VATICAN CITY
Boston.com
By NICOLE WINFIELD / Associated Press / March 5, 2014
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis is coming under increasing criticism that he simply doesn’t get it on sex abuse.
Three months after the Vatican announced a commission of experts to study best practices on protecting children, no action has been taken, no members appointed, no statute outlining the commission’s scope approved.
Francis hasn’t met with any victims, hasn’t moved to oust a bishop convicted in 2012 of failing to report a suspected abuser, and on Wednesday insisted that the church had been unfairly attacked on abuse, using the defensive rhetoric of the Vatican from a decade ago.
Victims’ advocates cried foul, saying his tone was archaic and urging Francis to show the same compassion he offers the sick, the poor and disabled to people who were raped by priests when they were children.
‘‘Under Pope Francis the Vatican continues to deny its role in creating and maintaining a culture where upholding the reputation of the church is prioritized over the safety of children,’’ said Maeve Lewis, executive director of the Irish abuse support group One in Four. …
The former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has said that while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he never dealt with a case of sex abuse, and indeed the scandal has yet to explode in Argentina on the scale that it has elsewhere, including recently in neighboring Chile.
But the online database BishopAccountability.org has cited several cases of Argentine bishops siding with abused clerics and imposing gag orders on victims — practices that were common in the U.S. before American bishops changed their tune amid an avalanche of lawsuits.
Terrence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org said it was ‘‘breathtaking’’ that Francis had made the church the victim of the scandal, rather than express sorrow to the hundreds of thousands of victims or acknowledge the complicity of bishops in covering up the crimes.
‘‘It is astonishing, at this late date, that Pope Francis would recycle such tired and defensive rhetoric,’’ McKiernan said in a statement.
The Vatican has in the past decade overhauled its internal procedures to make it easier to oust rapists. But it still has no blanket policy telling bishops to report abusers to police or risk being sanctioned themselves, and to date no bishop has been punished for a cover up. In addition, the harshest penalty the church hands out to abusers is the ecclesial equivalent of firing the priest.
McKiernan called for Francis to remove bishops who enabled abuse, citing St. Louis, Mo., Bishop Robert Finn, who was convicted in 2012 of failing to report suspected child abuse. A group of Catholics from his diocese recently sent a letter to Francis urging Finn to be removed.
McKiernan also questioned the usefulness of the pope’s new commission since bishops’ conferences around the world have already identified best practices. ‘‘What the Vatican needs now is a tough enforcer, not another study group,’’ he said.
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