CANADA
CBC
By Alison Smith, CBC News Posted: Mar 11, 2014
From the moment he stepped onto the Vatican balcony high above St. Peter’s Square, it was clear there was something different about him.
He wore a plain white robe, a simple cross and offered a casual “Good evening.”
“Buona sera,” he said, and the crowd roared its approval.
In the year since Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, that roar has hardly diminished.
“Rock star Pope takes the world by storm,” says longtime Vatican journalist John Allen. “That’s become the dominant narrative.”
As Allen, who writes for the Boston Globe and works regularly in Rome, points out, the story of the Catholic Church a year ago was scandal — pedophile priests, Vatican bank corruption and gay conspiracies in the Vatican.
Those stories haven’t gone away, Allen say, but Pope Francis now dominates headlines about the Catholic Church. …
But on perhaps the most important issue, the one that has struck at the very heart of the church’s moral authority, Pope Francis has yet to take significant steps.
Late last year, Francis announced a special commission would be set up to deal with the sexual abuse of children by priests. No one has been named to that commission, nor has its mandate been established.
‘Why me?’
Brenda Brunelle, who lives in Windsor, Ont., was abused by a local priest when she was just 13 years old.
A devoted Catholic, she lived with the shame and anger all of her adult life.
“All I wanted to know was: ‘Why me?’ ” she says.
When finally as a grown woman she asked for a meeting with her abuser to help her heal, she was rebuffed.
“And the last statement made to me,” she says, “was that when this particular priest dies, the Vicar General will walk with me to his graveside and assist me with closure at that time.”
That was five years ago and Brunelle hasn’t been back to church since. Closure for her now, she says can only come with real reform.
Children in the church to this day, she argues, are not safe.
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