UNITED STATES
VICE News
By Keegan Hamilton
March 14, 2014
From the moment he christened himself Pope Francis, the charismatic Argentine Jorge Bergoglio reinvigorated an office that under his predecessors had often been accused of hypocrisy, greed, and the championing of conservative dogma. Over the course of his first year as pope, Francis has spoken out against homophobia, attacked corruption within the Vatican, pushed for a peaceful end to the conflict in Syria, and even amassed millions of followers on Twitter.
But mostly lost amid the fanfare over Bergoglio’s one-year anniversary as pontiff yesterday was a new report that raises troubling questions about his complicity in the sexual abuse scandal that has plagued the Catholic Church for more than a decade.
Earlier this week, BishopAccountability.org released a report entitled “Pope Francis and Clergy Sexual Abuse in Argentina.” The report focuses on Bergoglio’s stint as archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 to 2013, and includes a database with links to public documents and media reports about 42 priests in Argentina previously accused of sexual misconduct. Specifically, the report focuses on five cases of sexual abuse by priests in which it alleges that “Bergoglio knowingly or unwittingly slowed victims in their fight to expose and prosecute their assailants.”
The principal researcher behind the report is Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org. In an interview with VICE News, Doyle described herself as a devout Catholic who was inside the Vatican last year during the papal conclave that elected Bergoglio pope. Doyle co-founded BishopAccountability.org in 2002 amid revelations of sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston, and eventually made her work with the non-profit her full-time job. Prior to focusing on Argentina, the organization published a similar database of priests accused of molestation in America.
“We try to aggregate all public information about the sexual abuse crisis,” Doyle said. “When we suddenly had a pope from Argentina, the first or second question that occurred to us was: How did he manage the sex abuse crisis when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires? He was there 15 years. He was the most powerful Catholic bishop in Argentina.”
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.