UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis is meeting now for three days with Cardinals Sean O’Malley and George Pell. The pope needs now, after over two years of papal foot dragging, to stop playing games on curtailing priest child abusers and on holding bishops accountable. He needs to fund and staff adequately his presently almost illusory abuse advisory commission. The pope also needs to tell Pell emphatically to stop using legal threats to try to intimidate Peter Saunders, and thereby other commission members as well. Inexplicably, other than Marie Collins, the other members seem almost invisible and even indifferent to the abuse Saunders and Collins continue to be subjected to. Francis’ silence now is reminiscent of his earlier failure to stand up squarely and bravely for his two tortured Jesuit confreres in Argentina.
The pope and O’Malley appear to have used a shameful “bait and switch” strategy with Saunders and other abuse commission members. They selected Saunders to meet with the pope to unload privately his abuse survivor stories. Last July, Saunders and five other survivors attended a private Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, where he made the first promise by any pope to hold bishops accountable for preventing sexual abuse by clergy. The pope said, “All bishops must carry out their pastoral ministry with the utmost care in order to help foster the protection of minors, and they will be held accountable.” See Vatican Information Service here.
As Bishop Accountability’s intrepid Anne Barrett Doyle correctly recently indicated, the only meaningful measure of the sincerity of the pope’s historic vow will be whether he removes church officials who fall short of his “utmost care” standard. Disciplining such powerful colleagues as Pell will be politically tough, but for the pope to make good on his promise, accountability must begin at the top. Diocesan bishops cannot be expected to comply with standards that Vatican officials have ignored with impunity.
Then the pope and O’Malley picked Saunders, a devout Catholic, for the abuse commission. After Saunders and others publicly accepted commission membership, the pope and O’Malley farcically told the commission members that the commission will not address “individual cases”. If the commission fails to address individual bishops’ accountability, yes, it is a farce! Thank God the brave Saunders was unswayed by the papal ruse. He has prophetically pursued the individual cases of both Pell and Chile’s Bishop Barros. Amen!
Pope Francis must rebuke Pell and insist that he immediately withdraw his threatening, even menacing, approach to Saunders. The pope should then take this opportunity to launch a review of the evidence of Pell’s harshness towards victims that has emerged in two government inquiries in Australia.
Meanwhile, US bishops are set to hold their last national meeting before Pope Francis’ US visit, the pope and bishops’ 2016 US presidential election strategy appears to be in a “free fall”. Pope Francis, with his seemingly discredited No. 3, Australian Cardinal George Pell, and the pope’s criminally investigated Minneapolis USA Catholic officials, may turn out to be more of a net liability than an net asset, as a supporter for US Republican candidates and their low tax billionaire backers, at least by the time the elections are held in November 2016, given the current negative papal trajectory.
Two new US criminal court proceedings have uncovered revelations relating to child sexual abuse scandals that have significant US national political connections. These cases, as well as the recent overwhelming negative Irish vote on one of the pope’s marriage positions, and the unending public relations miscues of the combative and shameless Pell (with at least some tacit yet shameful papal blessing, it appears), have important and potentially adverse implications for Pope Francis’ upcoming US trip and for his potential effectiveness in helping to elect Republican candidates in next year’s US elections.
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