UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
Post by ANTHEA BUTLER
In his ongoing PR mission to rehabilitate the Catholic Church’s image, Pope Francis may have taken a misstep. Today the Pope concelebrated mass with Cardinal Roger Mahony (who cheerfully blogged about it here) on the same day that the United Nations Committee on Convention of the Rights of the Child heard over eight hours of testimony from the Vatican on the ongoing sexual abuse scandal.
Interestingly enough, in the homily from that concelebrated mass, Pope Francis commented, “Scandals in the Church happen because there is no living relationship between God and His word. Thus, corrupt priests, instead of giving the bread of life, give a poisoned meal to the people of god.” No kidding.
For years the Cardinal’s malfeasance handed the people in my former parish of St. Agatha’s in West Los Angeles a poisoned meal, when young girls were molested there during the 1970s. Mahony, who swept much of the Los Angeles abuse scandal under the rug for his own agenda, is exactly the kind of cleric Pope Francis berated in his homily today.
And yet, as Cardinal Mahony reported in his blog, when he talked privately with the pontiff after the Mass, the topic of scandal did not come up—even though Mahony presided over the largest payout to abuse survivors in the Unites States, (660 million, plus a 10 million dollar civil suit). “Most of our conversation focused on the plight of migrants, immigrants, and refugees around the world,” Mahony says.
The same morning of the mass, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi and Vatican representatives were being grilled in Geneva on releasing records relating to sexual abuse around the world. Specific instances on which the commission repeatedly hammered the Vatican representatives included children missing from the Magdalene laundry scandal in Ireland, the issue of corporal punishment of children, and the excommunication of a nine-year-old girl for having an abortion because she was pregnant by her stepfather.
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