ROME
The New York Times
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
MAY 27, 2014
ROME — Pope Francis says he plans to meet soon with abuse victims to underscore the Vatican’s determination to “press forward” with “zero tolerance” toward clergy accused of abusing minors.
In an off-the-cuff news conference as he returned from the Holy Land on Monday night, the pope spent more than an hour addressing a variety of questions from reporters aboard his plane, on topics like papal retirement and priestly celibacy. He also said the Vatican was investigating three bishops over sexual abuse allegations and had found one guilty. “We are studying the penalty he will have to face,” Francis said. “There are no privileges.”
The pope announced that he would celebrate Mass with eight abuse victims in the small church inside the guesthouse where he lives at the Vatican. The victims, from various countries, including Britain and Germany, will be accompanied by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, one of the eight members of a Vatican commission created last year by Pope Francis to advise him on sex abuse policy. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Tuesday that no date for the meeting had been set.
It will be the first time that the pope meets personally with victims of clergy abuse, a gesture his predecessors Benedict XVI and John Paul II made several times. “The abuse of minors is a very ugly” and “serious” crime comparable to sacrilege, Francis said.
But Joelle Casteix, western regional director of a victims’ organization, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said in a statement that Pope Francis’ personal overture to victims would change nothing and would allow vulnerable children to remain at risk.
“No child rape will be prevented, no abuse cover-up will be prevented and no predator priest will be exposed by anything the pope said today or will do next month,” Ms. Casteix said. “His upcoming and self-serving meeting with victims is more of what we’ve seen for decades: more gestures, promises, symbolism and public relations.”
Bishop Accountability, a private Boston-based group that documents cases of sexual abuse by priests, called the meeting a “welcome and overdue change,” as long as the pope, who “refused to meet with victims of clergy abuse” as archbishop of Buenos Aires, would “open himself to be changed deeply” by the encounter.
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