the abuse crisis, that we may be in for the same old, same old behavior of obfuscation and image management with the new pope that we’ve had with other top Catholic leaders for far too long now:
On Friday, the pope said he wanted to “continue” the abuse practices of his predecessor. In a sad and ironic way, by refusing to even write an abuse policy, by saying one thing and doing another, Pope Francis is indeed following the pattern of his predecessor: talking the talk but not walking the walk. . . .
Catholics can feel good about the Pope’s apparently humble and likeable personality and his more down-to-earth demeanor and his professed concern for the poor. But everyone should realize that with the church’s on-going abuse and cover up crisis, he’s the “same old, same old.”
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.