UNITED STATES
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Grant Gallicho February 7, 2015
Days after Pope Francis instructed the world’s bishops to cooperate with the commission on sexual abuse he established last year, the seventeen-member group met for the first time in Rome. During a press conference at the Vatican this morning, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, spoke about the commission’s work, which will include promoting education about child safety, suggesting best practices to dioceses, and developing methods for measuring compliance with those norms. The commission is “very concerned” with the question of accountability for bishops who fail to protect the vulnerable, O’Malley said, and would recommend consequences in time. He stopped short of suggesting what those consequences might be, but said that there must be a way of dealing with such cases “not in an open-ended way.”
The commission is working on educational programs for church leaders–including seminars for members of the Roman Curia and for newly appointed bishops who visit Rome for episcopal orientation, according to O’Malley. The cardinal also said he is asking every bishops conference to name a person who will serve as a liason between the commission and the local church. In 2011, the Vatican asked dioceses to turn in their child-protection norms. At this point, about 96 percent of dioceses have complied, O’Malley said. The commission will be in touch with the rest. Very few dioceses have not yet developed such norms, according to the cardinal. But more than a few have guidelines that are too “weak.”
O’Malley is urging Catholic funding organizations to include child-protection requirements in their funding-eligibility guidelines–and to help dioceses in poorer countries pay for abuse-prevention training.
Differences across cultures is another aspect of the crisis being examined by the commission. In Africa, for example, “there are issues of abuse that have to be addressed very urgently,” according to Fr. Hans Zollner, another member of the commission, who spoke with Vatican Radio yesterday. Zollner, who heads the Institute of Psychology at the Gregorian University in Rome, mentioned “the abuse of power in a very authoritarian way by bishops and priests, the abuse of women–including religious women–by priests, which is not so frequent in Europe or the United States,” but too common in some parts of Africa. And in some Asian cultures “the public debate on abuse does not take place because in the society at large…sexual abuse is an absolute taboo topic,” Zollner explained.
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