WASHINGTON (DC)
WPXI
By RACHEL ZOLL
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Pope Francis praised American bishops Wednesday for their “generous commitment'” to helping victims of clergy sex abuse, drawing an angry rebuke from advocates who said the bishops acted only under the threat of hundreds of lawsuits.
Addressing church leaders in a prayer service at the Washington cathedral, Francis said they had faced the crisis “without fear of self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice.”
“I realize how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you, and I have supported your generous commitment to bring healing to victims — in the knowledge that in healing we, too, are healed — and to work to ensure that such crimes will never be repeated,” the pope said to loud applause from the bishops.
But the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said that the bishops had displayed “cowardice and callousness” in response to victims who came forward and that they “hide behind expensive lawyers and public relations professionals” instead of fully confronting the scope of the problem within the church.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an advocacy group that collects records on abusive priests from around the world, called the pope’s remarks “distressing and quite off-base.”
The abuse crisis erupted in 2002 with the case of one pedophile priest in the Archdiocese of Boston, then spread nationwide. The revelations in Boston, about guilty priests kept in ministry without any warning to parents or police, persuaded thousands of people across the country to come forward with new abuse claims, prompted grand jury investigations in several states and compelled the bishops to take an inventory of how every American diocese had dealt with perpetrators and victims going back decades.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.