UNITED STATES
International Business Times
By Zoe Mintz
It would not be an understatement to say Pope Francis has reached rock-star status. His image has graced the covers of Time Magazine, Rolling Stone and even The Advocate, a gay focused magazine. In March, Fortune called the pontiff one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders. Forbes says he is the fourth most powerful person on the globe. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. His approval ratings are sky high. He even helped broker a historic diplomatic deal between the U.S. and Cuba.
But has he lived up to the hype?
“He absolutely lives up to the hype,” Robert Christian, editor for Catholic blog Millennial Journal, told International Business Times in an email. “Francis’ message is not that he’s perfect — it’s that this is who he is: a guy who cares deeply about the poor and vulnerable, who tries to live simply, who tries to build his life around his love of God and others. People can see with their own eyes this is true, and that’s why he is connecting with them.” …
Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis
The clergy sexual abuse crisis — where thousands of priests have been accused of abusing children over a span of 60 years — is arguably the largest problem the modern Catholic Church faces. It is also the area where Pope Francis has been lagging, according to David Clohessy, the national director of SNAP, or the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — a 12,000-member U.S.-based organization representing victims of clergy sexual abuse. He has wanted doctrinal change for just as long. But he is met with the challenge that most advocacy groups have: Dealing with a 2,000-year-old institution that moves at a very slow speed.
Between the ages of 12 to 16, Clohessy has memories of his childhood priest molesting him during overnight skiing, hiking and boating trips. He suppressed the memories for years, he said, until they flooded back in his mid-30s. He later discovered three of his siblings said they were abused as well.
One of those siblings — his younger brother Kevin — later became a priest. When Clohessy went public with his claims in 1992, one of the youth supervisors in his diocese came forward with a list of names of clergy who teenagers told her “made them feel uncomfortable” during overnight trips. One of those names was Kevin’s. He reportedly would get drunk with the boys and make sexual advances. An 18-year-old said Kevin fed him alcohol and carried him to bed.
In 1993, Kevin was removed from his post and entered a treatment program. Church officials said the allegations against him were “inappropriate and serious” but the sexual behavior was “not criminal, in that it did not involve anyone below the legal age of consent.” He was relocated to a different parish. To the best of Clohessy’s knowledge, Kevin is currently working at a funeral home. He was not criminally prosecuted or defrocked.
“With each new pope there seems that there’s more talk, promises and apologies, but little-to-no decisive reform,” Clohessy said. There are roughly 6,400 priests who have been publicly accused of sexual abuse in the U.S. Clohessy suspects there are more who have been protected by their bishops.
It was only in the past six months or so when Pope Francis began speaking about the crisis. In May, he met with sex abuse victims and called the allegations an “ugly crime” akin to performing “a satanic Mass.” In June, Polish Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski was defrocked after a Vatican tribunal found him guilty of sexually abusing minors. During a homily given in July, Francis called for “zero tolerance” of sex abuse by clergy and met with six more victims. In November, he created a panel of clergy and sex abuse victims that will advise the Vatican on child protection policies. They will meet for the first time at the Vatican on Feb. 6-8.
For Clohessy this isn’t enough.
“In so many other areas the pope’s word is all he has. In terms of peace, hunger, inequality — the pope can’t do anything about those things except exhort. He has incredible power with the abuse crisis,” Clohessy said. Catholics, he added, should “judge him by his deeds and not his words in every area of his papacy.”
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