UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Meanwhile, as Pope Francis’s recent interview and what it portends for the direction of the Catholic church continues to be discussed, Kristine Ward of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition (NSAC) points out that what Francis didn’t say also deserves notice. Nothing in his interview touches on the abuse crisis in the Catholic church, which is, as Kris notes, “the largest crisis in the Church since the Reformation.”
Francis did speak, but glancingly, of “wounds” from which the Catholic church is suffering, Kris observes–and the fact that his language about the abuse crisis, to which the coded term “wounds” clearly refers, has to be encoded while he speaks bluntly about abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, speaks loudly and clearly about the way in which the church’s top leaders too often continue approaching (or, better, failing to approach) this subject. As she points out, it’s difficult for pastoral leaders to speak transparently about a crisis in whose mismanagement they themselves have long been “in too deep.”
And right on the heels of the interview, as she also notes, comes a denial from the previous pope, Benedict XVI, that he ever participated in covering up abuse. To which Barbara Blaine of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) replies, “We obviously and vehemently disagree.” And to which Barbara Dorris of SNAP says, “He could not be more wrong.”
Here’s Andrew Sullivan on Benedict the “unrepentant”:
To give some obvious, glaring examples of his complicity: despite sitting on mounds of evidence of the crimes of Marcial Maciel for years, Benedict waited and waited to act, and refused to talk in public about the matter, while Maciel went on to rape even his own son; he also helped give refuge to Cardinal Law, one of the most heinous cover-up artists in the whole disgusting saga; he even personally ensured that the man who raped over 200 deaf boys at St John’s School for the Deaf, Father Murphy, was allowed to retire in peace in the “dignity” of his priesthood. And yet Benedict is still capable of telling his interlocutor: “I never tried to cover up these things.”
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