CANADA
Catholic Register
BY ALAN HUSTAK, CATHOLIC REGISTER SPECIAL
February 18, 2015
MONTREAL – The Roman Catholic Church is moving forward in the aftermath of the devastating child abuse crisis, yet a sense of helplessness around the issue still has to be resolved before the damage can be fully repaired, says a leading clinical psychologist and member of a papal committee examining child abuse.
“The taboo around sexuality in the Church still has to be addressed,” said Dr. Delphine Collin-Vézina. “There have been important changes in the way certain dioceses are dealing with sexual abuse. But the Church is not advancing at a quick pace. But that is because it is a complex issue. Meaningful change takes time.”
The director of the McGill Centre for Research on Children and Families, Collin-Vézina is the only Canadian on an eight-member scientific advisory board invited to Rome to work on a papal committee examining child abuse cases.
The problem of sexual abuse, she says, is not exclusive to the Roman Catholic Church. Part of the problem is that abusers are hard to identify.
“Most of them are normal people, people of trust. You don’t know that they are dysfunctional predators hiding in the bushes. Many of them are otherwise great individuals.
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