UNITED KINGDOM
Huffington Post
Keith Porteous Wood
Ahead of the first anniversary of his papacy, it’s a good time to review the Pope’s handling of the child abuse crisis, which so plagued the papacy of his predecessor.
Few would dispute that clerical child abuse was the most pressing issue, given that his predecessor’s lamentable performance on this was widely thought to be the main reason that a papal election took place.
The nearest to anything positive in the whole year is the Holy See’s announcement, during the examination of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (surely no coincidence) of the establishment of a Commission on clerical child abuse. A sceptical New York Times editorial announced this as “long overdue”. Associated Press concluded it had been “hastily put together”, an analysis reinforced by the absence of any more detail three months later.
In a wide-ranging interview in the Corriere della Sera on 5 March 2014, the Pope said the following on clerical child abuse:
“Abuse cases are horrific because they leave the deepest wounds. Benedict XVI has been very courageous and opened a path. The [Catholic] Church has moved very far along this path. Possibly more than most. Statistics on the phenomenon of child abuse are astonishing, but they also show clearly that the great majority of abuse takes place within the family and amongst neighbours. The Catholic Church is probably the only public institution that has acted with transparency and a sense of responsibility. No-one else has done more. And yet the [Catholic] Church is the only institution to have been attacked.”
This short passage is remarkable for its aloofness, its shameless attempt to downplay the seriousness of the abuse by drawing invalid comparisons, its solely positive portrayal of the Church’s role, its failure to acknowledge the worldwide clerical child rape on an industrial scale for decades, and probably centuries. His comments are hardly a display of the transparency demanded by the UNCRC.
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