UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org
Pope Francis has announced he will meet soon with clergy sexual abuse victims, and the Irish Catholic reported on June 26 that the meeting will be held “next week” in Rome, and will include survivors from Ireland, Britain, the United States, and Poland. Reporter Michael Kelly leaves open the possibility that survivors from other countries will also attend.
It is urgent that survivors from Argentina be included in the meeting, for two reasons. First, in the global Catholic Church so powerfully expressed by the papacy of Pope Francis, the sexual abuse of children is a global problem not restricted to the developed world. Second, Argentine survivors asked to meet with Pope Francis when he was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and president of the Argentine bishops’ conference. Unfortunately, Cardinal Bergoglio consistently ignored those requests.
He will no doubt handle his first meeting with survivors in an apparently open and engaging way, but the seriousness of his engagement is in question. In his 21 years as bishop and archbishop, the Wall Street Journal reports, including the years when he headed the Argentine bishops’ conference, he “declined to meet with victims of sexual abuse, according to the victims and a spokesman for the Buenos Aires archdiocese.”
The upcoming meeting will be more effective if the pope includes in it Argentine survivors whose communications he ignored. By inviting these particular survivors, Pope Francis would signal his intention that the Vatican meeting be hard-hitting, and he would immediately improve the grim situation of victims in his home country. Just last year in Argentina, a church attorney defended a cardinal’s deliberate concealment of a prolific abuser, saying the children’s parents should have called the police; and anotherbishop argued in court that a mother who had allowed her son to stay overnight at a priest’s home was partly responsible for the boy’s abuse.
On this page, we profile the Argentine survivors whose inclusion in the Vatican meeting would be beneficial. Each of them sought Pope Francis’s help, and none received a reply. All of them tried to contact the cardinal archbishop in 2002 or later – years when many bishops in the US and Europe disclosed numbers and names of abusive clergy, and when Pope Benedict issued repeated apologies [1, 2, 3, and 4] and met with victims five times, in the US, Australia, Malta, the United Kingdom, and Benedict’s home country, Germany.
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