VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio
[with audio]
(Vatican Radio) Following Pope Francis’ meeting with survivors of sex abuse this week, a leading Catholic child protection expert says the Church is “on track” with its safeguarding policies and is sharing expertise with secular organisations working in the same field.
Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner is a psychology professor at Rome’s Gregorian University and heads its Centre for the Protection of Minors. He also serves as a member of the recently established Vatican Commission on safeguarding and care of abuse victims. On Monday he accompanied two of the six abuse victims who spent almost three and a half hours sharing their stories with Pope Francis following Mass in his Santa Marta residence.
Fr Hans talked to Philippa Hitchen about those encounters, about the work of the Vatican Commission and about the way the Catholic Church is sharing its expertise with others….
The Commission met for the second time on Sunday…..we discussed membership issues, we want to add some members especially from those areas that are not represented now, Africa, Asia, Oceania……we discussed briefly statue issues, we learned that we will have soon an office here and we prepared for the meeting with the victims……
I was present as a translator for the two German victims in the encounter with the Holy Father, I can say it was amazing how much time he took…..and it was even more impressive to see the Holy Father’s reaction and these people’s reaction – all of them came out of the meeting with a sense of deep gratitude that they had been listened to…
I can say the two meetings went quite differently, the first one didn’t talk much about her own experience of the abuse that happened many years ago. She tried to interact with the Holy Father who replied so there was a real dialogue going on in which she explained about her whole journey over decades, what she has suffered from the moment she was abused and, as she said, ‘her soul disappeared from her body’ and then the little steps that helped her come back to herself…….she said Holy Father, you have to do something to help perpetrators not to offend again…
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