UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Sadhbh Walshe
theguardian.com, Thursday 10 July 2014
The most promising pope in the modern history of the Vatican had quite the audience this week: Francis spent two days with six people who were sexually abused by priests. He begged their forgiveness, of course, for “an ugly crime” perpetrated by a kind of “sacrilegious cult”. That was pretty bold. But he also made a half-promise: “We must go ahead with zero tolerance”, the pope said on the papal plane, adding that his church should “weep and make reparation”.
As the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his brilliant treatise on another kind of reparations entirely, there is justice, and then there are practicalities; there are reparations, and then there is existentialism. And when you’re running the most existential institution on Earth – the Catholic Church – sometimes you have to get down to details, even if you’re talking basic penance to God, not amends to people. Sometimes you have to stop talking in empty promises and start cleaning house.
His Holiness sure knows how to say he’s sorry for this “sin of omission”, but as David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap) told me on Tuesday, “We don’t need any more symbolic gestures or study panels to make recommendations – we need concrete actions that will protect vulnerable children.”
The past is not just the past, as the church well knows, and if you want evidence that that Francis’s zero-tolerance policy is merely a PR stunt, look back to the pope’s time in Argentina.
Then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was closely involved in the case of Father Julio Cesar Grassi, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of molesting a boy in his care. Details are murky, but Anne Barrett-Doyle, who runs the website Bishop-Accountability.org, which has tracked the case closely, told me this week that Grassi remained free on conditional release until September 2013, when his final appeal was rejected, at least in part because of a private report commissioned by Bergoglio that sought to prove Grassi’s innocence and, according to Barrett-Doyle, to discredit the victims.
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