UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis can no longer project to the world an image that is merely a mix of a winning smile, sound bites and Tweets, public relations photo ops, media focused trips and vague pronouncements on capitalism and climate change, all seemingly amplified by outlets of opportunistic billionaires like Rupert Murdoch that appear to need papal support with fundamentalist voters to elect ‘low tax” politicians.
Reality has overtaken the pope’s non-stop 24/7 image making. The pope’s meager two year record makes clear that protecting children from abusive priests and their complicit bishops, and administering justice to abuse survivors, were always and still are much lower priorities than protecting cardinals from prosecutors and Vatican wealth from survivors’ lawyers.
Francis has failed spectacularly as pope, as he did in Argentina as cardinal, to protect children from abusers and to give justice to survivors. He is continuing to fail to meet this top challenge, as two current events confirm.
The pope has now let his top adviser, Cardinal George Pell, use public legal threats to bully prophetic Peter Saunders. The pope himself, after an intensive one one one private meeting, selected Saunders as his personal choice as an abuse survivor member of the pope’s farcical “go slow and lightly” priest child abuse commission. The pope must now, out of basic human decency, stand by his choice of Peter Saunders, who has already suffered too much from clerical abuse. Instead, the Jesuit pope and his Jesuit mouthpiece, Fr. Lombardi, have shamefully failed to do so.
The pope has also let his Archbishop of Milwaukee continue to behave with cruelty to abuse survivors, including some of the 200 deaf victims sexually abused as children by a single priest, as Fr. Tom Doyle recently noted here. The Archbishop reportedly continues, in effect, to dissipate scarce resources on his lawyers’ stonewalling efforts over the $50+ million of Archdiocesan cash that the Vatican let Cardinal Timothy Dolan earlier bury in a cemetery trust, evidently to make it unavailable for desperate survivors’ just claims.
The pope could likely with a phone call order the Archbishop to restore the funds to the Archdiocese’s regular assets, but he has failed to do this. Instead, the pope utilizes his limited time on meeting with the Harlem Globetrotters, the passengers of the “Children’s Train” , and even Pentecostal pastors in advance of next year’s US presidential election for which the pope is evidently allying the Vatican and his US bishops with US evangelicals to elect a “Vatican friendlier” US Republican president.
Now, the Vatican’s top clerical expert on the pope’s abuse commission with Saunders, Jesuit Hans Zollner, has confirmed that currently there is no canonical recourse to hold accountable local bishops who cover-up sexual abuse in their diocese. After years of Vatican “zero tolerance bulloney”, the pope should be ashamed over his lack of serious efforts to curtail priest sexual abuse by making bishops accountable — the only way this stain on the Church can be eradicated.
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