UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent
PAUL VALLELY Author Biography Saturday 08 March 2014
No Pope had ever before dared to take the name Francis. And for good reason. St Francis of Assisi was the son of a rich merchant who in the 13th century cast aside his lavish lifestyle, giving away the fine clothes off his back. They called him Il Poverello – the little poor one. But this was more than an embrace of poverty. It was a challenge to what the man who was to become the first Pope Francis has called the “luxury, pride, vanity of the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the time”.
A pope who took the name of the great saint of the poor would be casting down a gauntlet that he, and his church, should be tested against the most demanding of standards. On 13 March, 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio took that name. One year on, how has Pope Francis measured up?
As his attitudes and priorities emerge, it is clear that he wants a church for the poor, that puts mercy before moralising, compassion into action and which embraces rather than excludes. There is still debate about whether the 266th pontiff is doctrinally liberal or conservative. But there is no doubting that he is a radical. It has also become clear that there are three key areas on which he has yet to deliver if he is to fulfil the promise of his chosen name. …
The third challenge is over the institutional church’s complicity in cover-ups of paedophile priests. A recent UN report highlighted tens of thousands of crimes by priestly abusers over several decades in a dozen countries. Francis has an equivocal record on this. In Buenos Aires he took a tough line on abuse, ridiculing the practice in the US, UK and Ireland of simply moving paedophile priests to a new parish. He told fellow bishops in Argentina to remove suspects from active ministry and try them in a church court. But he did not advocate involving the police, which is a key demand of many victims’ groups, and in his time the Argentine bishops missed the Vatican 2010 deadline to create safeguards against new abuse.
In his first year, Pope Francis has not spoken publicly at any length on clerical sex abuse. In private, he has told officials in the CDF to act decisively. He has announced a new Commission on the Protection of Minors. But he has yet to reveal who will sit on it – or what its brief will be. And a papal diplomat recently accused of sexually abusing boys in the Dominican Republic was not reported to the police there; instead, he was recalled to the Vatican for prosecution.
The truth is that the Vatican is split over whether offending priests should be reported to the civil authorities or dealt with by internal Church procedures. But Pope Francis should be in no doubt that the latter will not be enough to satisfy victims, who want to see abusers reported direct to the police. Anything less will see his Church continue to stand in the pillory of public condemnation.
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